CG Common Ground | Common Ground Systems
What we did and what it producedActive

The work, decision by decision

The sweep, as a repeatable method

  1. Read the public search endpoints first. Several state and county procurement portals answer a plain keyword query, server-rendered, with no login: publication and closing dates and an automated scope summary. That single source produced most of the qualified hits in the first sweep and is the daily core of the monitor.
  2. Layer in the logged-in sources. A registered account on the larger bid-notice networks unlocks agency names and documents that the public tier locks behind a paywall or a registration wall; a home county's own purchasing portal is fully open once registered and gets checked daily.
  3. Score every hit against one test. Does the scope match a licensed, advisory positioning (owner's representative, agency construction management, preconstruction, cost estimating), not a field-supervision or at-risk builder role that would need a license the firm does not hold in that state. Runway matters as much as fit: a bid with days left and a document not yet pulled is a different call than the same bid with weeks left.
  4. Kill-check hard dates at flag time, not after. One flagged solicitation turned out to have already lapsed its own mandatory pre-bid attendance requirement a full week before the sweep even surfaced it, which meant it was dead on arrival the moment it was flagged. The rule that followed: a flag with no document pull never carries forward as "waiting on a decision." It carries as "needs a document pull," a build task, not a decision the principal owes an answer to.

The proposal method

  1. Read the RFP's own definition of the role before estimating the odds of winning it. The question that matters first is not whether the firm can compete on price and experience. It is whether the RFP's own language for the role is a field job or an advisory one, because those are different competitive fields entirely.
  2. Reverse-engineer the proposal from the RFP's own mandatory structure and its point weights. A nine-section public RFP is not nine equal boxes. A rubric crosswalk maps every scored criterion to the sections that answer it and allocates drafting effort by marginal points per hour, not by raw point weight: a twenty-point criterion whose gap is a missing reference, not a missing hour of writing, gets no construction effort, no matter its weight.
  3. Translate a flat pricing instinct into the buyer's own required format. A public-agency cost criterion often scores transparency and itemization, not creativity. The economics of a fee do not have to change to satisfy a different presentation; the presentation does. (The fee architecture itself, on this pursuit, is described here only in words: an itemized, not-to-exceed retainer backed by hours estimated by phase, offered alongside a performance-aligned alternative tied to documented savings.)
  4. Build a reusable proof-of-work artifact instead of a single-use sample. Where an RFP asks for a sample work product, a compact, navigable demonstration of the actual review and reporting process outlives the specific submission it was built for, at a small added cost in build time.

The gate that came out of the pursuit that did not ship

  1. Ask two yes-or-no questions before any section gets drafted. Does the RFP require named, contactable references or credentials specific to this scope, and if so, how many and how recent. If it does, do that many qualifying references exist today, with a contact willing to take a cold call from the issuing agency on short notice. Both are checkable in minutes. If the second answer is no on a hard requirement, the pursuit either does not start, or starts explicitly as toolkit-building rather than as a submission attempt.

What we kept, replaced and installed

We kept the instinct to match scope language to an existing, defensible positioning; that read correctly on the pursuit that did not ship. We replaced treating a nine-section RFP as a uniform checklist, because a checklist weighs a thirty-point section and a five-point subsection the same way. We installed the rubric crosswalk, the itemized fee-translation method, the reusable proof-of-work pattern, and the two-question gate, in that order in the pipeline, gate first.

What it cost, and what we would watch

Two build days went partly into sections of one proposal that turned out not to be reusable once the pursuit stopped: the cover letter, the agency-specific qualifications narrative, and the reference section itself. The itemized fee method and the reusable demo would have been built anyway as standing toolkit work, so they are not part of that cost; they are the asset the pursuit produced. What we would still watch: whether a scope that reads as a close match to an existing positioning is sometimes evidence that an RFP was drafted around an incumbent already doing similar work, rather than evidence of a rare, lucky fit. That check has not yet been run against a real case, and it belongs before the match is used to justify time on the next one.

What it produced

The sweep runs as a daily habit rather than a periodic scramble, with a written reason attached to every GO and every NO-GO. The reference-gap pursuit produced no submission, and it produced a rubric crosswalk, an itemized fee-translation method, a reusable proof-of-work pattern, and a two-question go/no-go gate that now runs before any comparable pursuit starts drafting.

A slice of the project list

A few related projects.