Every morning, the bids worth chasing

Finding public work isn’t hard because there’s too little of it. It’s hard because it’s everywhere. One repointing job at a town hall can show up on the state listings, a county page and a couple of plan rooms, each with its own number. A GC invite for a school job can come in at night with a subject line that tells you nothing.

We used to check all of it by hand. On a good morning that got done before the first call from a job site. On a busy one it didn’t get done at all.

How it runs day to day

Early every weekday, before anyone is at a desk, Bid Radar starts. It reads the bid alerts, digests and invites that came in since the last run, and it opens each one. Then it visits the public bid pages on its list. It merges duplicates, drops anything already past due, and skips work we never do.

Every bid that’s left gets a fit score. The strong ones go to the top of the report with one line on why they fit and what to check. The maybes go in an “open and decide” list. If a due date can’t be confirmed, the bid goes under “needs a manual check” instead of the ranking, because a wrong date is worse than no date.

The whole thing lands in Dom’s inbox as one email. When he wants more on a bid, he asks for a deep dive, and it comes back with the scope, the bond, the wage rules and the three biggest risks. When he says “we’re bidding this one” or “pass,” the log updates, and tomorrow’s report remembers.

It only reads bid and procurement mail. It never replies to anyone, and it never tries to get past a login or a block. Sites that block automated visits come in through their own email alerts instead.

What still needs a person

The go or no-go. A score can say a job fits our trades and sits close to home. It can’t know that our best crew is booked that month, or that the owner was slow to pay last time. That call is still Dom’s, and it should be.

If you chase public work

Any trade that bids public jobs can run this, from paving to HVAC to painting. We set it up with your sources, your trades and your idea of a good job, then tune the scoring with you until the top of the report is the stuff you’d actually bid. Read more about bid finding and tracking.