Bid or pass? A go/no-go framework for government tenders
Bidding is expensive, and not every tender is worth your hours. A practical go/no-go checklist — fit, capacity, economics, odds, and strategic value — to decide which public-sector jobs to pursue before you start writing.
By Joseph Morrison · Founder, Cornerstone Contracts
Every bid costs you something real: the hours to read the documents, price the work, write the response, and chase the addenda. Those hours are finite, so the most important decision in public-sector work isn't how you bid — it's which tenders you bid on at all. A disciplined go/no-go step, taken before you write a word, is the cheapest way to raise your win rate and protect your margins.
Here's a framework you can run in a few minutes per posting.
The five questions
Work through these in order. A clear "no" on any of the first three is usually a pass on its own.
1. Fit — is this our work?
Does the scope match your trade, your service area, and the kind of project you do well? A posting that's adjacent to what you do — a little outside your trade, a little outside your region — is where good hours go to die. The closer the fit, the stronger and faster your response will be, because you're not stretching to look qualified.
2. Capacity — can we actually deliver it?
Winning a job you can't staff is worse than losing it. Be honest about:
- People and schedule — can you crew it on the buyer's timeline without starving your other commitments?
- Bonding and insurance — can you meet the bid bond, performance security, and coverage the documents demand? (Our guide to bid bonds and surety covers how this works.)
- Cash flow — public-sector payment can be slow; can you carry the work until you're paid?
3. Economics — does the math work?
Price the job from your real costs and capacity, then ask whether the number you'd need to be profitable is a number that could win. If the only way to win is a price you'd lose money on, that's not a bid — it's a donation. Walk away before you've sunk the writing hours.
4. Odds — what's our realistic chance?
You don't have to win every bid, but you shouldn't pursue ones you're nearly certain to lose. Consider the likely field, whether an incumbent is defending the work, and how well you match the evaluation criteria. On a scored proposal, map your evidence against the rubric honestly — if you can't answer the heavily-weighted criteria with proof, your odds are thin regardless of price.
5. Strategic value — is winning worth more than this job?
Sometimes a thin-margin job is still a "go": it's a first contract with a buyer you want a relationship with, a reference project that unlocks bigger work, or a spot on a standing offer or supply arrangement that future call-ups flow from. Just make the strategic case explicit — don't let "it might lead to something" excuse a job that fails the first four questions.
Turning the answers into a decision
A simple way to use the five questions:
- Two or more soft "no"s: pass. Your hours are better spent on the next posting.
- All yes, with fit and economics strong: go, and commit to a fully compliant, criteria-answering response.
- Borderline: go only if the strategic value is real and named. "Practice" is not a strategy.
The discipline isn't in saying yes to good bids — anyone does that. It's in saying no to the plausible-but-wrong ones that quietly eat your week. The contractors who win consistently are usually the ones bidding less, on better-fit work. (The flip side — the avoidable ways bids get lost once you do commit — is in why contractors lose government bids.)
The hard part is finding the go's
A go/no-go framework only works if you have good postings to run it against — and that means seeing the right tenders in the first place, not drowning in the wrong ones. When you're skimming five portals every morning, the good-fit job is easy to miss and the marginal one is easy to over-pursue out of fear of missing out.
Cornerstone Contracts pulls postings from the federal, provincial, and municipal portals every day and scores each against your trade, service area, and typical project size — so the postings in front of you are already filtered toward the "go" side of this framework, and the "no"s never waste your morning.
Browse what's open right now in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia — free, no account. Then start free to see them scored to your profile, with a compliance-aware draft proposal for any tender that clears your go/no-go.
This is general guidance, not procurement or legal advice. Every tender sets its own terms — decide against the specific document in front of you.