Three estimators, 60 percent more bid capacity, and nothing thinner about the work

Three estimators. Between 100 and 200 bids a year. Work that out per person and it is a new tender landing every working day or two, each one a fresh pile of documents nobody has read yet.

That team now carries roughly 60 percent more bid capacity than it could before, with the same three people, and without spending less time on the work that decides the number.

The contractor is not named, at their request. The figures are published with their agreement.

The challenge

• Three estimators against a bid calendar of 100 to 200 jobs a year, roughly one new tender each per working day or two
• About four hours of reading before anyone could say whether a tender was even worth pursuing
• Scope and takeoff preparation consuming the bulk of every bid, leaving the judgment work for whatever time was left

What changed

• The first pass dropped to about ninety minutes, so walking away early stopped being expensive
• Scope and takeoff preparation dropped by about a third
• The same three people now carry roughly 60 percent more bids, at the same depth of review

Why more capacity is usually a bad deal

Any estimating team can bid more jobs. The question is what it costs.

The normal way to raise capacity without hiring is to spend less time per bid, and the time always comes out of the same places. Scope gets a lighter read. Fewer exclusions get chased. More of the number rests on an assumption nobody had time to test. The bids go out faster, the win rate may even hold, and the cost does not surface until a job is running and somebody finds out what was carried.

That trade is so normal it is barely noticed. It is also a bad one, because capacity bought by lowering the bar is not capacity. It is deferred risk, and it arrives later with interest.

Why the confidence held

The reason is in where the hours came from.

None of the savings came out of judgment. No decision moved from a person to a machine. What changed is the work surrounding the decision: opening the documents, reading them, finding what matters, structuring it, and assembling it into something a person can act on. That work is necessary, it is expensive, and almost none of it is what an estimator is actually paid for.

Piper does that layer. The estimator still sets every number, still decides what to carry, still owns the price. They simply reach those decisions with the reading done and the material organised, rather than spending most of the bid getting to the point where the real questions can be asked.

So the review did not get thinner. If anything it got easier to do properly, because the estimator arrives at it with hours left instead of on the last afternoon.

The numbers

About twelve to thirteen estimator hours back per bid, before counting anything manager review gives back. That line is excluded on purpose. There is about an hour of it per bid today and the team expects it to fall further on work produced by junior estimators, where the review is heavier. None of that is in the figure.

Turning that into capacity: scope and takeoff dropped by about a third, and that third is worth about eight hours, so the stage used to take around twenty four hours and now takes around sixteen. With the first pass moving from about four hours to about one and a half, those two stages went from roughly twenty eight hours a bid to roughly seventeen and a half. Twenty eight divided by seventeen and a half is 1.6.

Sanity check: run three estimators through a normal working year at the old hours per bid and you get a calendar of roughly 140 to 150 jobs, which sits inside the 100 to 200 the team actually runs.

The initial project review figure is measured. The scope, takeoff and proposal savings are the team's own working estimate of their workflow rather than instrumented measurements, and the manager review saving is excluded rather than estimated.

Saying no is the other half

One number deserves pulling out even though it is not the headline.

The first pass, the read that answers whether a tender is worth pursuing at all, went from about four hours to about ninety minutes.

At this bid volume that changes the economics of saying no. A no-bid decision that used to cost half a day now costs an afternoon. Walking away early stops being a luxury, which means fewer hours spent on jobs that were never winnable, and more spent on the ones that were.

The point

More bids is the easy half of this. Every team knows how to produce more bids, and most know exactly what it costs to do it that way.

The result worth having is more bids at the same standard: the same depth of read, the same exclusions chased, the same confidence in the number that goes out. That is what the extra sixty percent is made of here, and it is the only version of extra capacity that is still there in two years.

See also where preconstruction teams spend their time, and for a review on a much larger bid, what a final bid review found in a bid that was already finished.