About Vendor Radar

The Problem We Solve

If you sell services, expertise, or implementation work to local government, you know the challenge: the best opportunities are often visible in public documents — meeting agendas, budget resolutions, committee minutes, capital improvement plans — long before they become formal solicitations. But nobody has time to monitor hundreds of city, county, school district, and special district websites every day.

By the time a project shows up on a bid board, the relationship-builder has already had three meetings with the public works director. You are starting cold; they are confirming next steps.

What We Built

Vendor Radar is a government opportunity intelligence platform focused exclusively on local government — the cities, counties, school districts, park boards, townships, and special districts where the majority of public infrastructure spending happens but where visibility is hardest to come by.

We monitor public documents nightly, extract forward-looking signals, classify them by service category and signal type, enforce quality and suppression discipline, and deliver actionable intelligence to firms that sell into the public sector.

Every signal links back to its source document. Every claim is grounded in a public record. We do not speculate and we do not pad volume with noise.

What Customers See After Signup

Customers use Vendor Radar as a working queue, not a static research page. The dashboard is built around daily briefing, signal triage, source-document review, filtering by territory and category, and digest delivery for teams that want highlights outside the app.

Our Approach

Vendor Radar is built on a few convictions:

• Source faithfulness over volume. We would rather suppress a questionable signal than publish something misleading. Provenance and accuracy matter more than impressive counts.
• Body-level maturity compounds. The longer we monitor a government body, the better we understand its document patterns, publication cadence, and signal yield. This institutional knowledge is our competitive moat — it cannot be replicated by scraping a single database.
• Local is different. National SLED databases and federal procurement tools do not capture what happens at city hall, the county board, or the school board meeting. Local government procurement is fragmented, relationship-driven, and document-heavy. We built for that reality.
• Early beats complete. A signal that tells you a city is studying a water main replacement project is more valuable than a complete RFP filing that arrives the same day your competitor sees it. Lead time is the product.

The Team

Vendor Radar is built by Donnie Balliet, Jason Endres, and Brett Gurholt.

Donnie Balliet

Co-founder leading platform, extraction systems, data quality, and source-linked signal infrastructure.

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Jason Endres

Co-founder leading customer development, market fit, onboarding, and regional service-firm workflows.

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Brett Gurholt

Co-founder and practitioner advisor bringing public-project delivery experience from landscape architecture.

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Donnie builds the platform — the scrapers, the extraction pipeline, the quality systems, and the infrastructure that turns government documents into reliable signals every night. Jason works the market — understanding what regional service firms actually need, how they make BD decisions, and what makes the difference between intelligence that sits in a dashboard and intelligence that wins work.

Brett brings the operator's perspective from local-government-facing professional services. As a professional landscape architect and project manager, he has worked across site design, master planning, public outreach, parks and recreation, downtown revitalization, transportation alternatives, and construction administration. That experience keeps Vendor Radar grounded in how public projects actually move from early discussion to scoped work.

That combination — deep technical investment in source-level document intelligence, direct understanding of how firms sell into local government, and real practitioner experience delivering public-sector projects — is what shapes every product decision.

Why We Built This

Donnie: I built Vendor Radar because local government opportunity intelligence is too fragmented for most firms to monitor well. Cities, counties, schools, and special districts all publish useful clues, but they are scattered across hundreds of sites and buried inside agendas, packets, minutes, and budgets. The product exists to turn those public records into source-level intelligence with the quality discipline to know when to publish, when to suppress, and when to keep looking.

Jason: From the market side, the existing tools were not built for regional firms trying to win work with cities and counties. National platforms are broad, bid boards are usually too late, and neither one consistently explains why a local opportunity is real before the formal solicitation arrives. We built Vendor Radar for the firms that need earlier, cleaner, locally grounded signals they can actually use in business development.

Brett: From the practitioner side, I know how much public work begins before there is a formal RFP. The useful clues often show up first in meeting packets, committee discussions, planning documents, and capital budgets. Vendor Radar exists so firms can see those signals early enough to understand the need, build the right relationships, and prepare before the project becomes a public listing.

The Company

Vendor Radar is operated by Celebrate Beyond Today, DBA Vendor Radar. We are a focused product company building procurement intelligence infrastructure for the Upper Midwest and expanding from there.

We are not a consulting firm. We are not a government IT vendor. We are a platform that turns public records into business development intelligence for the firms that keep local infrastructure running.

Accountability and Support

We answer support emails personally — no ticket queue, no chatbot gatekeeping. If something looks wrong with a signal, tell us and we will investigate the source document. If a government body you care about is not monitored yet, tell us and we will evaluate adding it.

This is a small team building a focused product. That means you talk to the people who built the system, not a layer removed from it.

Get in Touch

Questions, partnership inquiries, or feedback: support@vendorradar.ai