Notwithstanding the tremendous upheaval in the construction industry due to COVID, you still need to bid work. While the advent of BIM and the many, many computer-based estimating programs now available make the process faster and, in many cases, more accurate, the actual process of estimating has not changed very much.
While you can add “assemblies” at the click of a mouse that are itemized, priced and ready for the supplier to order or “see” how your piping will install, and where, through BIM, the estimator still has to know what he is looking at and how it will play out in both material and labor costs in the real world.
Accuracy in estimating, above all else, is imperative. This is especially true in the current bidding climate. My editor’s column in the November issue detailed the fact that many projects have been canceled while still on the architect’s drawing board, while others that were “in progress”’ have been halted... many never to start again.
According to the Associated Builders and Contractors association, this condition now exists across the board in our industry. The available work open to bid has shrunk. The bidding opportunities have disappeared and no one knows when, or if, the industry will ever recover to anywhere near where it was pre-COVID.
What to do? Well, curling up in the fetal position and sucking your thumb is one solution... not that anyone who has made a business in our trade would even consider surrendering like that. Another alternative is to improvise, adapt and overcome... the more likely route many will take.
We are going to lose a lot of shops in the next few years. Not speculation, but fact. The contraction of the economy will take its toll as it always has in times past. New companies that started on a shoestring and hope in the future, will find themselves on the outside looking in.
Small service work, the mainstay of many small startup shops, is morphing. There are already big changes in how service calls are generated and handled as people spend more time at home and use the digital connections they have come to rely on to find, schedule and pay for service work.
That makes what new and remodel work there is more competitive, and the small start-up shops are forced to bid against the more established shops for the available work.
Estimating then, even at that level, becomes even more important to all concerned. While new estimating programs can actually provide an advantage to the small shops by allowing even the little guys to turn out more estimates that are on a par with what the larger shops produce, the level of experience of the estimator is what will be the determining factor.
Unless the estimator has the knowledge and experience to “see” a job from start to finish and to know, for example, that a particular specification can be interpreted in a different, and less costly way, the ability to simply put numbers in a column won’t matter. That is where the small startup shops are at a disadvantage.
As stated above, estimating accuracy in today’s business climate is one of, if not the, most critical areas moving into the near future. Using the digital tools to produce a detailed and easily understandable estimate is a great leap forward in speed and mathematical accuracy, but knowing how to estimate is still the single greatest advantage a company can have.
Missing simple things in a takeoff, no matter how “cool” the digital program is, can still make your estimate nothing more than an elaborate waste of time. Whoever does your estimating had better know the trade inside and out. Even then, missing important notes on drawings or miscounting fixtures or equipment can cut a potential profit into a break even proposition… or a loss.
It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that all of these new digital tools brought to bear in producing an estimate amount to nothing if the person doing the estimate does not fully grasp the scope of the work. It certainly helps, although it is by no means a panacea, if the estimator has actual field experience. Sometimes, having “been there, done that” translates to an insight otherwise not available to someone who has never been in the field.
Estimating is such a critical part of any contracting business that it surprises me how it is often relegated to a second tier when planning projects. That is, until the estimator misses something or miscounts.
I think that we can all agree the construction world looks different, post-COVID, than anything we have seen before. How we approach this “brave new world” will be the determining factor as to who survives and thrives and who becomes an asterisk or a footnote. That goes for the big guys as well as the small startups.
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a third-generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].