SUBJECTIVE BID SPIN CYLE

Collecting bids for pavement maintenance (or water-proofing or flooring or HVAC, etc.) can be a huge pain. But it doesn’t have to be.

Congratulations! Someone got promoted and you’ve inherited their properties in an unfamiliar territory…

Lucky for you, It’s that time of year again…

There's money in the budget for pavement maintenance (or water-proofing, or flooring, etc.) & it’s time to figure out how to spend it.

Company policy is to secure a minimum of 3 bids from different contractors.

You reach out to 3 local contractors and get 3 different responses.

One contractor says he will visit the property and email you an estimate. A few days later, you receive an email with an attachment.

How about that turnaround time?! IMPRESSIVE!

The attachment, however, is entirely unimpressive.

The entire estimate, terms, and conditions fit on 1 side of a single piece of paper.

It is literally a wall-of-text, one-page contract.

They even used a larger font to fill up the page!

It’s also full of contractor mumbo jumbo…but it is REALLY inexpensive aka CHEAP!

Another contractor wants to meet on-site and discuss options during a walk-through.

You agree to meet with a complete stranger who turns out to be a very nice person…but an hour later, you leave with an overwhelming amount of information that you will never remember…and you now have 15 minutes left on your lunch break…bummer.

One week later, you get a well-put-together, professional proposal, but the work will cost 50% more than the first proposal…and all you remember is how your lunch break got cut short. You’re still not over it.

The third contractor says he can’t even look at it for 2 weeks!

But, hey, if they are that BUSY, they must be GOOD, right?

After two weeks, you attend another walk-through...but this time it is much more efficient…and only lasts 15 minutes! The contractor asks good questions & provides good answers, and equally as important, barely interrupts your lunch break!

You are thanked for your patience and promised a highly-detailed, spectacular proposal.

Not only are you NOT disappointed…I mean, WOW! This bid package is amazing…IS that PHOTO paper…it’s so GLOSSY?!!

Unfortunately, it took another week to get this proposal...which means it takes about a month to just get a proposal from this particular contractor. It also looks like this final contractor put in 3 times as much assessment effort and wants to charge at least twice as much…

At this point, you now have 3 wildly different estimates with 3 wildly different costs…

It’s been almost 2 months since you first reached out to contractors & it somehow feels like you’re just getting this process started.

The problem is the project scope. A clearly defined project scope is essential to any project & it is not uncommon for this concept to get lost in the maintenance service-provider space.

Typically, in new construction projects, all bidders are provided professionally-engineered, detailed plans. These detailed plans commonly go through several iterations before the project is completed; this approach is designed to be as objective as possible to facilitate the design-bid-build process. However, in the maintenance space, the project scope can be almost entirely subjective based on the experience of the person providing the assessment and it is much more difficult to accurately compare subjective bids/estimates. 3 different contractors will usually come up with 3 different scopes.

Here’s the two strategies I recommend to stop this madness:

#1 Build a Long-Term Pavement Maintenance Plan for Continuity

Turnover happens…with both property Managers and contractors. If you don’t have a 1 or 3 or 5 or 10-year Pavement Maintenance Plan, you’re going to be stuck in the “Subjective Bid” spin cycle indefinitely and there’s really not very much you can do about it. With a long-term plan, property managers can tell service-providers exactly what they want done every year. Expecting a contractor to provide you with a long-term pavement maintenance plan is a BIG ASK. Offer to pay for it or hire us on PavementVeterans.com.

#2 Create a custom-built Project Scope or Openly Share Quality Proposals

This is the best option if a property has no Long-Term Pavement Maintenance Plan. This is simple and guaranteed to fire some people up, but it is effective. The politically correct thing to do is hire us on PavementVeterans.com. We will perform the assessment, build the scope, and coordinate with contractors to streamline the bid-collecting process. It’s easy to compare value when everyone is provided with…and is pricing from…the exact same scope. No one gets offended.

Or…if you have a good relationship with contractors & don’t mind the risk of getting them all riled up…ask a trusted contractor to build you a scope or proposal It should sound something like this:

“I need a proposal for a property and your bid packages are always top-notch. Company policy requires me to get 3 bids, but I don’t have time for 3 separate walkthroughs and a lot of back & forth. I need your proposal to have accurate photos, measurements, & quantities while keeping all the pricing on a separate page; I am going to share your proposal…without the pricing…with 2 other contractors…to help move things along quickly. We can award this contract much faster…and with more confidence…because all 3 contractors will be bidding the exact same scope. If you are not awarded the contract, I will give you as much feedback as possible on why that was the case and you can bill me $200 for your time building the scope. For future projects, I may ask you to provide a bid based on a detailed scope built by another contractor...which will save you time and effort.”

There may be some initial resistance to this process. Someone may be offended. If a contractor or property manager is offended by this recommendation, have them call me; I will explain to them why this is beneficial to both parties. The reality is that property managers already share bids with trusted contractors and any contractor would gladly accept the opportunity to review a competing bid.

If you go through this process once or twice, with perhaps a few tweaks here and there…you will never look back. Trust me.

Justin Dooley 07/12/2025