Most tenders don't lose. They get passed over.
One blank field, a missing insurance line, an exclusion buried in your pricing notes: any of them lets a council set your tender aside without ever reading the good bits. We build responses for builders and subbies that don't give them the chance. You send the RFT. We pull out every requirement before anything gets written, complete the schedules properly, machine-check the pricing arithmetic, and get the finished response to you two days before close.
Two tenders we tracked last month never got awarded. One was a Crown housing job, the other a council changing-room renovation. Different buyers, different cities, same line on the outcome notice: no winner, responses did not meet requirements.
Somebody priced those jobs. Somebody sat up late writing those submissions, and got nothing back, not even a score. The rules that did it are printed in every RFT: omitted details can be treated as failing, and qualified tenders can be passed over. We built Lodgeable around those two sentences.
In this order, every time.
Extract
First job: go through the RFT and pull every requirement, returnable schedule and evaluation criterion into one matrix. It's tedious, which is exactly why it gets skipped, and why tenders die. Ours is finished before a single answer gets written.
Draft
Responses get written against the published criteria using the evidence you actually hold: your licences, your insurances, your past jobs, your people. If you don't hold a licence, we don't claim it in your tender. We'll tell you what's missing before it costs you anything.
Verify
Every rate and extended amount in the pricing schedule gets checked by machine, because a $400 arithmetic slip reads the same as carelessness to an evaluator. GST treatment gets confirmed against the tender's own rules rather than habit, and we go field by field until nothing is blank.
Gate
Nothing gets lodged until the conformity checklist passes: no qualifications, no exclusions, no gaps. If a requirement genuinely can't be met, you hear it from us early, while there's still time to fix it or walk away. Better than hearing it from the council after close.
Two ways in.
Bid Teardown
Send a tender you lost, or a draft you're halfway through and unsure about. Inside 48 hours you get it scored against the published criteria: where you dropped marks, anywhere you'd have been passed over outright, and the three fixes that would move the needle most next time. The review is yours to keep either way.
Book a teardownPilot Response
A complete, submission-ready response to a live tender: the compliance matrix, drafted criterion responses, completed schedules, checked pricing. We need at least 14 days before close to do it properly. The first three clients get this rate while we build our base here, and we'll say so when that changes.
Start a pilotAsked and answered.
- Can't I just use ChatGPT?
- Go for it, honestly. A chatbot will give you decent paragraphs. What it won't notice is that this particular RFT wants GST-inclusive rates, or that Schedule 3 wants safe work method statements from the last twelve months, not just any old ones. That's the stuff that gets tenders binned, and that's the part we take on. We use AI too. The difference is everything wrapped around it.
- What do you need from me?
- The RFT documents, plus whatever evidence you hold: licences, insurance certificates, a couple of past jobs, who'd run the work. Most clients can get us everything in one email and a phone call. If something's missing, we flag it on day one.
- What won't you do?
- We won't take a tender closing inside 14 days, because rushed responses lose and we'd rather not charge you for one. We won't invent track record you don't have. And we don't do bespoke pricing strategy: your margin is your business, we just make sure the numbers you give us hold together on the page.
Three steps, no meetings.
- Email the RFT to hello@lodgeable.co.
- Same day, you'll have a fixed fee and scope in writing. Half up front.
- The finished response lands with you 48 hours before close, checked and gated. Balance on delivery.