A federal solicitation can run to a hundred pages, and most of them are standard clauses. The decision to bid or pass turns on five things, and every solicitation puts them in roughly the same places. Read those five first, in this order, and you will know within ten minutes whether the rest is worth an afternoon.
First, the set-aside and the codes
Before anything else, find out whether you are allowed to bid. The notice names a set-aside, if there is one: small business, 8(a), HUBZone, service-disabled veteran-owned, woman-owned, or none. It names a NAICS code and a size standard. If the set-aside is not one you hold, or the size standard is one you exceed, stop. Nothing later in the document changes that answer, and a great deal of proposal effort is wasted every year on notices that were never open to the bidder.
Second, the dates
There are usually three that matter: the deadline for questions, the deadline for the offer, and the date the work starts. The gap between the question deadline and the offer deadline tells you how much time you really have, because the answers to questions often change the requirement. If the questions closed last week and you are reading the notice today, you are bidding on a document you cannot clarify.
Third, the statement of work
Skip the cover pages and the clauses and find the statement of work, or the performance work statement, or the specification; the name varies, the content does not. Read it once for scope: what is being bought, how much of it, where and for how long. Then read it again for the verbs. Every "shall" is a requirement you will be scored against, and the count of them is a fair measure of how much writing lies ahead.
Fourth, how the offer is evaluated
Every solicitation says how proposals will be judged, and that section matters more than the statement of work, because it is what the evaluators actually read against. Look for the factors, technical, past performance, price and any others, and how they weigh against each other. "Best value" with technical factors more important than price is a different bid from "lowest price technically acceptable," and a winning proposal for one loses under the other.
The evaluation section is the only part of a solicitation the government promises to read the way it says it will.
Fifth, what you must submit
The instructions to offerors say what the package is: which volumes, how many pages, which forms, which format, how it is delivered. Page limits are enforced, and a proposal that runs long is cut, not read. A required form left out is an offer that is never evaluated. Ten minutes here saves the whole bid.
Then decide
With those five in hand you can answer the only question that matters at this stage: can we win this, and is it worth what it will cost us to try? A short list helps:
- We are eligible, and we can prove it.
- We have done this work, or something the evaluators will accept as the same.
- We can price it and still make money.
- We can write it by the deadline, alone or with a partner.
- Winning it would be good for the firm, not just good to have won.
Four of five is a bid. Three is a conversation. Fewer is a pass, however attractive the number at the top of the notice. Crafteny does this reading for every match on your board, and turns it into a short summary, an eligibility read, a value estimate and a bid or no-bid call, so the ten minutes become one.