The Steel Erector's Playbook

Issue No. 04

A bid invite hit my inbox last week. Multi-story mid-rise. Downtown Chicago. Decent tonnage. Mid-tier developer.

I passed in ten minutes.

Three years ago I would have spent two days on that takeoff and gone in aggressive to win it. Now I preview the plans, run it against our criteria, and pass in ten minutes.

Here's what changed.

We sat down and studied our completed projects. The winners. The losers. The ones that paid and the ones that bled.

A pattern jumped out fast.

The multi-story buildings inside city limits were the worst performers in our portfolio. Tight logistics. No laydown. Tough union red tape. Heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic killing our crane picks. Every one of those jobs ate hours we didn't price for.

The wins were a different animal entirely. Suburban industrial. Schools on summer breaks. Open lots with crane access. Single-fabricator coordination. The pattern was so clear it almost embarrassed me — I'd been chasing the wrong work for years.

That's when we built the scorecard.

We score every bid 1 to 5 across 10 criteria — total out of 50. For that Chicago mid-rise, here's where it died:

The total didn't crack 20. The math confirmed what my gut already knew.

Now here's the part most owners get wrong about the number.

A low score doesn't always mean walk. It means pass or premium.

If the relationship's there — a GC or fabricator who's paid us right for years — we'll still bid a low-scoring job. But we build the risk into the price. We don't sharpen the pencil and hope. We charge for the exposure the scorecard is showing us.

What you never do is bid a weak job at a thin number and pray it works out. Hope is not a system. The score is telling you something — your job is to listen to it. Either you walk, or you make the risk pay.

And here's the other half most owners miss:

They score the bid after they've already spent ten hours on it. By then they're emotionally invested. They've talked to the GC. They've started planning the schedule. They want to win it.

You can't make a clean call once you're already in.

Score every bid in the first ten minutes — before you commit a single estimating hour. That's the whole point of filtering early: your best estimating effort goes to the jobs that actually fit your operation.

Your sweet spot is hiding in your last 20 completed jobs. Pull the records. Compare estimated hours to actual hours. Look at margin by project type, by GC, by location. The pattern is there. You just have to be honest enough to see it.

That's what made the difference for us.

— Dino

One field-tested system per week to protect profit, reduce chaos, and build a business that runs without you.

DinoDePasquale.com

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