An opportunity monitoring system built around how architecture & design firms actually make go/no-go decisions.
Every tender portal your firm uses already sends its notifications somewhere. Percolated watches that inbox every day, scores each opportunity against your own criteria, and sends a short daily digest to whoever should be looking at it.
Where opportunities and time get lost
Two things happen when opportunity monitoring is done manually, however capable the person doing it is.
01
Opportunities get missed
Every portal a firm uses already sends an email notification when something relevant is posted. The problem isn't the portal - it's that nobody reliably reads every one of those emails, every day, without exception. An EOI notification lands in a shared inbox during a busy fortnight and gets read three days after the close date, if it's read at all. It doesn't take many misses for the cost to outweigh years of a monitoring system.
02
Senior time goes to work that doesn't need a senior person
Principals and bid managers spend real hours each month working through that inbox and deciding what's worth chasing - time that isn't going into design quality, client relationships, or running live bids.
Percolated removes both of these problems.
That time doesn't just disappear when it's spent on monitoring. It changes what a firm is actually able to do:
Win rates improve with quality, not volume
A team with more time per pursuit spends it on a sharper design response and a more considered proposal, not a rushed one. That moves win rate more reliably than chasing more opportunities ever does.Feedback from submitted bids actually gets used
Most firms don't have time to properly debrief a loss, so the same avoidable mistakes repeat from one tender to the next. Time back is time to request and act on client feedback after each submission - the thing that compounds bid quality over years, not just one proposal.Bid systems get built, not just used
Time spent on monitoring is time that isn't spent improving how the firm runs bids at all - templates, boilerplate content, criteria, the process itself. That work only happens when someone has the hours to do it properly rather than in the gaps.Client relationships get more attention
Time back for a principal goes toward existing and prospective clients - where negotiated and repeat work comes from, work that never has to compete on a tender in the first place.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
You’ve missed the EOI stage for a $20m regional health project - the right sector, the right scale, a client you’ve worked with before. The notification landed in the tender inbox during a busy fortnight, sat unread behind other messages, and by the time it surfaced, submissions had closed. One missed notification. A project that would likely have been shortlisted, gone.
That's the failure mode Percolated is built to close. Not "checking the inbox more often" - an inbox that gets read every single day, without fail, stops being a risk at all.
What manual monitoring is already costing you
Firms without a dedicated bid manager
The principal does the checking, downloading, and summarising themselves. An hour a day at $350 an hour, across a working month, comes to roughly $7,350 a month. Around $88,000 a year, using standard billing rates.
Firms with a bid manager
The bid manager checks the inbox, downloads what's relevant, and summarises it, then sends the principal a summary and the RFP itself to read. On a salary of $100,000 to $130,000 plus 11.5% super, that's roughly $111,500 to $145,000 fully loaded, or $56 to $73 an hour. The same hour a day comes to roughly $1,200 to $1,540 a month. Around $14,000 to $18,500 a year, currently spent on monitoring instead of live bid production.
$88,000
Principal time spent annually on manual portal monitoring (at $350/hr, 0 mins daily)
20-30%
Of relevant tenders missed by firms using manual monitoring
$125,000
Expected value of one missed bid opportunity ($500K fee × 25% win rate)
How Percolated works
The tender notification inbox is read on a fixed schedule, every day. Not whenever someone has a spare ten minutes.
Every EOI, RFP, and potential opportunity is scored against your firm's own Go/No-Go criteria: sector fit, capacity, client relationship, competitive position. Not a generic keyword match.
Every opportunity reviewed and scored is logged to an Audit Log, so nothing that's come through is ever invisible. Even the ones scored Decline or Discard stay on record there, so you can see what was assessed and why, not just what made the cut.
Pursue, Review, and Watch opportunities go into your firm's Go/No-Go Register, where your Bid Manager reviews and actions them. Your Go/No-Go criteria profile lives here too, so scoring stays grounded in a record you control.
A short daily digest goes to the person who should act on it, covering Pursue, Review, and Watch opportunities with the score and the reasoning behind each. Decline and Discard opportunities don't clutter the digest. They're still logged in full, just not something you need to see every morning.
In your first six months, a monthly check-in makes sure the scoring stays accurate as priorities shift. After that, it moves to quarterly.
You also get a ready-to-use prompt for summarising opportunity documents with your LLM of choice (eg. Claude, ChatGPT, Co-Pilot etc), so working through a lengthy RFT or EOI pack takes minutes instead of an afternoon. This gets handed over and walked through at your go-live call.
Built by someone who's run bids for 20 years, not a software company
Percolated was built by someone who has been in the bid space inside architecture and design practices for over 20 years, not a product team working from assumptions about the sector. That background shapes three specific things:
The criteria are built around real Go/No-Go decision-making, the same weighted factors a principal already uses informally, not a generic sales pipeline adapted to fit.
Institutional knowledge stays in the system. When a bid manager leaves, the criteria, the scoring history, and the reasoning behind past decisions stay with the firm, not in the departing person's head.
It's scoped to solve one problem properly - opportunity monitoring - rather than bundling in project management or invoicing features the firm doesn't need from this.
Pricing
ONE OFF SETUP
Covers connecting the single tender notification inbox, Go/No-Go criteria calibration, and a test run before the firm relies on it.
$6,400 + GST
MONTHLY
Your monthly fee* covers ongoing quality checks, maintenance, and check-ins (monthly for first six months then moves to quarterly), so the system keeps running properly without you having to think about it.
$500 + GST
*No lock-in contract. You can stop whenever it's not working for you.
In context: for a firm without a dedicated bid manager, $500 a month is a little over 6% of the principal time it replaces, on the illustrative figures above. For firms with a bid manager, the direct monitoring cost is smaller, but the time still goes back into live bid production instead of inbox triage, and a missed opportunity costs the same either way. Most firms without a bid manager recover the setup cost from freed-up principal time within the first month.
Pay annually and save two months. $500 a month comes to $6,000 across a year. Paid upfront, it's $5,100 - a 15% saving, same system, same service throughout. Applies to the monthly fee only; the setup fee is the same either way.
What happens next
Setup runs across three short calls, capped at two hours in total. Getting started shouldn't cost you a chunk of time you don't have.
Discovery call
45mins
Any remaining questions get answered, and we walk through exactly what setup involves before anything is built.
Calibration call
45mins
We go through your firm's Go/No-Go Criteria Profile together, so scoring reflects how your firm actually makes go/no-go decisions.
Go-live call
30mins
A walkthrough of exactly what you'll receive, when, and what to expect through your first month before hypercare check-ins begin. This is also where you get the opportunity-summarising prompt for your LLM of choice, so you can put it to use from day one.
Most firms have a working digest within a week of signing on.
Still have questions?
If anything here, or in the video, didn't cover it, a short call will. No pitch, just a chance to ask what's still unclear before you decide anything.
or, visit our FAQ page
or email dani.mcinally@macsbidstudio.com.au
I'll reply within 24 hours.