Dear reader,

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with running a contracting company that is doing well enough to stay busy, but not yet organized enough to pursue every good opportunity that comes across the desk.

The work is there. You see it.

An invitation to bid lands in your inbox. A GC you know sends something over. PlanHub has a project that fits. A public solicitation comes across your radar and, for a moment, you think, we should probably go after this.

Then the day starts.

A superintendent calls. A customer needs an answer. Someone is waiting on pricing. A crew has a problem. A supplier needs confirmation. One of your current jobs needs attention now, not tonight.

So the bid sits.

Maybe you open it later. Maybe you forward it to somebody. Maybe you tell yourself you will get to it Saturday morning.

Sometimes you do.

Sometimes you don’t.

And I think that is where a lot of contractors misunderstand the problem.

They assume they need more leads.

Or another estimator.

Or another piece of software.

But very often, the real problem is simpler than that.

Nobody actually owns the bidding function.

Everybody touches it, but nobody owns it.

The owner finds opportunities. The estimator prices what he can. A project manager might help with a scope. Someone in the office chases a form. The owner comes back in for the final number. Somebody submits it at the last minute.

And then everyone goes back to the jobs already under contract.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that system when a company is small.

The problem comes when the company wants to grow.

Because commercial and public bidding does not reward the contractor who merely sees the most opportunities.

It rewards the contractor who can consistently identify the right ones, understand the requirements, get the estimate organized, assemble the response, meet the deadline and stay with the opportunity after everyone else has moved on.

That takes time.

More importantly, it takes ownership.

That is the part of SMC I think is difficult to understand until you see what is happening behind the scenes.

We are not simply writing proposals.

Before our team can responsibly bid on behalf of a contractor, we have to learn the company.

We need to understand the work you perform well, the jobs you actually want, the size of project that makes sense, your labor, your materials, your suppliers, your pricing structure, your qualifications, your bonding, your insurance, your past performance and your real capacity.

We organize the documents you will need again and again. We establish the registrations and portals that matter. We train our team on your company. We train our system on your company.

Why go through all of that?

Because if we do not know your business, then every bid becomes another interruption for you.

We would have to come back and ask the same questions every time.

We want the opportunity to go through the work before it gets to you.

We want the solicitation reviewed. The scope understood. The requirements identified. The estimate coordinated. The documents organized. The deadline controlled.

By the time your judgment is required, we want the question in front of you to be much simpler:

Does this project fit our capacity?

Does the number make sense?

Do we want to submit it?

Those are decisions you should make.

The other twenty or thirty things surrounding those decisions should not have to consume your evenings.

That is what we mean when we say we become the bid department behind the company.

Would you want more opportunities coming in?

Would you want more of the opportunities you already see to actually get pursued?

Would you want your estimator spending more time estimating and less time chasing paperwork?

Would you simply like to stop being the person who has to hold the entire process together?

Because if your current system already gives you everything you want, there is very little reason for us to get involved.

But if you know there is good work sitting out there that your company could pursue — and the only thing standing between you and that work is time, capacity and ownership of the process — that is a conversation worth having.

Just a conversation about what you could hand off and where your time could be better spent.