How to win a bid job, that you desperately need.

When we first started our little trucking outfit, things could not have been worse.  It was 19981 and the Canadian oil companies were in lockdown and reverse from the energy crisis.  There really was little or no work.  I remember going door to door looking for anything.  We had a one ton winch truck, a 30 ft single axle trailer, and a pick up.  We were a hot shot outfit trying to survive.  I wasn't a bad salesman, as I get along with most everyone; and enjoy hearing their story; and everyone's got a story.  If I made 25 sales calls in a day I usually got a job out of it.  Maybe not much of a job but a job.  So I kept up the sales, split the city into quadrants, and kept notes on where I'd been, who I spoke to, and their reaction.  

Pretty soon my uncle and I were busy; we found some companies that appreciated our can do attitude and the good service.  

These 3 things, Sales, a good attitude, and great service are still things we focus on.  But we're not a one truck pony anymore; we are competing with large consortiums, biding against massive trucking companies, at times international crane companies that can field resources far beyond our capabilities.  

So how do we compete against these juggernaughts.  Pricing is not a big secret.  Everyone has a fairly good idea what the other guy is charging.  BUT a couple months job, multiple units required; that's a bid and things can change a lot as soon as one starts talking long term work.

We have one of these quotes sitting on our desks right now.  A crane or large boom truck job, 3 to 6 months on site, 3 to 10 cranes required; light work, but long reaches.  Roof and wall sections.  The perfect job for a fleet of boom trucks.  We wanted this work badly.

We spoke on the phone several times to the project managers and the job grew  larger, and more unlikely with every conversation.   

There were 10 buildings, some of which they wanted 3 cranes working on;  all seemed to be different heights, various widths; others had 2 or 3 tiers or climbing roofs, inset walls,  The conversations were getting awkward; there was just too much we did not know.  We went to see them in person and got a chance to see  some of the detailed plans.  We returned to the office and using the building dimensions we had been told and the info we had pulled from the stack of plans; we worked on the lifting plans.

One of the buildings was a towering monster that our units could barely reach the top, and had no chance of landing any of the roofing material.  This was not a fight we wanted to start, or an ordeal we wanted to put our customer thru.  

Do the work you are good at, that you have confidence your equipment can handle.  Your customer will appreciate the reality and the candor.  We told our principle to find another vendor with a large crane; that we would rather not work on that particular structure.

There were 9 other structures, and we quickly realized we had to commit our largest, longest, and unfortunately busiest crane, for this entire job.  That wan't going to work. We had worked too hard to diversify our work, combed the city, the oilpatch, the industrial world, and the internet to shut out our many clients; even for a great job.

We needed another crane, and brother these American built boom trucks, sitting on American trucks, all priced in American dollars, are a ton of cash.  No matter how tight a relationship one has with dealers, and we are Tight.  (I know them all),  with the Canadian dollar in such sad shape, these units are grossly overpriced.   But we could try.

 First we needed to get a better understanding of exactly what these structures looked like and the crane needs each one demanded.

We phoned and very simply laid out our plans, they wanted to hear some rates and we had a pretty good idea what they were going to be, so we laid that out; and the informal conversation made everyone a little more comfortable.  We needed more data on these buildings.  The actual plans were offered to us.  Perfect,  We got the plans, and printed out these extra long over legal monsters.  9 sets, 15 pages each, It was a daunting pile.

We combed thru the plans; and large as they were; some of the details were so tiny we needed magnifying glasses.  It was a quite a search, I ended up taking them home.  But we found the dimensions and the layouts we needed.  All the measurements, were there, each elevation, all sides, and walls.  This was what we needed.  But just to be sure we drew each building to scale and placed our cranes against these measurements.  Suddenly we knew the maximum crane requirements for each building and there was  a LOT of difference.

 We realized there were 3 major groupings of buildings, 3 of 9 required the big stick, 155 ft plus a jib.   2 of the 9 weren`t so demanding but still needed 124 ft of boom.  The last 4 were slightly smaller and only required 110 ft of boom.  This was great news and we had these other cranes in our fleet.

But there was still the matter of acquiring another boom truck.  The project people had plans to hire other cranes, how many 'other' cranes?  How long are we going to be up there.  How many of our cranes can we spare?  

We thought hard on this, cash is limited, we own 5 large boom trucks; and in our mind we were going to commit 3 to this project.  We buy one more, that means we are sending 2 of ours and the new one to site.  Another prickly detail, we couldn't afford to dump a lot of our cash into a down payment.  We needed to trade in an older unit of ours.  But that leaves us with only 2 units left in town.  That`s not enough.  

Time to get a little creative.  We know the dealers well, and their yards were full of equipment.  They were anxious to sell.  We floated the idea of trading in our unit, on the new machine; but they let us KEEP our trade in, until the job was over.  They didn`t blink; said they were very flexible and could probably work that out...........  OK!!!

We wanted to assure ourselves about the total work involved in each structure.  We know the crane required, but how long is this going to take?  We went back to the plans and found the square meters of the floor and the walls.  If we used the floor area for approx roof dimensions we would be close, We took these two figures, roof and walls,  and transposed them into square footage, because I can`t think in square metres,  We also knew the dimensions of the pieces we were lifting.  (in sq ft),  And then we knew how many lifts we had for each structure.  

Experience is so valuable in these quotes, I checked with our operators about how many lifts a day they were doing on similar jobs.  Using those totals we could get a rough idea how many days in a perfect world it would take to construct each building.   For 3 cranes it was about 3 months.  That would be good; a solid step in paying off a valuable and useful new crane.  But there were going to be more than 3 cranes,  What if there were 6, 7, 8.  And our customer is not there to make us money, he has to concentrate on keeping to his clients schedule, and when the job`s done, Its done.

We put our numbers in but we added a clause that if we were to be chosen to participate; we need to be first on site and would like to be the last to leave.

As we studied the tentative and by then redundant, start, and build dates of the various structures,  we understood that only 2 cranes were slated for at least 6 of the buildings.  Many of the buildings were the smaller ones.  We realized if our crews are released from a three crane build, we could pair a large crane and a medium, for the smaller buildings, send one of our medium cranes up; and supply 2 complete crews without hurting our fleet or our manpower.  We put that in the quote.

We went over in person to present this quote.  We pulled out each wad of plans.  We had them separated into groups of the largest boom required, with the scale drawing of each one to back up the numbers.   They thought about that.

Then we showed the figures we pulled from each one about the roof and floor footage.  This was right down their alley as these were the figures they had wrestled with themselves.  

Whether we were right in our evaluations or not; we showed our customer the work and thought we had committed to his project.  Many of the calculations you had to assume were ones they had sliced and diced themselves trying to put their own build package together.  So even if our figures were wrong it was a journey of interest for them.  And we learned a lot in the process

Finally we laid out our rates, trying to cover the inevitable problems, of billing out time and situations for things that are NOT covered  in the contract.  The early in and late out seemed to be fine.  We gave them some good numbers, good for us and`` them` and our people would love the OT.  We are confident we will be one of the participants in this project, but the scheduling is a huge worry.  If they demand 10 cranes and everything done inside a month; that could be painful.  Cèst la guerre. We are expecting word today actually.

That word never came, we waited a week, then another, and another.  Our dealers, threw bid packages at us left and right, brought cranes over to demo, We were knee deep in quotes, and as we waited for our own proposal to be evaluated, the deals sweetened.  

Our bank totals had been holding, and we started to see better  cash flows, a bit more profit.  The more we looked at the equipment, the deals, the trade in dollars, the value of up grading; [and we realized it was a large Up grade,] the more we wanted the new units.  We weren't really adding equipment, just replacing.

We bought 2 great new units.

Then we lost the job. OUR customer liked our number, we thought we were IN.  But there were cranes already on site; and a site decision has to be respected.

As we sit here, approx 2 weeks into what would have been start up; all our people, including the new cranes. and the operators we hired to help us; are all out.  

It's hard to complain when we are relatively successful in tough times,but I still wish we had got that job.  On the plus side, it wasn't a complete loss, our customer has more confidence in us than he ever had before, just from a little research and some thought.