Track A · Public sector
Screened first.
Scored second.
A public buyer does not begin by reading your approach. Purchasing staff first run a responsiveness check — a pass/fail list with no points attached, no partial credit and, in most jurisdictions, a protest window instead of an appeal.
A submission set aside at that step is never scored at all. The evaluation committee does not see it, does not know what you proposed, and does not get to weigh it against anyone. We produce responses built to clear the screen, then compete on the criteria the committee is actually required to apply.
Scoped by phone · Fixed price · Engagements start at $2,500
Steps 1 to 3 carry no points. They only remove bidders.
The acronym on the cover
tells you the rules.
Public solicitations are not one document type with five names. Each one changes what wins, what is negotiable, and what gets you removed before anyone reads a sentence.
The most common expensive mistake is treating a sealed-bid ITB like a scored RFP — writing a persuasive narrative for a competition where the only thing being weighed is a number, and where a single arithmetic inconsistency between the bid schedule and the total is grounds to set the whole thing aside.
Issuer types
Every issuer runs its own procurement code, its own portal, and its own delivery rules. A county that accepts electronic submission through a vendor portal and a city that requires a sealed physical package at a clerk's counter are not the same submission job, and the difference is not something you want to discover on the due date.
City
Purchasing or procurement department, delivery to a named clerk or portal, award by commission or council vote at a scheduled public meeting.
County
Board of county commissioners, a central procurement portal with mandatory vendor registration, and a formal addenda distribution list you must be on.
State agency
Statewide vendor registration is usually a precondition of submitting at all, not a formality afterwards. Standard terms are incorporated by reference.
Authority
Airport, seaport, transit, housing and utility authorities. Independent boards with their own procurement rules, and frequently their own concession and lease frameworks.
Special district
School, hospital, fire, water and community development districts. Small purchasing staff, tight formats, and unforgiving submission mechanics.
Federal
Registration and a unique entity identifier before anything else, clauses incorporated by reference, and representations and certifications that must already be current.
That list describes the work we take on and the rules we read for. It is not a list of past clients. We have one reference engagement and it is set out in Exhibit A below.
What you receive, itemised.
Not every solicitation demands every item below. What the solicitation demands is determined by reading it, and the compliance matrix is what proves the reading happened.
Eight ways a good bid
gets thrown out.
A hard gate carries no score. There is nothing to make up elsewhere, no evaluator with discretion to overlook it, and no version of the story where strong content compensates.
These are enumerated from the solicitation before a word of narrative is drafted, so the document is built around them rather than checked against them the night before. Each one is verified again on the rendered files, because a requirement satisfied in the draft and a requirement satisfied in the submitted PDF are not the same claim.
Why the page cap is treated differently. Six of the eight gates above are binary facts you either arranged or did not. A page cap is the one that drifts, because the document keeps growing after the last time anyone counted. In our build the cap is measured on the rendered PDF and a breach exits non-zero — it fails the build rather than printing a warning somebody reads at 11pm and decides to deal with later.
A municipal airport food and beverage concession bid.
A hospitality operator brought us a concession solicitation issued by a municipal airport: multiple volumes, a hard page cap on the technical response, a revenue model the issuer could audit, and a forms package with items published only as scanned exhibits. Every figure below was measured off the produced files rather than estimated.
What this is not. That bid has not been decided — submissions were still open when this page was written. We are showing you production, not a win. We have no win rate to quote and we will not manufacture one. Any proposal shop that leads with a scoreboard before showing you its method is asking you to trust the number instead of the work.
For context on the alternative the same operator tried first: 46 turns with a general chatbot, which outlined the proposal eight times and repeatedly asserted that a submission of this size could not be produced in one pass. It produced no deliverable.
Scoped on a call,
quoted as a fixed price.
There is no price list on this page, because a twelve-page RFQ and an eighty-page multi-volume concession bid are not the same job and pricing them the same way would mean overcharging one of them.
Send the solicitation. Maui — the consultant who runs intake — reads the actual document and calls you to scope it: how many volumes, which forms, what pricing model, how much of the narrative already exists on your side, and how much time is left before the question window closes. You get a fixed number before anything starts.
What is the difference between an RFP, an RFQ and an ITB?
An ITB or IFB is a sealed price competition: the award goes to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder, so responsiveness is effectively the whole contest. An RFP is scored against published criteria where price is one factor among several, and the issuer may negotiate. RFQ is the ambiguous one — to some issuers it means Request for Qualifications and carries no price at all, to others it means Request for Quotations for a small purchase. We read the issuer's document rather than the acronym on the cover.
Can you still help if the due date is close?
Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on two dates rather than one. The due date sets the outside limit. The question deadline sets the useful limit, because anything you can no longer ask becomes an assumption you have to defend in writing. If the question window has already closed we will tell you what that costs you before you commit, not after.
Do we have to write the technical content ourselves?
No. You supply the facts — staffing, equipment, licences, references, financials, how you actually run the operation — and we produce the narrative, the compliance matrix, the pricing volume and the forms package. What we will not do is invent a fact you did not give us. Anything unsupported stays visible as an open item rather than quietly becoming a sentence in the draft.
What happens if the issuer publishes an addendum after we start?
We re-run the compliance matrix against it. An addendum can move the due date, change the page limits, add a form, alter the scope, or answer a question in a way that changes your pricing. It also usually requires a signed acknowledgement inside the submission, and a missing acknowledgement is one of the most common non-responsiveness findings there is. Addenda are checked up to the closing date, not once at the start.
What does a government engagement cost?
Government engagements start at $2,500, and every solicitation is scoped individually. Send it over, Maui calls you to scope it, and you get a fixed number before anything starts. Work begins on a 50% deposit and the 50% balance is due on delivery.
Next step
Send us the solicitation.
The number, the issuer and the due date are enough to start. Maui reads the issuer's own document and calls you to scope the work. No charge for that call, and no obligation after it.