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Narrowing the bid on purpose, then catching my own math error

A Filiberto's bid built off three sheets got cut to shell labor, and then I caught two mistakes of my own.

The first bid for a new Filiberto's location went out as a complete general contractor number, built from a plan set of just three sheets with no structural or mechanical drawings behind it. I decided that was more than I could stand behind.

I reset the scope to shell labor only: slab, footings, wall installation labor and structural coating. Material passed through to the owner, and everything else was named and excluded. I held the full turnkey number back until we had the full plan set and had walked the site.

A turnkey figure off three sheets was overreach to stand behind. Narrowing to what I could estimate with confidence protected the accuracy and kept the deal moving. It beat declining the job, and it beat guessing at a number I could not defend.

The narrowed bid shipped, but its cover sheet miscalculated overhead, tax and profit and printed the wrong total. The next revision caught and fixed it. A second revision then wrongly left the roof out of scope, and the revision after that fixed it.

Narrowing a bid to protect the number is the right instinct, but it does not make you immune to a math error. Check your math the way you checked your scope. Two real mistakes made it into successive drafts, and both were caught in the normal course of revising. That was no crisis. It was the work.

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