How do you estimate the impact of design changes or variations on your costs?

Understanding your clients and their personalities, as well as networking with professionals who have made mistakes to learn from is also beneficial.

Well, changes are not something easy to work with, but if you face it with good will and be bold to overcome the challenge, you might come out with new estimates, and rearrange old estimates. First thing to do, is to understand what is changing and what are the impacts of the present scope, for an example: let's suppose that the architect decide to remove a column from a project (I know, the long debate between engineers and architects...). Well, you will study the possibility of doing so. Then, you come out with a green flag, but, you have to reinforce nearby beams, slabs and other elements that was correlated with the support that specific column. Well, now you know what you have to measure to come with new costs of this change.

Certainly, after you've got your new estimates from that change. Second to do, is to compare these new costs with the base estimate, previously done with the previous scope. A good thing to do is to come with percentages of the change, and their currents values, so the project team may evaluate the extend and the cost of that change.

Direct costs are easily done by skilled estimators. But the different between a quality estimate, and a inaccurate estimate, relies on the indirect costs, those costs that are difficult to measure, but are always present by the time the payments are done. Indirect costs might come as taxes (mostly related to taxes over services industry), fees that were not considered such as inspection license fees, environmental, social and governance fees, IRS fees, insurances, freight services from documentation diligences, etc.)

Including a contingency and a markup to your estimate will secure the financial health of your project, but it comes with the possibility to overprice your project, and get rejected by the client if they found another with a "fair price". So by doing that, make sure you highlight phases in your project that are more likely to have uncertainties, activities of high risk that you have to create a contingency plan if it comes out of handle. Therefore, you can focus what items should be markup and what contingencies might be add in determined phases, by doing that, you will certainly hold a financial health for you project, without losing competitive prices over the market.

Well, here is where you ability as a salesperson must get into action. As in a field of engineering, specially civil, clients want their project to bring security, liability, stability and sometimes longevity. Therefore, present to you client where these characteristics can be found in the project, and the cost and time associate with them. Being clear and concise about theses characteristics, the client will know he is good hands, and it will listen to your price offer.

Change orders- a critical part of a job. Changes can come up at inopportune times forcing the GC and contractor to negotiate informally. Always be sure tk document the who, what, where, when, why... Who gave the direction, what is the task, where is it to be performed, what is the required time frame, what is the reason for the change., i.e, Scope gap, directed change. In these scenarios I've been successful in collecting because I follow these simple steps! When you're given the execution order, reply via email with your pricing, scope, and restate the direction. Now when you are challenged with the cost of the change order, you have what you need to justify the work, and you show acknowledgement of the costs from the project owner.