Membership
You want to know how the firm in front of you actually performed. So does every agency that hired them before you, and so will the next one. The exchange is the arrangement that makes that answerable, and membership is how you get into it.
A network product should say plainly what it is worth before the network exists, so here it is in order. The first two do not depend on anybody else joining.
Day one
Most agencies cannot say whether a bidder has worked for them before, how it went, and which department would know. That answer is already in your files. It becomes reachable as soon as your contracts are loaded, before any other agency is involved at all.
Within weeks
A contractor can ask a past client to confirm and rate the work. That client responds through a single-use link and needs no account and no membership. The reference is verified against the contract rather than selected by the vendor, so it counts for something a letter does not.
As the exchange grows
Once a second agency signs a sharing agreement with you, their finalized records about firms you are considering appear in your search, labelled with who issued them. They see who searched and the purpose given. Either side can suspend it.
Nobody should buy a subscription to fix a problem they have not measured. The first step is a review, and it is useful whether or not anything follows it.
Step one
We sample 25 contracts your agency completed in the last three years, score what evidence each one left behind, interview three of your people, and read three of your live solicitations for qualification criteria that are standing in for something else.
You get a scored baseline, a staff-hour figure for what reference checking costs you now, and a 90-day pilot design you are free to take to anyone. About three weeks, and roughly six hours of your team's time.
The fee credits in full against anything that follows. At this amount it sits under the small-purchase threshold in most jurisdictions, so a purchase order is generally enough and no solicitation is required.
Step two
Import 100 contracts, finalize 25 evaluations with contractor review, train your evaluators, and produce one relevance packet for a procurement you are actually running. Measured against the baseline the diagnostic established.
For context on the number: a small city's procurement suite commonly carries a one-time deployment fee above $11,000 before the first year's subscription. Both steps here together cost less than that, and both credit forward.
Design partners
We are selecting up to five agencies as design partners for the shared record standard. A design partner has the diagnostic fee waived, holds a three-year price lock, takes a named seat on the standards and fairness council, and shapes the record schema. Influence over the standard rather than control of it, because a fairness standard one agency controls is not a standard.
Twenty minutes to work out whether this is worth doing at your agency and whether we are the right people to do it.