This guide is written by GovRoute, a Georgia small business that checks public bid sources in Georgia and Tennessee every morning. What follows is how to approach bidding, in plain words.
This is general guidance, not legal or procurement advice. The solicitation document itself always governs.
The steps
- Decide where you'll bid. Pick the counties you can actually serve and write them down the way they appear on bids—for example "Gwinnett, Fulton". A wider list means more to read; a narrower one means less.
- Decide what you'll bid. NAICS code prefixes are the shorthand for the kind of work: 541 for professional, scientific, and technical services, 238 for specialty trade contractors. A contract value range keeps the jobs that are too big or too small out of your way.
- Watch the places the work is posted. Federal opportunities post to SAM.gov, state solicitations to the Georgia Procurement Registry, and county work to the county bid pages themselves. Checking all three by hand, every day, is the part that usually doesn't get done.
- Read the requirements before you read the whole document. Before writing anything, find the deadline, the submission method, the bonding, insurance and licensing terms, whether e-Verify applies, and whether there is a pre-bid meeting. Those items decide whether you can bid at all.
- Put the dates on a calendar. A pre-bid meeting you miss can end your chance at the job before you write a word, and the due date is not the day to discover the submission method.
- Prepare the response. A cover letter and a forms checklist, then the substance. Anything you don't actually know should be marked as missing rather than guessed at—guessed detail is the kind that gets a response thrown out.
- Review it and approve it yourself. The bid goes in under your business's name. Whoever helps you prepare it, the final review is yours, and nobody should submit it without your sign-off.
- Watch who won. Award notices tell you what closed and to whom, which is how you learn what the buyers in your counties actually buy.
Before your first bid, get registered: Get bid-ready in Georgia, the official registrations and certifications in order.
Where GovRoute fits
- Steps three and four, every day. We check the Georgia Procurement Registry, SAM.gov (Georgia) and a growing list of county and city bid pages, filtered to your counties and your work, and email you the matches in the morning when there are any. No news, no email that day.
- The requirements, in plain language. On Gold, every matched bid you open from the Georgia Procurement Registry, except Department of Defense bids, gets a page-cited requirements sheet—deadline, submission method, bonding/insurance/licensing, e-Verify, pre-bid meetings—not just a link to the raw solicitation document.
- The dates, on your calendar. A live calendar feed of the deadlines for your matched bids.
- A head start on the response. On Gold, a response package with a cover letter and a forms checklist, and a draft you edit—anything your fact sheet doesn't cover shows up clearly marked as missing, never guessed at.
What we do not do
Everything stays in your business's name, and you are the bidder. We write out the answers to the fact blanks on the agency's forms from the facts you give us, ready for you to copy onto the forms. Every number is yours: you set the price, sign, and provide any bond. We never sign for you or use your login. With an agency, the only thing we do for you is submit, by email, a bid you've signed off on.