In the construction industry, competition for jobs is fierce, and you can’t be sure you’ll win every project you bid. So, the key to success often lies in expanding your capacity to bid more potential jobs in order to increase your chances of winning. Here are our top tips for increasing your bid production speed by 50% or more.
The Standard Construction Bidding Process
The process of bidding construction jobs evolves as new technologies become available, but at its heart it doesn’t change. You’ll always need to take steps to find new possible jobs, decide whether to bid on them, create an estimate, and submit a proposal.
In the current environment, contractors find new project information in a variety of ways, including of course primarily personal connections and referrals. According to STACK’s 2020 industry survey data, approximately half of contractors use a planroom or lead gen service, and 25% utilize business development and cold calling.
Spreading your resources across multiple methods for project seeking is your best bet for finding the right projects to bid. If you’re looking for where to get started, try Dodge Data & Analytics.
The workflow for estimating and submitting proposals also varies, from paper and pen to sophisticated software tools, and everything in between. This is where most contractors can really increase efficiency in their bidding process.
The Impact of Doubling Bid Production
You know you won’t win every project you bid, but here’s how it might look if you increase your chances.
How to Become More Efficient in Compiling Estimates for Your Construction Bid
The first step to improving efficiency is tracking your current process to understand where you’re successful and where you could do better.
Set a specific time period – maybe a week or month, depending on how many jobs you typically bid – and track how much time you spend on each task from identifying the job to submitting the proposal. It might help to visualize your process on a whiteboard, labeling steps, time to complete, and any return to previous steps in the flow. Think about things like:
– How much prep happens before takeoffs? Do you spend time printing and transporting paper plans? If you use software, how long does it take to organize plans and documents before you can get started measuring? How much time do you spend searching for items on plans?
– Could your takeoffs be streamlined? How could your takeoff process improve? If you’re working on paper, what impact would switching to an onscreen process have? If you use software already, what parts of your workflow still hold you up?
– Is there a better way for your team to collaborate? Track time spent sending files among colleagues, waiting for answers to questions via email, and even if projects get derailed if someone is out sick.
– How to do you handle creating estimates? When you have your takeoff complete, what happens next? Note if you spend time transferring data between different software solutions or typing it into Excel or another tool from paper. Do you need to look up materials in a pricing guide for each project? How do you determine your markup for each job?
– What needs to happen between creating an estimate and submitting a proposal? Once you have your selling price determined, how does that information get conveyed to the general contractor? Do you retype estimate information into another platform like Microsoft Word and copy over your company logo?
When you break down each of these steps, and any others required in your own individual way of working, and assign time spent to each per project, you can begin to use actual data to spot key opportunities for an improved workflow. Identify your top 2 or 3 blockers and focus on refining those stages first.
What Are Some Ways to Repurpose Previous Construction Bids?
Because each project is different, of course you can’t simply copy a bid and change the name of the GC. But, there are several ways to make parts of your process repeatable so you can remove extra steps.
Takeoff Template Libraries
Look for material takeoff software that allows you to save templates of takeoffs you do most frequently. If you do a lot of takeoffs for asphalt parking lots, for example, yo