Janitorial bid intelligence
Upload the RFP. Archer reads every requirement, prices it against real labor data, and tells you what it would take to win — before you commit a number you cannot deliver.
Close $21,400/mo to hit $4.20M. 2 of 6 levers can get there alone.
| Profit margin | 6.4% | 78% of room |
| Crew production rate | 1.18× | 42% of room |
| Wage rate blocked | — | SCA determination $22.50 |
at $4.35M against 4 bidders. Best expected value sits at $4.28M.
faster than the top of the band for restroom cleaning. Understaffed as priced.
Illustrative figures, shown in the form Archer reports them.
The problem
A 90-page solicitation hides the things that move price: a union clause, a wage determination, a mandatory day porter, a pricing form that must be filled out a specific way. Miss one and the bid is wrong before the math starts.
A blended square-foot rate carried over from the last job is not an estimate. It cannot tell you whether the crew you priced can actually clean the building, which is how a won bid becomes a losing contract.
Shaving margin until the number feels competitive is not strategy. Without knowing where the field is, you cannot tell the difference between the bid you should sharpen and the one you should walk away from.
How it works
Three steps, each one showing its work, so the number you submit is one you can walk a client through line by line.
Upload the PDF, Word file, or bid workbook. Archer extracts every site and square footage, the service frequencies, the union and prevailing-wage rules, insurance and bonding, the submission deadline, and every form that has to come back with the bid. Each value is cited to the page it came from, and anything the document left ambiguous becomes a question to ask at the walk-through.
Hours come from ISSA-style task times per unit: minutes per fixture, square feet per hour by method, receptacles per shift. Wages resolve from the wage determination, the CBA, or local market data in that order. On top sits the full cost stack — burden, supplies, equipment, overhead, and the mobilization cost of standing a sixty-person crew up.
Archer fits a competitor price distribution to comparable awards, then shows the price that maximizes expected profit and what a 50, 65, or 80 percent chance of winning would cost. Name a target and it runs the model backwards: what margin, what production rate, what staffing — and which of those the law or the crew will not allow.
The model
Anything can produce a price. The useful part is knowing what stands behind it — and hearing “no” while there is still time to act on it.
Every task carries the range a trained crew actually sustains. Price above it and Archer flags the plan as undeliverable instead of quietly handing you a number that fails inspection in month three.
A prevailing wage determination, a collective bargaining rate, a statutory minimum. The solver treats these as walls, not suggestions, and says so when a target can only be reached by going through one.
A limit backed by a wage determination counts. A limit that is a shipped default does not, and never on its own makes a target look achievable. You always know which is which.
When no price above your margin floor has a real chance of winning, Archer says so rather than recommending a cut that changes nothing. Knowing which jobs to skip is worth as much as knowing how to price the rest.
The pricing logic that took years to build does not have to be retyped. Archer reads an existing bid workbook, maps its production rates, burden, overhead, and margin rules into the engine, and prices with them. What ships out of the box is a labeled starting point, meant to be replaced by yours.
Who it’s for
Campus and multi-site bids where a rounding error is six figures.
The same math the big firms use, on the jobs that grow a company.
Deliverables
Every buyer wants the bid in their own format. Archer produces a working Excel model where every derived cell is a live formula, fills the customer’s own pricing workbook without breaking their formulas, completes PDF bid forms, and prints a summary you can hand to a review board.
Live formulas over named inputs. Change an input cell, the model recalculates.
Filled by cell or named range, their formulas left alone.
Headline numbers, staffing, schedule, wage basis, risk flags.
AcroForm fields completed and optionally flattened.
Put a live solicitation through Archer and compare it against how you priced it. That is the only demo worth running.
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