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Sending an unverified bid to a competitor, and owning the mistake

I sent a bid to a competing contractor before reviewing it, and the comparison exposed my own error.

I sent a Kanopi-built bid for a residential addition to a competing general contractor, a referral partner, as a comparison. I had not yet reviewed it myself for errors. The competitor's bid returned lower, and plainly built from numbers my team had sent.

Two things surfaced. My own bid carried a real tax-jurisdiction error. And the competitor had worked off my numbers instead of estimating independently. I fixed my error openly in the rate library and laid the competitor's bid beside mine honestly. I did not quietly send out a cleaned version.

I had not planted any errors. I simply sent a bid before checking it. When you are caught in a mistake, the honest move is to say so plainly, not to act as though the corrected version was always the intended one.

The tax jurisdiction was wrong. The property is outside any incorporated city, so the lower county rate applied instead of the city rate I had assumed. I changed the rate library so every later residential bid checks the county assessor's jurisdiction field first. I also recorded that the competitor's figures were mostly multipliers taken from mine, not an independent estimate.

Say exactly what happened if you are caught in your own mistake. That keeps trust faster than a quiet cleanup. My account was plain: I left no errors in deliberately, I just failed to verify before sending, and I let no more flattering story take its place.

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