Masonry Magazine February 2004 Page. 36
BIDDING
Ugliness (The Bidding Documents) - I could write a book on this, but my experience certainly has been that there is a vast chasm between the best of architectural/engineer (A/E) documents and the worst. These bidding documents most often include a set of working drawings and a specification guide and the quality, completeness, and accuracy or lack thereof-can definitely affect your margins. Personally, I've built projects from documents that have been:
Detailed, complete and accurate My hat's off to these firms.
Detailed, complete and entirely inaccurate (i.e., as specifications not matching drawings; working drawing pages not meshing with other pages; detail notations that lead nowhere; cross-sections/specifications taken from boiler-plate books circa 1890; structural elements held up by "magic"... and much more).
Only the architectural pages - A growing favorite, with no reference as to how electrical, HVAC, plumbing or equipment will fall into place. (Phone call: "Oh," comes the reply, "we're gonna 'design-build those aspects". Uh huh.) "Renderings" (as 1 call them) of what the designer wants the project to eventually (kinda) look like; hardly more than outlines with little or no detail, often on 8-1/2 x 11 paper or napkins.
There really is a difference between building teams and those differences do translate into money.
And yet, with all this variation, we still bid on and even take these jobs because of (say it with me):
Market Competitiveness - How competitive is this bid going to be? Are there three bidders? Six? Twenty-eight. True note: I actually bid and then attended an open letting with twenty-eight bidders. Now ask yourself, "Would you really want to be the low bid out of twenty-eight bids?" I thought so. But the number and quality of your competitors can affect your thinking and often play a role in determining that final proposed margin.
Your Own Need for Work Almost any contractor will admit that there have been leaner times when the only important thing to do at the time was to sacrifice margin in order to get the work and keep crews and staff loyal and busy. And I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. If it's applied wisely, it can be
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February 2004
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