Summer isn’t just peak season for pouring concrete—it’s go-time for the estimating team, too. If you’re a concrete contractor, you already know the drill. While your field crews are working overtime in the heat, your estimators are buried under a pile of RFPs, change orders, and bid invites with turnaround times tighter than a footing form.
This is the season where the right estimating strategy can mean the difference between landing profitable work for fall… or spinning wheels on low-margin jobs. So how can your team stay sharp, efficient, and competitive when the inbox won’t stop pinging?
Let’s break it down:
Fast-Turn Bid Strategies: When Everything Is Due Yesterday
Public agencies and private developers alike rush to get projects out before fiscal deadlines or school year kickoffs. Your estimators are juggling bids, reviewing a new addendum, and getting texts from the field, all before lunch.
What works in STACK:
- Prebuilt Items and Assemblies in STACK let you launch faster. Save your most common concrete scopes—curbs, slabs, walls—and reuse them in minutes.
- Smart search tools help you find key plan callouts instantly, even in 100+ page sets.
- Real-time team collaboration ensures multiple estimators can divide and conquer without duplicating work.
- Automated plan comparison with no more hunting for last-minute scope changes.
Concrete-Specific Challenges: Always First to the Table
Your scope is one of the first in the bidding sequence. Which means it’s your numbers that shape the GC’s total. It’s also your bid that sets the tone for coordination.
Summer scopes to watch:
- Site concrete: sidewalks, paving, ADA ramps
- Structural: foundations, columns, slabs
- Specialty: tilt-up, precast, decorative
STACK helps by providing hyper-accurate measurements and detailed quantity breakdowns that give you confidence on every pour, every phase.
Keeping Up with the Field—Without Losing Focus
With foremen and PMs knee-deep in concrete work, you must extract critical data—crew rates, productivity, supplier costs—without constant back-and-forth.
Pro tip: Use STACK’s real-time cost database integration with 1build to update pricing on the fly when your supplier raises rebar costs or your team changes mix designs based on weather conditions.
Unit Pricing Under Pressure: Don’t Sacrifice Margin for Speed
It’s tempting to drop your number just to stay in the running. But when fuel surcharges and material escalations hit, those thin margins disappear fast. STACK helps by:
-Keeping your historical cost data organized and searchable
-Letting you build location- or crew-specific production rates
-Highlighting cost impacts in real-time as you adjust scope
Prioritizing What to Bid: Make Your Time Count
You can’t bid everything. Leadership depends on you to help decide which jobs are worth chasing.
Factors to weigh:
-Distance from your batch plant
-GC reliability and payment history
-Risky specs (e.g., exposed finishes, short cure windows)
-Existing client relationships
STACK’s preconstruction tools let you evaluate plans faster, callout red flags earlier, and make better go/no-go decisions.
Ready for Summer Relief?
No fluff. Just the smart tech and strategies you need to win the work you want—without burning out in the process. Check out a demo today.
