The single-offer award: how often one company answers

The field

When a contracting officer reports an award, one of the fields is the number of offers received. USASpending carries it under that name on each award and as a column in its award downloads, next to the extent competed and the reason the award was not competed, where there is one. It is a count of the offers, bids or quotes that came in. It does not say who the other offerors were or what they offered.

Most people who read award records look at the amount and the winner and stop. This field is the one that tells you whether the winner had company.

How to read one offer

The number means little alone. Read it with the extent competed.

• Competed, one offer. The buyer asked the market and one company answered. This is the case worth your time. The door was open and nobody else walked through it.
• Not competed, one offer. One company was asked, so one answered. The reason not competed tells you why: only one source, urgency, a statute. That is a different problem and a different article.
• Set aside, one offer. The pool of eligible companies was small, or the ones in it were not watching.

Then ask why nobody else answered. The usual reasons are a short response time, a requirement written around what the incumbent already does, data or tooling only the incumbent holds, or terms that made the work unattractive. Some of those you can do something about and some you cannot. The old solicitation, if it is still posted, usually tells you which.

Why the buyer cares too

One offer on a competitive buy is not the result the buyer wanted. In defense buying there is a rule about it. DFARS 215.371 says that if a competitive solicitation was open for fewer than 30 days and drew only one offer, the contracting officer is to resolicit and allow at least 30 more days. The next part of the same rule deals with how the contracting officer shows that a single price is fair and reasonable, which can mean asking the offeror for cost or pricing data.

The exceptions are wide. Buys at or below the simplified acquisition threshold, small business set-asides and commercial buys made under FAR Part 12 are all outside it. But the rule shows how a buyer is expected to think: one offer is a result that has to be explained. A contracting office with a record of single offers in a code has a reason to welcome a second credible company.

By code and by office

The rate is not uniform. The same code can be thin at one office and crowded at another, because competition is local to an office: its requirements, its lead times, the companies it already knows. A national rate for a code is a place to start. The rate for the code at the office you want is the number to act on.

We do not quote rates in this article. They move with every month of new awards, and a figure that is right today is wrong in a quarter. In LastAwarded, What it goes for shows the share of awards that drew a single offer beside each price band, nationally and for each office with at least five awards of that kind in the last five years. Where too few awards recorded a count, the figure is left blank. Award history can be filtered to the awards that drew one offer.

The mistakes

• Reading one offer as a closed market. On a competed buy it means the opposite. The market was open and unused.
• Reading one offer as an easy win. Something kept the others away. Find out what before you plan around it.
• Counting sole-source awards in. An award that was never competed has one offer by design. Take those out before you count, or every sole-source market looks like an opening.
• Trusting a blank. Some records carry no count. Blank is not zero and it is not one.
• Stopping at one award. A single one-offer award is an event. A run of them at the same office in the same code is a pattern, and a pattern is what you plan on.

What to do on Monday

1. Pull the awards in your codes at the two or three offices you most want to sell to. Keep the competed ones.
2. Mark the awards that drew one offer. Note who won each and when it ends.
3. Read the old solicitation where you can find it: the response time, the evaluation, anything only the incumbent could have met.
4. Introduce your company to the contracting office well before the end date. Say plainly that you intend to offer next time.
5. Answer the sources sought when it posts. A buyer with two credible responses writes a different solicitation from a buyer with one.