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.
Ask an estimating lead how many pursuits it takes to win one and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask where the number comes from and the confidence tends to go with it.
The guidance itself is not controversial. Lenders and industry advisers converge on roughly the same ceiling, and the reasoning is simple arithmetic about what estimating costs to run.
The highest reasonable ratio for subcontractors should not exceed 10 or 11 to 1.
Past that point the cost of estimating outruns the margin on the work you actually win. One in ten is not a target to aspire to; it is the outer edge of sustainable.
Why the number goes untracked
- It lives in two places at once. Bids go out of the estimating system; awards come back through accounting, weeks later, under a different job name.
- Nobody owns the reconciliation. It is not estimating’s job after submission and not accounting’s job before award.
- A losing bid produces no artefact. There is no document to file, so there is nothing to file it against.
- The honest version is unflattering, and the unflattering version is the one worth having.
A loss produces no paperwork, which is exactly why it disappears.
What having the number actually requires
Not analytics. Bookkeeping. Every pursuit needs to keep its identity from the invitation through to award or loss, so the two ends can be matched without anyone doing it by hand on a Friday afternoon.
That is a workflow property, not a reporting feature. If the pursuit is a folder on a share drive and the award is a line in the accounting system, no dashboard will reconcile them for you.
The part that matters more than the ratio
A bid-hit ratio on its own is a scoreboard. The useful version is the distribution behind it: which general contractors invite you and never award, which trades you consistently price high, how far off the winner you were and whether that gap is drifting.
ArosBid keeps the pursuit identity intact from intake through debrief for exactly this reason. The ratio is a by-product of the record being complete, not a report someone has to assemble.