Shape 01 · Finding work
The work is public. Nobody sends it to you.
Permits, bid notices, filings, license applications, plan rooms. All of it is posted where anyone can read it, and none of it arrives on your desk. I build the thing that reads it every morning and tells you what fits, while there is still time to do something about it.
01
How it works
Five steps. The third one is the whole game.
Find the source
Every trade, every industry, has a place where its work gets announced before it reaches the people who want it. Permits. Bid notices. State filings. Licence applications. Board agendas. Plan rooms. The first job on the call is working out where yours gets posted, and whether that source is any good. Some counties and agencies publish properly. Some barely publish at all. I check before I quote you a price, because selling you a watcher on a source that does not exist would be a waste of both our time.
Read it every morning
A scheduled job pulls whatever is new and stores it. No login, no copy and paste, nobody remembering to go and look. It runs whether or not anyone is in the office, and it keeps everything it has ever seen, so nothing is lost when you decide six months later that a name looks familiar.
Work out which ones are actually yours
This is the part that decides whether the thing gets used. A feed with everything in it is the same as no feed at all, because nobody reads three hundred rows on a Tuesday. So it filters on what you actually want: the job types, the size floor, how far you will travel, and how fresh it has to be to still be worth a call. Anything borderline gets shown, not hidden. A little noise costs you a minute. A missed real one costs you the job.
Put a name and a verified number on it
A listing on its own is half a lead. Whoever filed it gets matched against an authoritative record, the state license board rather than whatever a search engine guesses, so what reaches you is a real company with a real number. Where two sources disagree, you see both and which one is official, rather than a confident wrong answer.
It lands where you will see it
A dashboard you open with coffee, and an alert if you would rather it came to you. Each one carries what it is, what it is worth, who filed it, how to reach them, and why it was surfaced. You approve or you pass, and passing keeps it, because a no today is often a yes next year.
Worked example
Commercial HVAC, Alamance County.
This is the version I have built and run, so it is the one I can describe properly. Your industry will have a different source and different rules. The machine underneath is the same.
What it found in its first weeks
$1.4M
A commercial HVAC contractor was hearing about jobs roughly three weeks after the permit was filed. By then the general contractor had usually picked his mechanical sub, so the call was polite and pointless. The system reads the county permit feed every morning, works out which GC filed each job, checks that company against the state license board for a verified number, scores it on size and freshness, and surfaces what fits while the mechanical scope is still open. It found a $1.4 million job nobody at the shop knew existed. To be straight about what that means: it surfaced the job. It did not win it, and nothing has closed yet. I will update this line when something does, and I will say so either way.
Screenshot slot
The morning view, with real permits in it.
The dashboard as it actually looks on a Tuesday, client name blurred. This is the most persuasive image available to this business. Roughly 1800 by 1100.
Why timing is the product
On a commercial job the mechanical sub gets chosen during buyout, usually within a few weeks of the GC winning the contract. Hear about it after that and the scope is gone no matter how good your number is. So the filter is not just "is this a job," it is "is this a job that is still open." Under a million, filed in the last sixty days. Over a million, ninety, because bigger jobs buy out slower. Those windows came from research and they are wrong until real wins and losses correct them, which is what the first sixty days are for.
What it costs
$1,800 to build it. $475 a month to run it.
The monthly is not optional on this one and I would rather say that plainly than bury it. This is a service running on my infrastructure, not a thing I hand you and walk away from. Sources change their format, pages move, filters drift out of date, and somebody has to notice. If the monthly stops, the watcher stops.
The first sixty days are tuning. You tell me which ones were live and which were already gone, and the filters and the timing windows move to match what you actually win. Cancel with thirty days notice, any time, for any reason.
The other things I build, quoting, job costing, the weekly report, are yours outright. They run in your accounts and they keep running if you fire me. That is a different page.