Most programs stop at the award. That is where the expensive mistakes start. Below is what each session actually covers.
Four gates that come before price, and three of them are answered from your own records rather than the solicitation. Bonding as a balance-sheet test — the surety underwrites working capital and cash reserve, not your reputation. And the payment cycle that quietly sets the largest job you can safely carry.
Contractor performance evaluations run 1 to 4 under Administrative Order 3-42, and nobody sends you yours. Where a minimum score gates the award and where it does not, why the procedural protections attach to the rating that is not the one disqualifying you, and how to pull your own file.
The first hard deadline in a solicitation is usually not the bid date. Mandatory pre-bid meetings, the question cutoff, and the addendum that arrives in an inbox nobody is watching — one missing acknowledgement discards six weeks of work, and it is not queried.
Two different ways to lose, fixed by two different things. The mechanical failures that end a bid at opening: wrong form, missing number, figures that do not tie. And what happens when your number looks too low and you are asked to defend it.
You are not in the room when your envelope is opened, so the stamped time of receipt is the only evidence of timeliness you will ever hold. Then we build the one-page screen that decides which packages your estimator is allowed to touch.
How you structure the SOV decides your cash position for the whole job — subdividing so every month has something billable, and putting material on its own line so it is claimable on purchase. Then the markup spread that makes self-performed change work worth three to four times the same scope subbed out, a decision made at bid time.
The contract is effective ten days after award and failing to move is expressly a default — but contract time does not begin until a Notice to Proceed the owner may issue, with no outside date stated anywhere. The carry nobody prices, the baseline schedule as your legal position in every delay claim, and the retainage reduction at fifty percent that only happens if you ask for it.
On a dry run the owner’s engineer already cleared plan review and you only pull the permit — so a Notice to Proceed issued before the permit is the owner’s delay, not yours, and it is compensable. How to build that claim, how the daily rate is set by a schedule of values you wrote months earlier, and the order of precedence that decides which document governs when two of them disagree.
Five things that send a pay application back, each costing roughly a full cycle. What payment actually takes here, agency by agency. Which notarisation requirements are absolute and which are not enforced in practice. The consent of surety for a subcontractor who will not sign. And the closeout sequence that starts at the last inspection, not the last day of work.
The forty-eight hour clock that runs from the event, not from your decision to claim. Change-order pricing by formula, and the documents the formula consumes. Three claim clocks, not one. The reservation of rights that catches more contractors than every deadline combined. Then the capstone: read a live solicitation and write the decision memo.
Ten Days to the Bid Table — $899, once. Self-paced, about forty minutes a day. Every session ends in a written exercise on your own jobs and your own numbers, reviewed against how the County actually behaves.