What the bids you prepare and never win are costing you.
Nobody measures this line, because it appears on no profit and loss statement: these are engineering hours you have already paid for. Put your own numbers in and it shows up.
The starting values are a coherent example, not a market average — we do not have one, and we are not going to invent one. Replace them with yours.
The ones you actually work on — not everything that lands in the inbox.
Everyone combined: finding the context, comparable projects, pricing, writing.
What the people who actually prepare the bid cost you, not what you bill them at.
On the bids you prepare, not on the tenders you receive.
And if you also won more bids?
Two more numbers. They do not enter the decision — that is deliberate — but they show what the commercial effect would add.
The decisive variable. Crossed with volume, it decides whether a loop is worth building at all.
What is left on a project once delivery is paid for.
This figure contains no assumption of ours. It is your volume, your win rate, your hours and your hourly cost — nothing else. You can redo it on the back of an envelope.
- Put another way1.6 full-time engineer across the year
- 6.3% of your signed revenue
One bid in five screened out earlier, and one point of win rate.
Recovered time is not enough on its own: you need added win-rate points, and nobody can guarantee you those. That is exactly what we look at during the Diagnostic, before anything is committed.
For this to be worth it, it would have to clear €90,000 over twelve months. That is the 3× rule: below it, I do not build. The amounts are on the services page.
Method: block B only recovers 80% of the hours of a bid screened out — deciding not to bid still costs time. Block C never enters the 3× test.
Three blocks. The third never counts towards the decision.
Time recovered on preparation
On the bids you keep preparing, the context, the comparable projects and the evidence are retrieved instead of being reconstructed from scratch.
Time never spent on bids lost before they started
The senior hours that no longer disappear into bids that were lost before they started. This is the largest pool, and the one nobody measures today.
Possible effect on the win rate
A better-evidenced bid stands a better chance. This block is calculated, displayed — and deliberately excluded from the 3× test.
The 3× rule
We do not put a loop into production if the documented potential value over twelve months does not reasonably reach three times the first-year investment. At the end of the Diagnostic, if it is not there, I tell you and we stop.
Block B only recovers 80% of the hours of a bid screened out: running a go/no-go costs time, and that is exactly the time the system is meant to reduce, not to remove. The hours spent on a bid you win are never counted as a saving — they are productive.
What this calculation is not
- It is not a promise of results. No revenue, no meetings and no ROI are guaranteed.
- The three scenarios are assumptions you choose, not observed averages. We have no client case in your sector, and we do not pretend otherwise.
- The Diagnostic replaces these assumptions with your real numbers. That is precisely what it is for.
- The calculation stays in your browser. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored.
These four variables are exactly the ones we work through in the first call. With your real numbers, the calculation stops being an assumption.