Bid or No-Bid: The RFP Decision Calculator

Bidding feels free because nobody invoices you for it. It isn't: sixty hours of estimating, writing and presenting is real money, and a firm that wins one in five carries four losses inside every win. The firms with good margins aren't better writers. They're better decliners.

How it works

Ten minutes per RFP:

• The job's profit and the bid's true ticket price (hours at your burdened rate, plus bonds and fees)
• Starting odds — 1 ÷ expected bidders — adjusted by eight scored questions: did you know before the posting, have you provably done this work, is there a comfortable incumbent, can you meet the price, are the terms survivable
• Expected value of bidding, the minimum odds that justify writing at all, and the return per bidding dollar
• A three-way verdict: BID / marginal — only if strategic / NO BID, with the polite decline script included
• The Portfolio — your whole year of bidding as one machine, and the discipline dividend: in the sample, declining the weakest quarter of RFPs is worth +$14,040 and 300 recovered hours

Built for

Construction and trade contractors answering tenders · agencies and consultancies answering RFPs · IT and facilities firms in government and institutional markets · anyone whose senior people spend nights writing proposals.

What you get

One .xlsx file, four tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no subscription. Duplicate the This Bid tab per RFP and you have a bid log that teaches you your real odds by score band.