How should subcontractors follow up on bids?

It is not discipline and it is not indifference. An estimator who has just sent a number is immediately holding the next one, and the follow-up competes with pricing work that has a date on it. Pricing always wins, because pricing is what the week is measured by.

So the follow-up becomes something that happens when there is a gap, and in a busy quarter there is no gap. The result is a pipeline where the bids that get chased are the ones that happened to be sent during a quiet week, which is not a strategy.

Most advice about bid follow-up is about what to write. That is the wrong end of the problem for a subcontractor, because the failure is not a weak message, it is no message.

A plain note on a fixed schedule outperforms a carefully drafted one that never leaves, and it does so by an enormous margin, because the comparison is not between two emails. It is between one email and silence.

• What went out, and when. Without this there is no cadence, only a memory of having meant to.
• What came back, including the losses. A recorded loss is worth more than an ignored one: it is the only way to learn whether you are being beaten on price, on schedule or on not answering the phone.
• Who said it. The estimator who reads a reply is often not the person who will price the next job for that general contractor.

Sending is the visible half and recording is the half that compounds. An office that sends reliably and records nothing has a busier estimator and no more information than it started with.

The usual objection to scheduled contact is that it will read as pestering. In practice the opposite is the common failure: estimators worry about being a nuisance, so they send nothing, and the general contractor reads the silence as indifference rather than as courtesy.

Two touches spaced several days apart, each short and each giving the recipient something easy to reply to, sits comfortably inside what anyone on the receiving end considers normal. The person you are contacting is managing a list of their own and is not offended by being on yours.

What does irritate people is volume without attention: four identical notes in a week, or a message that plainly has not noticed they already replied. Both are symptoms of a system that sends but does not listen, which is why the recording half is not optional.

A bid follow-up is the same category of work as a submittal package: repetitive, deadline-adjacent, and done by somebody whose expensive skill is something else. The reason both sit on the same desk is that both are what happens after the technical work is finished.

That is why they get automated together rather than separately, and it is the shape of what we install.

We can tell you what we built inside a working underground contractor: the tool that turned hours of construction document package assembly into under a minute, and the platform its 114 people use daily. That work is where ProjectFlow came from, and it is running there now.

What we are not going to do is put a number on what automated bid follow-up has earned anyone. It is live with AC Electric and we are still tuning it, so the figure we would quote you would be a guess dressed as a finding. The guarantee is how we carry that instead.