Carlisle Site Services gets its mornings back
A two-crew site work company stopped opening SAM.gov at six every morning. Captivaq reads the notices and sends the ones that fit, with the reason.
Ben CarlisleOwner, Carlisle Site Services
Key results
Twenty minutes a morning back, every weekday
Every match arrives with the reason it fit
First bid draft ready in one afternoon
“If you spend your mornings on SAM.gov, you are going to like Captivaq.”
Ben CarlisleOwner, Carlisle Site ServicesMeet Carlisle Site Services
Carlisle Site Services does grading, excavation and site prep for federal facilities across the Southeast. Ben Carlisle started it with one excavator and a borrowed truck, and now runs two crews out of a yard outside Columbia.
The work is steady when it comes, and it comes from the government. Base housing, fence lines, drainage on a training range, the pad for a maintenance building. Every one of those starts as a notice on SAM.gov.
“I was the estimator, the foreman and the guy reading SAM.gov at six in the morning.”
Most mornings the reading found nothing. The notices that did fit were often found late, after the question window had closed, and the ones that looked right on the first line turned out to be wrong by the third page.
Twenty minutes for nothing
SAM.gov alerts sent everything posted under the company's NAICS code, so the alert was not the problem. The reading was. Ben skimmed a dozen notices a day and opened maybe one a week.
The ones he opened took longer than they should have. A solicitation is a package, and the fit lives across the statement of work, the set-aside line and the place of performance. He read all three to learn that the job was in Nevada.
“The alerts were not the problem. The problem was that every one of them looked the same until you opened it.”
Bids he did write were written late. By the time he found a notice, read it and decided, the question deadline had passed and the due date was close. Two of the first year's bids went in the night before.
Ten minutes on a Tuesday
Setup took one sitting. Captivaq read the company website and drafted a profile: what the crews do, the equipment, the states they work in, the NAICS codes and the past jobs on the site. Ben corrected three lines and added the small business status.
“It knew what we did before I typed anything. I fixed the counties and hit save.”
From then on every new notice on SAM.gov and the state portals was scored against that profile the day it posted. The first shortlist arrived the next morning with four notices on it, each with the reason it matched.
The shortlist does the reading
Ben now opens one list. Each match says why it fit, what would sink it, and when the questions close. The wrong-state notices never reach him, and the set-asides he qualifies for are marked before he opens them.
The first bid Captivaq drafted was for a drainage repair on a training range. The draft came with the requirement list pulled from the package, a compliance matrix, and bracketed gaps where a fact was missing.
“The first bid it drafted for us, I edited for an afternoon and sent. That used to be a week.”
The mornings went back to the crews. Bidding moved to a Friday hour with the shortlist open, and the company has submitted more bids this quarter than in the whole of last year.
Customer story
“If you spend your mornings on SAM.gov, you are going to like Captivaq.”
Ben CarlisleOwner, Carlisle Site Services
