Not All Solutions Are Sexy: How I Doubled Bid Conversions by Fixing the 1 Simple Problem
We went from winning 1.5 bids out of 10 to 3 out of 10, without adding a single hour to anyone's week. The fix was two changes that everybody thought were stupid at the time.
Neither one was clever. That's kind of the point.
I sign NDAs with employers and clients, so I can't name names. What I can tell you is that this happened at one of the largest electrical contractors in the Denver metro area.
The owner wanted to grow from a multi-million-dollar electrical contractor into a multi-hundred-million-dollar powerhouse. He invested in training and gave me the green light to start and run a couple of internal think tanks to figure out why we kept missing our estimates.
Operations blamed estimating. Estimating blamed operations. Everybody pointed fingers, and nobody had time to actually solve it.
So I dug in.
The estimating audit
At the time, I was an assistant project manager. My first instinct was that the problem had to be in estimating, and I said so out loud.
The lead estimator called my bluff: "Estimate a project, win the bid, and then go manage it yourself."
Challenge accepted.
Within weeks I understood how brutal the estimating process actually is.
Deadlines so tight there's no time to research anything
Information that's incomplete on arrival
Spotty coordination between trades
Moments where you put a number down and pray you didn't miss something
I did it anyway. I bid two major projects, one over $12 million, and won one of them.
I got lucky, and I knew it. At our conversion rate, winning one should have taken closer to seven bids. I got it in two.
That's when I learned the actual truth. The problem wasn't estimating. It was the whole system.
Then I had to go build it
Once the project kicked off, I found holes in my own budget inside the first month. I'd missed things because the information wasn't there when I needed it.
When you're managing a job, you can slow down and ask. You submit an RFI, you wait for an answer, you negotiate a change order. Hopefully.
When you're bidding, you don't get that. By the time you figure out the right question, the deadline to ask questions has already passed.
The design team's favorite line was, "The intent was evident at the time of bid." Which translates to: you missed it, now it's your problem, sucka.
(Look, I've never met an architect who said it that way. Engineers, though? They pronounce the r very clearly.)
Here's the lesson that stuck with me, and I've seen it hold true in every company since: inefficiency isn't about effort. It's about missing connections under time constraints.
Nobody at that company was lazy. Everybody was working hard on the wrong side of a gap.
The two unsexy changes
My senior project manager, the lead estimator, and I proposed two things:
1. Assign one estimator to do nothing but read and document all the notes and issue early questions. Not estimate. Read. Their entire job on a bid was to find the gaps while there was still time to ask about them.
2. Require vendors to submit preliminary cut sheets with their quotes on engineered items like gear and lighting. So we knew what we were actually pricing instead of assuming.
At the time, both ideas were treated as radical. Vendors balked. Estimators rolled their eyes at me.
Today it's close to industry standard.
What changed
Bid conversion went from 1.5 in 10 to 3 in 10. Same team, same hours.
And the second-order effect mattered more than the first. When you're winning three out of ten instead of one and a half, you stop chasing every project that comes across the desk. You get to choose. On multi-million-dollar work, that's an enormous shift in leverage.
We also delivered those jobs with fewer surprises, better coordination, and higher margins, because the questions had been asked early instead of discovered in the field.
All from a couple of small changes that connected the right people to the right information in time to matter.
How to run this in a smaller shop
You probably don't have an estimator to dedicate to reading notes. You might not have an estimator at all. The principle still works, scaled down:
Separate reading from pricing. Whoever reads the specs and drawings for gaps shouldn't be the same person racing the clock to put numbers together. Even if that means one person does it on Monday and the other job on Wednesday, put a wall between the two tasks.
Put your questions in early, in writing. Most contractors sit on questions until they've finished pricing, by which point the RFI window has closed. Ask on day two, not day nine.
Make vendors show their work. Ask for cut sheets or a clear scope letter with every quote on engineered items. Half the misses in a bid come from assuming two quotes covered the same thing.
Track your hit rate. You can't fix a conversion rate you've never measured. Count your bids and your wins for six months. If you're under 2 in 10 on work you're genuinely qualified for, something upstream is broken, and it's almost never the number.
Not all solutions are sexy
Sometimes it isn't a shiny new tool or a trendy process. Sometimes it's a better question, a clearer handoff, or a different conversation between two people who weren't talking.
That's the work I've spent 30 years doing, and it's what I do now for contractors who need that kind of attention without hiring somebody full-time to get it.
Your solutions don't have to be sexy. They just have to work.
FAQs
What's a good bid conversion rate for a subcontractor? It varies a lot by market and work type, but many specialty subs run somewhere between 1 and 3 wins per 10 bids. What matters more than the benchmark is your own trend, and whether you're bidding work you're genuinely positioned to win.
Why do we keep losing bids or missing our estimates? Usually it's not the estimator. It's that the information needed to price the job accurately wasn't available before the question deadline closed. Fixing the front end of the process beats sharpening the numbers at the back end. OR you’ve got inexperienced bidders underbidding you. Don’t worry. They won’t last long at those rates. And… also, don’t worry. You’re going to underbid a job by heart-stopping amounts as well.
How do I improve estimating accuracy without hiring another estimator? Separate the reading from the pricing, MAKE TIME FOR REVIEW—did you hear me yelling that?— and issue your questions early and in writing, and require cut sheets or scope letters from vendors on engineered items. None of it costs money. All of it costs a little discipline.
What is a cut sheet? Manufacturer documentation for a specific piece of equipment, showing what it actually is and what it includes. Getting one with the quote means you're comparing the same scope across vendors instead of guessing.
Frankie Allen spent 30 years in construction, from drafter to journeyman electrician to project manager on residential, commercial, hospital, and federal jobs. Rippling Roots provides fractional assistant project management to contractors in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Western U.S.
