What Bid Results Tracking Is And Why It's so Important.

speaker 0:   0:00
way. Welcome to the six figure Trading Podcast Season one Episode seven What is results, tracking and why Is it important? Hi, I am your host. Jamie Henry, creator of the estimating Business in a box. My question for you today is this. Are you tracking all of your post good results? Do you know this one? Changing your bid strategy can set you apart from everyone else in the industry. So you ask what our bid results. What has been tracking It's really simple. It's very often underutilized, though it's the absolute, most powerful tool in your toolbox for every commercial project. That's your bidding. You should be doing this because if you're not, you're gonna be missing out on an opportunity where you could see how you could beat your competition. Kind of get a feel for why you're probably losing so many projects. A lot of guys don't have to do this. Some guys don't and some of the guys that even know how to do it there just over time. I don't know. We can't get, uh, I don't want to say we get lazy, but we get laxed and so we're a little less apt to keep up on these sort of things because it is a little bit of work. You know what been tracking consist of every time that you send out a bid. Say, let's see you do your bidding a big commercial project. And let's say you said that bid out five or six or maybe even 10 different contractors. Now, what you've gotta do about two days after that bid one out, you've got to contact all those contractors. You sent that bit too, and ask them for a post bid result list because a lot of guys would give it to you Most. The contractors want you to have it. You know, one of the ways you can ask him for that information is to let him know you want to provide the absolute best chance at winning every project for them. So in order to do that, you need to be competitive and to be competitive, you can I need to know where you land among your competition. And if they would please, for that information to you so you could do better on the next project to hopefully be a little more competitive for them. Ah, lot of times, they'll understand that. They'll say, OK, I'll give you the results now. A lot of times they'll give you the results, but they may not give you who the results are with so they might have your bid and four of your competitors. And sometimes they'll tell you exactly what every competitors name was and what their bid amount waas. And when they do, that's the gold. You can't beat that. This information that is so vital to your next bid you should be. You should be getting every one of those that you can and putting them in a spreadsheet or some software. There is software that will analyze this data for you so that you can figure out how you can feature competition. Sometimes they won't do that. Sometimes the guy will simply send you back a bid list. Abid result. This says Okay, there were 12 bidders and you were number six and the low bid was 1.2 million and the high bid was 3.4 million. Now, granted, that's not really the information You're looking for it That's not gonna help you a whole lot, except that you do know what your bid about Waas. You know what the low bid was? You know what? The highest bid waas. So you can kind of guess where you're at in that range of those 12 bidders? Not exactly, but a good guess. And that's better than nothing. That's better than no results at all. Because if you just keep putting out bid after bid after bid and you just keep talking with wall to see what sticks, you're never gonna get the results we're looking for. You can't do it because if you don't know your past history, you're gonna repeat your past history because you can't change what you don't know. So make sure you get those you know, once you get that information put into a spreadsheet, um, if you put every single job that you've been in a spreadsheet with your bid total, and then leave a few cells between jobs so that you can go and get those results on every single project and you can put it if you've got the competition's name, you can put their name under yours. And if you've got their bid amount, you can put that right next to their name and if you do this for everybody that bid that project, You know, if you can do this on every single project, I can almost guarantee you that over time you can almost figure out what they're bidding. Strategy is you could almost figure out because we all know the raw material is the same. So a raw material costs on a project isn't gonna change that much. You know, depending on what databases were using and how we calculate the job cost, there'll be a small variation, but raw materials will pretty much always be the same. So the only other factor is gonna be labor units. How many labor units They figured, how the hours they've put on this project again if they're using some sort of a national database system like P H, C. C for plumbing, or maybe smack the standards labor units for sheet metal HBC projects that they should be pretty much exactly the same because if we're all counting the material correctly, our numbers should match because we're all looking at the same blueprint. So the only other biggest factor beyond that is gonna be added cost. You know, the amount they put in for their permits, their project management, how much they're allowing for blueprint drafting miscellaneous costs. You know, any overtures, these types of things that we fluff into every bit, And so that part you really can never figure that out. But you can get a percentage idea for each bid. Once you've got that percentage idea for each bid, you can deduct or add to yours accordingly to make sure you could beat their numbers and it's against complex. I've created a whole course on that. If you ever want to get really in depth with this and you really want to know all the ins and outs and I've got some templates in there and a lot more data that more than this podcast can could get into at the six figure tradesmen dot com, you can go find that. But you know, the reason is gonna help you win is because by knowing what their numbers are consistently, you could find a percentage of what their bid is against yours. And so once you've got that percentage, you know you can pretty much doubt he's in on every project that you ever wanna win almost at will and Here's the other thing. If they're doing the same thing life it should be. And I can assure you some of them are, if not most of them. They're doing the same thing to you, so you've got to try to find a bid pattern of your own. That kind of keeps them guessing. And, you know, over time you'll figure out what that ISS. But they're gonna do the same thing that you're doing because they want to beat you, too. So once you've got a gun, each other figured out, there's going to come to Cat Mouse. If who really wants the job more than the other. And he's willing to go for the smallest profit margin. You know, it's often said the guy that made the most mistakes on the bid is probably the guy that's gonna win, and I can't tell you that that's more often than not. That's true. It does happen. Guys make mistakes. They become the winning bid because they're lower than everybody else, but not because there are better estimator. Sometimes it's just because they made a few more mistakes or miscalculated something, and it did it differently. So nine times out of 10 though if you track your results, you could become the winner. Almost almost every project. You know, I I said this in the beginning that this is for commercial, and mostly it kind of is. But you can do this for residential, too. It's a little more work. And it's also more of a personal favor that you're asking from homeowners because, you know, on the residential world, you don't deal with the general contractor. You will. You do with a homeowner. But I've worked. I've worked for other companies, and for my own, I would often go back. And if I didn't get the job, I would ask the homeowner if they would mind telling me why I didn't get the job, you know? Wasn't my price. Um, wasn't the warranty, was it? The promise of service wasn't the money. You just never know. But you gotta ask if you don't ask those questions. How are you going to adapt? How are you going to change? How can you figure out what you can do next time to try to get the win? You can always try to be the low guy. Okay. Bye. Always trying to be the low bid. The only thing you're going to do is not have as much money at the end of the day and drive the industry down. That really isn't the right solution. Um, sometimes you need to figure out how to convince the customer or the G C or whoever you're dealing with. Sometimes you gotta be more persuasive in convincing them why even though you may have a little bit more price, it's a better value. Because at the end of the day, we can, all by the same equipment we could all put in the same hours to do the project. The only thing you're gonna offer them that nobody else can is your service. So if you don't have something there to to offer them beyond price point, you're pretty much gonna You're not gonna have much of a chance in the industry anyway. So it doesn't matter if your residential or commercial if you just want to be like every other Joe Schmo out there, you know, go right ahead. But don't expect his results. You know, if you want to be one of the top dogs, you want to be one of the big performers. You got to do this with the professional way. And that is to, you know, track those results and figure out why you're not winning jobs. If it always comes down to money, you may have to lower your price a little bit. You know, in a lot of commercial projects, often it is about the money. But I have had many clients whose bids were actually more than the low bid, and they actually got the project because they were more qualified. Don't assume just because you're the lowest bid you get the job is how you present the bid, how you present your company and your service. That's gonna dictate the real winner here by going back and getting this big results when you're dealing with GCS. Anyway, this is gonna have a long term effect because they're gonna come to realize that first of all, you know what the hell you're talking about. You know the industry, you know how this works, and you're smart enough to come back to them and ask for this information, and so that's gonna have a little bit more of a favorable outlook on you. They're going to think Well, this guy really seems to know shit. He cares more. He's asking the right questions. So even though he hasn't won a job with us, you know, in the future you might think I should probably look a little harder. These guys, they really seem to have it together. And nothing of GC hates more than somebody who, uh, just doesn't really understand the business through in OK, I can't tell you how many jobs I've seen. The guy gets a job and he gets out there and he's in over his head. He doesn't know how to project manage. He doesn't know how to do the paperwork. He doesn't have to do some middles. There's a whole. There's a whole process here in the construction world, especially commercial, that if you make the life harder, McGee see, he's probably gonna turn you down. If the next guy's just a few 100 bucks for a couple 1000 bucks more than you, who knows how to properly manage the process because his money is on the line, if you're holding him up, then he's not gonna be too appreciative that so you know, you got to kind of understand the process of how this all works and being responsible enough to ask for your big results is a really big wind for you in the G. C. Because it makes him understand that you know what you're doing. I actually had a client. They had never, never done bad results. And so they were saying, Well, you know, we can't seem to win anything, and I know it's because we're always gonna be down a price. So it was kind of a little case study. I said, Hey, look, why don't you let me? I know it may charge extra, but why don't you let me try to get some big results on the next few jobs and let's figure out what's going on? And so I did, and I come to find out Yeah, a lot of it was the price. We're usually just a little bit high, but the second part of it was there was a couple of times these guys actually had one, and they were getting the process of getting the contract signed. And But there was just too many things that the contractor didn't know when dealing with the G. C. You know, the GC would ask questions and they would be a deer in the headlight. Didn't have an answer for him. And so before the paperwork was ever signed, they actually decided to go with another contractor. I found this all out, actually buy. I kind of do the contractor I was dealing with for them. So I had kind of, you know, used back to her methods to get to ask some more personal questions about why they didn't like this this guy's numbers. But that was the bottom line. It wasn't that the number wasn't good. It wasn't that they they didn't like the guy. They just didn't want to deal with the guy that didn't know how to, uh, how the business works. So, you know, if you're new to them, if you're new to the commercial world, especially, you've gotta understand how it really works. If you don't know how it works, before you go bidding the projects, get in and hang out with the general contractors, go talkto hang out in their office, go see him, ask the questions. You know, you're gonna you're gonna look like you probably don't know what you're doing too much. If you ask those questions before you ever submit a bit, right? They're gonna understand. You don't know you're new. You're you're trying to go from residential commercial, and you're not gonna feel real secure in that world. But let me tell you something. If you do it now, before you try to start bidding the projects and let the GC no straight up, I'm new. I did a lot of residential work. I want to get into commercial, but I want to do it right, and I'd like to bend to you in the future. But I want to make sure, you know, we can work cohesively together and I don't hold you up or I don't make you look bad. So I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions before I ever been to First Project. And I'm hoping you could be kind enough to give me some answers and insight on how this works because I really don't know what I don't want to act like I know something I don't. That conversation right there has just made you a very favorable prospect to that GC nine times out of 10 you know, there's always that one asshole that doesn't care. He just thinks you're an idiot. He'll never deal with you because you came to him this way. But who cares about that one? If you get a night out of 10 that are willing to sit down with you and help you before you ever go through the process, aren't you going to feel a lot more confident once you start going down that process of bidding commercial projects so that when you get that win, you know what to do with it? This is a little off course with that bitch tracking, but it's just something I want to touch base with because a lot of guys, they want to know why they're not winning jobs and bit tracking is a big, big way to find out why you're not wedding. Okay, so this kind of ties in. But don't always assume bid tracking is about the number. Because if you don't ask the right questions when you're doing been tracking, you still don't get the answers you're looking for. You can't just ask him, you know? Was my number low was my number in the middle. You gotta ask the right questions. You gotta ask him in death questions, you know, was our Was our paperwork submitted properly? Did you understand? Our proposal wasn't cohesive, that it seemed to match the project the way you saw it. These little things these little details are not little to the GC. He's not gonna be left holding the bag for you. So when you do your results tracking, make sure you get this info, take the notes, and then when you get what you're looking for from take the time to say thank you, let him know you really appreciate it. Let him not the end of the day. You're asking these questions to make it better for them and not just you. It's not all about you. You want to look out for their best interests that they feel like you have their interests in mind. They're gonna be very, very, very happy to accommodate you. I can promise you that, but don't forget, this isn't just commercial. You could do this residential. He too. Um, you gotta go back to the homeowner and you gotta ask him, you know, why didn't I get it? Is that prices a service? And it's a little more work and not all the homeowners air is apt to give you the information. Sometimes the homeowners already got what they want. They already found their contractor. They already hired him here and put the new furnace in. They don't give a shit about you anymore because you're not the one that worked with So don't feel bad if they won't tell you. But feel bad if you don't ask, you know it's the squeaky wheel gets the grease And if you're never squeak, you're never gonna get what you need So glad there and ask him Let him tell, you know, no big deal. And if you can't get it, move on and try to take your best guess and why you didn't get it And record your best guess that why you didn't get it cause you've got external elements. When you bid every project, they give you some insight as to why you didn't bid one advantage you might have. Let's say on the day you were there, given this homeowner a proposal when you pulled up, you've seen X y Z heating pulling away from their front door. Okay, you should have made a know that you should have noted in your notebook on this customer's notes. X y Z was there before you place in a bit, and then when you're done, or even before you're done, let's say Acme heating and cooling shows up. They're there to do a bit too again. If you're being diligent, you're gonna write this down as you can. Remember that. And at the end of the day, when you get done getting your bid results, if you get him, even if they don't tell you the companies that they went with it, who the hell they got bits from? At least you know 30 you know the guy before you, you and the guy after you and I can't tell you how many times when I was in the heating business I would pull up to a house and see another heating company pulling away or one pulling in behind me. Because homeowners, typically, we'll schedule these quotes to be done within about a two hour window back to back. That's pretty common. So, you know, do your homework, hang out for a second, pay attention as you're going down the road, look to see if you pass another competitors van and assume he's going to your house. Assume he's going where you just left and make a note of that so that, you know, even if you don't get the job, you know, even feel. Get any data from the homeowner. If you've done this 50 damn times and you see Acme has been there 50 times with you, you know that that's one of your top competitors. So you've got to try to figure out how you can knock out the competitors that you're always competed against. And if you don't know who they are, you can't call the strategy. So you know, this isn't just for the commercial world. You should also do this for residential. So, you know, that's pretty much it for this one. I do have a task I want you to complete. I do want you to create a list of the past five bids that you've done. Commercial residential doesn't matter right down the last five bids that you've done and not your company, is a holy. Maybe you've got other estimators in your staff. You you personally, if you personally haven't done any that hand this off to one of your estimators, but go down and track down those last five and put them into a spreadsheet. You could start to analyze these over time and make it a new habit that every time you do a job, commercial or residential 1 to 2 days, go back and try to get those big results. You know, make sure yet create yourself a template of questions that you always want to ask, so that you're making sure you're always asking the right things and then keep track of this information that we're willing to give you back. And over time, I can assure you you can find a way to create a winning strategy from, and I guarantee you that over time you'll find a way to beat your competition with the better strategy. I don't have any doubt. I've been there. I've done it. I've seen many, many, many other people do this. So if you need more templates or if you need more in depth trading on the subject, you know, please go ahead and check out my six figure tradesmen dot com website and glide and find my one line course on how to increase your winds through been tracking. I've got a whole course on that. There's some templates and some workbooks ago. There's a lot information you get with it. Feel free to check that out and hopefully I'll see you in our next episode. We're gonna talk about option for today's estimating software, so there's a lot of different software out there. I don't care what business you're in hating, plumbing, electric, and I know these reasons, their software for landscapers and concrete guys, whatever you're in, there's There's online estimating software for that. I wanna have a little discussion about what some of these software options could bring to the table that you may or may not need. Sometimes you might just over pay get all the bells and whistles you don't really want. Sometimes you might under pay and leave something behind that you really could have benefited from. So well, Dio would do a little bit of an end up discussion on those and kind of give you a run through. Almost some of those are I want to thank you for listening, and I hope I was able to teach you something new today. You know, even if I didn't teach you something new. I hope I inspired you. Or maybe I just reminded you of something you already knew. And now you'll be able to begin to implement that. So I'm Jamie Henry, creator of the estimating Business in a box. Be sure to leave any suggestions or input that you might have. I love hearing from all of you so I could make this podcast the best it can be. We'll see you tomorrow, and we'll talk about those options for estimating software.