Module 1 · Week 2 — The Go/No-Go Decision

The problem

Saying yes to the wrong work is how a firm quietly bleeds

A lead lands in the inbox. It's a real client, a real project, in a sector we work in. The instinct — the good, ownership-minded instinct — is to go after it. We chase.

But every proposal we write spends something we can never get back: our own people's billable time. In 2024, the average technical lead spent 35 hours on a single proposal — and that's before marketing, principals, and reviewers add theirs. Chase the wrong pursuit and you don't just lose; you've spent a week of senior engineering time on a future that was never going to arrive, time that could have gone to winnable work or to billable projects we already own.

Pursuit isn't free. Every proposal is a withdrawal from the same account that pays for our work — and our ownership.

So the most valuable skill in pursuit is not writing a better proposal. It's deciding, honestly and early, which proposals are worth writing at all. That decision has a name and a process at Weston & Sampson: the Go/No-Go.

The frame

Every pursuit is a bet on a forecast

Last week we saw the machine: the firm decides today — what to chase, how to staff, when to hire — on a forecast built from its pursuits. Each opportunity you log carries an expected revenue and a probability of winning. Multiply them and you get weighted revenue; sum that across every pursuit and you get the backlog the firm plans against.

That makes the Go/No-Go the first and most consequential place we touch the forecast. A "Go" doesn't just commit proposal hours. It adds an opportunity to the firm's read on the future. Say "Go" to work we have little chance of winning, and we don't just waste hours — we poison the forecast with revenue that isn't coming.

A disciplined Go/No-Go protects two things at once: the hours we'd spend pursuing, and the trust the firm places in its own backlog.

The throughline holds. Disciplined pursuit → trustworthy data → sound decisions → a healthy firm. The Go/No-Go is the gate where discipline either enters the system, or doesn't.

The instrument

How Weston & Sampson's Go/No-Go works

The Go/No-Go form turns a gut feeling into a defensible judgment. It is not a popularity contest, and it is not a test you pass — it is a structured read of fit, positioning, profitability, and readiness, built from a series of honest yes/no questions.

The form has one rule before any answer matters: read the RFP in its entirety first. You only complete it if you can answer its questions honestly. And two questions act as hard gates — answer "no" to either and it's a reason to stop, no matter how strong everything else looks.

The two hard gates. If we don't meet the minimum and comparative evaluation criteria — or we can't commit the time and attention to produce a responsive proposal on schedule — we stop. Nothing else outweighs these.

Qualification minimums. Are we licensed, corporately and individually, for every required service in the project's state? Non-negotiable basics that decide whether we're even eligible.

Strategic fit & positioning. Is there a capture plan? Did we hear about this before the solicitation? Do we have a relationship with the client? Did we help shape the RFP? Does it align with a firm initiative? Can we distinguish ourselves from the competition? This is where most of the truth about win probability lives.

Profitability & resources. Does the proposed fee let us run the project profitably? A win we can't deliver profitably isn't a win.

Operational readiness. Can we show relevant regional experience, and do we have staff in the area to actually do the work?

The form also forces the data the firm runs on out into the open: a named, committed technical champion; sign-off from the Regional or Client Manager; and — entered into Vantagepoint on the opportunity record — an estimated net revenue and an estimated win probability. Those last two are exactly the numbers that became the weighted backlog last week. The Go/No-Go is where they're born.

One gate, two jobs. The Go/No-Go filters out the wrong work and, for the right work, produces the revenue and win-probability data that feeds the firm's forecast.

The second decision

A "Go" answers one question. A disciplined pursuit answers two.

The Go/No-Go settles whether to pursue. But hidden inside every "Go" is a second decision we tend to make far too casually: what is this work worth, and how do we price it?

Score the opportunity and you know whether to spend the hours. Score the value — how uniquely we fit the need, how compelling an experience we can deliver, how much real business return we can create for the client — and you know what that "Go" is worth. The first read protects our time. The second read protects our price.

Opportunity score asks "should we pursue?" Value score asks "what is it worth?" Confuse the two and you either chase the wrong work — or win the right work at the wrong price.

Value isn't a feeling; it's a read on three dimensions. Uniqueness of fit: are we one of a few who can do exactly this, or one of many? Client experience: do we know this client well enough to make working with us easy and memorable? Business return: do we understand what drives value for them well enough to deliver it? A commodity service competes on cost. A uniquely valuable one earns a premium — and the higher we read on these three, the more our price can reflect the value we bring, not just the hours we burn.

Two reads on one lead. The opportunity score decides whether we pursue; the value score shapes how we price. As a rough model, the stronger the value read, the higher the fee multiplier the work can support. (Multiplier targets are illustrative until WSE confirms its own.)

For owners, this is the line between revenue and margin. Winning work keeps people busy; pricing to the value we create is what funds the profit, the bonuses, and the share value we all own. A "Go" we win at a commodity price can still quietly bleed the firm.

Read the field

Three kinds of pursuit — and where the price really gets decided

Where that second decision happens depends on how the work comes to us. Three patterns cover most of what we chase, and each one puts the pricing decision in a different place — which changes the skill that wins.

Qualifications-based. We win the project on our qualifications, then negotiate price afterward. Here pricing is secondary — selection turns on value perception and persuasion. The value score is doing the heavy lifting: it's the case we make for why we're worth choosing, and the foundation we negotiate fee from once we've won. Win first, price later.

Request for proposal (scope & fee). We're asked to propose a scope, an approach, and a fee, and we're selected partly on that number. Here pricing is front and center — the value score has to translate into a fee that is both defensible and competitive in one shot. Read value too low and we underprice the work; ignore it and we lose on cost. Win and price in one move.

Direct hire / direct appeal. A client comes to us with a request for services. Here discovery is everything — before we can price, we have to uncover the real need, the true scope, and what success is worth to them. Strong questions, not a fast quote, protect both the relationship and the margin. Define before you price.

Same firm, same value — but quals-based sells it, RFP prices it, and direct-appeal must first discover it.

The throughline holds. Score the opportunity to protect our time, score the value to protect our price, and read the pursuit type to know when that price gets decided. Disciplined pursuit → trustworthy data → sound decisions → a healthy, employee-owned firm.

Before we meet

Your pre-work

Do this before the live session

This is a live week. We won't lecture the form to you — you'll have already used it. Come having done the following, ready to defend your call.

Pre-work · about 20 minutes

Work a real lead through

Open the interactive Go/No-Go worksheet (link below) and read what each section is really asking.
Take the sanitized lead we've sent with this module — or a recent pursuit of your own — and work through it honestly, section by section.
Name the pursuit type (qualifications-based, RFP, or direct appeal) and give a quick value read — high, medium, or low — on uniqueness of fit, client experience, and business return. Where does the price get decided?
Write down your estimated net revenue and honest win probability for it. You'll be asked to defend both.
Note the one place you were tempted to talk yourself into a "yes" to reach "Go." Bring that tension to the session — it's the most useful thing you'll bring.

Work it through yourself

Weston & Sampson's real Go/No-Go criteria, sorted into strengths and open questions as you answer — with the hard gates built in.

Open the Go/No-Go Worksheet

In the room

What we'll do together — 45 minutes, live

We'll work the same lead as a group, surface where our reads disagreed, and pressure-test the calls. The disagreement is the point: it's where the difference between an honest forecast and a hopeful one becomes visible.

1Calibrate. Compare our reads on the shared lead and reconcile why they differ — especially win probability.
2Practice the hard No-Go. Walk a tempting opportunity that fails a gate, and rehearse saying no with confidence.
3Price the value. Name the lead's pursuit type, read its value on the three dimensions, and argue where the price should land — and why.
4Defend a number. Each of us states an estimated revenue and win probability and defends it to the group.

Challenge question

“When the honest read points to No-Go but we want the work anyway — what is the true cost of saying Go, and who pays it?”

Next week is self-paced again. Having decided a pursuit is worth the bet, we sharpen the two numbers the Go/No-Go demanded: how we forecast revenue and effort, and how we calibrate an honest win probability — the discipline that turns a guess into data the firm can trust.