How to build a pursuit calendar from early signals

The problem a calendar solves

Finding a project a year early only helps if something happens in the intervening year. In most firms it does not: the project gets noticed, mentioned in a meeting, and forgotten, and the team meets it again as a bid notice with three weeks to respond — the same position as everyone who never saw it coming.

The fix is boring and effective. Give every project a stage, an owner, a next action, and a date.

Five stages, five required actions

Match the stage gates to the signal chain so the calendar reflects reality rather than a sales funnel invented elsewhere.

• Funded — confirm it is real and identify the department or owner. Review quarterly.
• Planning — confirm scope and scale, make first contact, learn the delivery method. Review monthly.
• Design — reach the designer, pursue approved-equal or basis-of-design status, confirm the bid timeline. Review monthly.
• Permitting or pre-bid — confirm the general contractor, get onto the bid list, run bid/no-bid. Review every two weeks.
• Bidding — read the documents, assign the proposal owner, schedule the submission. Review weekly.

Contact cadence without being a nuisance

Early-stage contact is quarterly, and each touch should carry something: a comparable project, a code change that affects their scope, a lesson from a job like theirs. Late-stage contact is as often as the project warrants. The rule that keeps it comfortable is simple — every contact ends with an agreed next date, so the following call is expected rather than cold.

When to spend estimating hours

Estimating capacity is the scarcest thing in most firms, and the reason to track projects early is to spend it deliberately. Nothing before the design gate should consume estimating time beyond a rough sanity check on size and fit. At the design or pre-bid gate, run the bid/no-bid decision properly, and only then assign hours.

A calendar that starts a year out lets you see a crowded April in January and move a pursuit rather than discover the conflict the week both bids are due.

Reviewing the calendar

One short weekly meeting on the two nearest stages, and one longer monthly pass over everything upstream. The monthly pass has one job: confirm each project is still in the stage you think it is. Projects move, get delayed, get cancelled, and get re-scoped, and a stale calendar is worse than no calendar because it feels like coverage.

What to record on each project

Keep it light enough that people actually maintain it: project, owner or agency, stage, fit, estimated value, expected bid window, named contacts, last contact date, next action, next date, and the pursuit owner. Anything more becomes a data-entry chore and quietly stops being updated.