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Reading the competitor's bid before writing your own

Before pricing a big office campus bid, I had the team reverse-engineer a rival's structure to set a realistic labor range.

LIEF's Strata partners had three bids to turn around in the same week. One was a big office campus job, and word reached us that a general contractor from out of state, with no local crews, had already entered a competing bid.

Before I priced our number, I had the team reverse-engineer how that rival bid was built, where it ran high, where it ran low, and the reasons. I did not want to quote blind.

A competitor's number tells its own story. A shop that bids drywall high so its labor figure can look low, with neither in-house crews nor a local presence, is pricing on hope and not on capacity. That gap is where our own crews had the advantage, and it gave us a realistic range for our labor number in place of a guess.

That week we put the two live bids first, built around a target range taken from the competitor's own figures. Read the other bid before you write yours, because the shape of someone's price shows where they are weak. This is judgment with partial information. You read what a stranger's number is guarding, and whether the confidence behind it is real or performed.

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