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Field notes from
bid day.
What actually breaks a pursuit, written for the people who work them. No predictions, no benchmarks we did not measure, and every document reference cited so you can check it.
The ratio almost nobody tracks
Industry guidance puts the ceiling for a healthy bid-hit ratio at about ten or eleven to one. In a survey of more than two thousand construction companies, fewer than six percent knew their own.
Everything else
- There is no one left to read the set
Eighty-two percent of firms report difficulty filling craft roles and eighty percent report the same for salaried positions — the highest in three years. Document sets are not getting shorter.
→ - Sixty-one percent said AI. Far fewer said which part.
AGC’s 2026 outlook has 61% of firms using AI or planning to increase investment, up from 44% the year before. Adoption is the easy half of that sentence.
→ - A market growing at ten percent a year, still running on email
Estimating software is heading for $1.72 billion in 2026 and compounding at roughly ten percent. Bid day, for most subcontractors, is still an inbox and a spreadsheet.
→ - The line that disqualifies the bid
A mandatory site visit is four words in a front-end section and an entire pursuit on the floor. Here is why it goes missing.
→ - The total is not the sum
A vendor’s stated grand total and the sum of its own line items can differ by half a million dollars. Arithmetic is not a judgment call, so we refuse to treat it as one.
→ - Spec says 350 tons. The drawing says 400.
Spec-versus-drawing conflicts are neither rare nor subtle. They are just distributed across two documents that nobody reads side by side.
→ - What “nothing auto-sends” costs to build
It is easy to promise that an AI will not send anything without approval. It is much harder to build a system in which it cannot.
→ - Read the exclusions before you read the number
The cheapest quote on the table is frequently the one that excluded the most. The fix is to price the exclusions as scope, because that is what they are.
→ - Every loss is an input
A closed bid is not an archive entry. It is the context the next bid should have been priced against.
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