Most firms calculate the cost of losing an RFP by asking what the project would have been worth. That's the wrong math. The real cost is on the input side, and it's bigger than people think.
Research from Tenders Resource Centre and OciWins puts the production cost of a single mid-complexity proposal at $12,000 to $15,000, with firms typically spending 2 to 6 percent of total contract value on proposal preparation alone. Most of that is senior staff time: architects bill at $125 to $250 per hour, and a typical RFP response takes 40 to 100 hours across the team.
According to Deltek's research on architecture firm KPIs, the typical net multiplier in an A&E firm is 2.94 to 3.54x. That's how firms recover overhead from direct labour. The practical implication: every 100 hours spent on a losing proposal requires 300 to 350 billable hours to recover the overhead impact. That's not "the fee you missed." That's billable work that has to make up the gap.
Those 40 to 100 hours came from somewhere. Usually a senior associate who could have been doing schematic design, or a principal who could have been in client meetings. The 2023 median utilisation rate for architecture firms is 61 percent. Part of that gap is senior staff tied up on proposals that the firm was never going to win.
If your firm submits 25 RFPs a year at a 40% win rate, that's 15 losing proposals. At 60 hours each, that's 900 hours of senior staff time spent on proposals that produced nothing. Apply the net multiplier and you're looking at 2,700+ billable hours of recovery work — most of a full-time equivalent's annual capacity.
Tightening Go/No-Go criteria isn't about pursuing fewer opportunities. It's about not paying $12,000-plus for proposals you were never going to win.
This is what ArchFP's Go/No-Go evaluation is built around. It scores each opportunity against your firm's actual eligibility and strategic fit before you commit a principal's week to it. If your firm wants to spend its proposal hours where they're more likely to win, book a 15-minute demo and we'll show you what a data-driven pursuit process looks like.