People ask me for a ballpark all the time. A verbal number, a range, “just roughly what are we talking about.” I rarely comply. Not because I’m being difficult — because I honestly don’t think about my pricing that way.
I run the estimate in the blind
Sure, I have an idea what’s high and what’s low. But I’m not surprised anymore when a job comes out crazy out of range, because I’ve learned not to look until the end.
I run the estimate blind. I build the schedule — the manpower, the equipment, the days, every expense that rides along with them — and I can visualize the job as if I’ve already done it. Only when that’s finished do I look at the unit price. If it’s far off what I’d have guessed, I go back through the line items and find what I over- or under-estimated. Usually it’s the estimate that’s right and the guess that was wrong.
That’s the difference between a number and a feeling. By the time my number is on paper, it’s derived directly from a plan I can see. You are not going to convince me you know better than I do how long my crew takes to do my work, and I will stand by that number to the end.
Give me thirty minutes
So here’s my answer to “just a ballpark”: give me the basic information and thirty minutes, and I’ll whip you up a real number. Don’t ask me for a guess.
If the information is thin, understand what you’ll get. I’m going to assume the worst. I’m going to throw in contingencies for everything I can’t see. The number will be high, and it will be qualified to exactly the assumptions I made. The more detail you can give me, the tighter I can lock the price and the more of that contingency comes back out. That isn’t a negotiating trick — it’s just how unknowns turn into dollars.
Where the “going rate” comes from
Now, the temptation when you’re starting out is to skip all that and look it up. Material prices, fine — every supplier on the internet will quote you a price and it’s real. But it’s just as easy to look up the going rate for labor and services. There are the estimating reference books. There are the subscription services. And these days there are the AI estimators, which I assume can find far more of this information than I can.
Their source is the same, and I think it’s all meaningless.
That information comes from surveys. Take it from me: nearly everyone who submits a number to one of those surveys is either guessing or not telling the truth. They either don’t know what their work costs, or they’d rather not say. There is no team of analysts walking onto job sites and writing down what a crew actually produces per day — and anybody who does have that kind of data is holding it very close to the vest, because it’s the most valuable thing they own.
The only going rate I trust is my own history.
Every estimate is make or break
I look at every estimate as the moment the whole project is decided. If I don’t make a deal that can serve the interests of my organization, I’ve set us up to fail before the first truck rolls.
If I go too strong, maybe it’s an opportunity lost. I can live with that. If I go too soft, I’ve committed my crew, my equipment, and my time to something I now have to work even harder just to mitigate. One of those mistakes costs me a job. The other one costs me the job and the money.
That’s why the thirty minutes matters and the ballpark doesn’t. The reason it only takes me thirty minutes now is that every previous job’s schedule is sitting right there in the worksheet — my own crews, my own rates, my own history — and a new estimate starts from that, not from a survey.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology