Built by the people who were already doing this by hand.

Where it came from

Every janitorial contractor of any size has a spreadsheet. It holds production rates somebody measured on a real floor, a burden calculation that has been corrected a dozen times, and margin rules that encode which jobs went wrong and why. It is the most valuable thing the company owns and it lives in one file that one person understands.

Archer started as that spreadsheet. The three of us had been pricing janitorial contracts between us for 45 years — small office parks through multi-site campuses — and the model kept getting better while the process around it stayed the same: read a 90-page solicitation after hours, retype the square footages, hope nobody missed the clause about the mandatory day porter.

The software does the reading and the retyping. The model is still the model.

What we believe about bidding

A price you cannot defend line by line is a guess with a decimal point. If the crew cannot clean the building at the rate you priced, you have not won a contract, you have bought a problem — and you will find out in month three, in front of the customer.

So Archer is built to say no. It flags a plan that needs crews running faster than anyone sustains. It refuses to reach a target by pretending a wage determination is negotiable. It tells you when no price above your margin floor has a real chance of winning, instead of recommending a cut that just loses you money more slowly. Knowing which bids to skip is worth as much as knowing how to price the rest.

The same rule runs through the proposal generator: it will not write a claim about your company that you did not give it. A proposal that overstates your safety record is a lie with your name on it, not ours.

Who we are

Three of us, 45 years in the trade between us, still bidding. names, titles and a line each company entity and where you are based

Those are marked rather than written because Archer holds itself to the rule it holds proposals to: nothing gets asserted about a company that the company has not supplied. Send them over and this page fills itself in.

Where to find us

ISSA Show North America, IFMA World Workplace, and BOMA International. If you are bidding against us, come say hello anyway.