Most construction executives will tell you they want to win more work, yet only 40% of construction companies have a formal go/no-go process to decide which opportunities to pursue. At a high-level, an executive might see that there is proposal capacity, get recommended an opportunity and that’s enough for them to make the decision to pursue.
The true cost, however, is so much more than the hours spent on a losing proposal. Executives are pulled in and distracted, subject matter experts are taken away from high-impact, billable work, right-fit opportunities don’t get the time they deserve, employees get burned out with losing efforts and no data is captured systematically to improve future decision making.
The Costs Everyone Counts
The obvious cost—time spent responding—is conservatively between $3,000 to $5,000 per response for relatively straightforward proposals. With the average win rate hovering between 15%-20%, the spend per winning proposal is $33,000 at the upper end.
Many executives will see this as the cost of doing business. The hidden costs are much more impactful than purely hours spent.
Hidden Cost No. 1: Executive Distraction
An executive’s time is sparse and expensive. Every serious pursuit pulls senior leaders into pricing calls, strategy reviews, positioning decisions and final red-team sessions. When this time and attention is spent on a proposal that the company is not in a position to win, the senior leaders are kept from doing work that moves the business forward—winning right-fit proposals, nurturing client relationships and managing current projects.
A leadership team that is spending an afternoon on a long-shot bid is a leadership team that is not spending their time on the right work. Grandiose, long-shot bids may feel like ambition, yet they are often barriers to growth when pursued frequently.
Hidden Cost No. 2: Repeated Expert Work
Technical experts such as senior engineers and project managers are some of the most overcommitted and expensive people, after the executives. Most pursuits will have significant information overlap with approaches of similar, past projects.
RFPs will often ask them to answer the same questions from scratch each time. These subject matter experts are often the bottleneck. In fact, they historically and famously only respond to proposal input requests 30% of the time—leaving proposal managers and marketing directors to use boilerplate content, which directly impacts win rate.
So, the question is: Is their time best used responding to poor-fit pursuits? No, it is not. Pursuing the right work ensures less waste and perhaps better response rates.
Hidden Cost No. 3: Spreading Too Thin
Companies have a rather fixed amount of proposal response capacity. Operationally, that tends to mean that during high-volume times the quality of responses will suffer. The dependencies on executives and subject matter experts remain the same.
This is exactly the time when going after the right-fit work is absolutely imperative. Without a systematic approach to deciding which work is the right-fit work, the company will undoubtedly produce worse outputs and have worse win rates. This leads to the next issue.
Hidden Cost No. 4: Employee Burnout
Winning feels good. Losing feels bad. Losing feels even worse when there are unrealistic deadlines and expectations. Often, proposal managers and marketing directors are given an RFP and told to pursue the opportunity.
Nobody likes feeling like they are wasting their time. Most people do not appreciate working into the late hours of the night for what will undoubtedly be a wasted effort.
To protect employees’ mental health, going after work that makes sense, having realistic expectations and being consistent are all key. A recent survey showed that in construction +50% of marketing talent was considering quitting their current role. When they leave, the company loses significant institutional knowledge.
Hidden Cost No. 5: No Data Capture
How does a company know which opportunities to pursue if there is no systematic way to record the decision-making process and the results of that process? Not having a process to define which opportunities to pursue inherently means that there’s no data being captured on what worked and what did not.
Making decisions on gut feeling is not the way to promote growth of a company. It works sometimes, admittedly. However, gut feeling tends to go much further when there is data to back it up and a system that builds in consistency.
Hidden Cost No. 6: Financial Risk
Not all RFPs and opportunities were built equally. There may be significant contractual risks. There may be a single sentence that breaks your financial model. Without thoroughly reviewing a document with that particular lens, the company puts itself at risk of expending their time and people on an unprofitable project.
Having an appropriate process will help mitigate the financial risks that are otherwise often overlooked.
The Fix: A Real Go/No-Go System
A strong go/no-go process requires data, discipline and memory.
Data is crucial. Does the opportunity have significant risk? Does the RFP have clauses that are unfavorable? Is the company, at a minimum, compliant with the expectations? Are the requirements ones that the company can meet or exceed? Who is competing for this work? Can the company meaningfully differentiate itself from the competition? What is expected return on time spent responding? Is there an existing relationship with a decision maker? Without being able to answer these questions, pursuing an opportunity comes with financial risk.
Discipline is exactly as it sounds. The company needs the will to act on what the data says, even when there is open capacity and pressure to bid. A poor-fit opportunity is still a poor fit when the pipeline looks thin. Walking away is hardest when an executive is excited or a deadline is looming, yet that is exactly when discipline matters most. It also means applying the same standard to every opportunity, not just the ones nobody feels strongly about.
Memory is what makes the process compound. Every decision, the reasoning behind it and the result should be captured somewhere durable, not left in an inbox or a single person’s head. Over time, that record becomes the company’s own definition of a winnable pursuit. The next go/no-go decision starts from evidence instead of a blank page, and the knowledge stays with the company even when people leave.
None of this requires heavy bureaucracy. It requires a repeatable way to look at an opportunity honestly before committing the company’s most expensive resources to it.
The strongest firms decide well and remember what they decided. Chasing every RFP is a choice and it is rarely free.
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