Estimating For Painters: To Tender Or Not To Tender? That's The Question
I recently had this question in from a small painting contractor that was looking to use us to price a larger painting contract:
Hi Mark,
'A building contractor has sent me tenders to a fair few decs in the area. I don’t really want to spend a fortune having it priced and also waste your time, what’s your thoughts on this sort of tender: Worth going through with?'
If you want to keep getting bigger and bigger, growing your business to 12-30 decorators, so you are eventually off the tools, you need to be pricing larger projects and lots of them.
Main contractors don't want you to pick and choose which ones you will or wont price for. They want to know that when they send you a tender, you’ll price it.
Success rates for painting projects can be low, particularly as the painter never takes the time to find out if their main contractor secured the project or not, and if not, who did and then make sure they make contact and get their tender submitted to the winning main contractor.
It really depends what you want with your business.
Yes tenders cost money (whether it's you doing them or me), but the idea is that the projects you secure more than pay for your overall tendering costs/company overheads and make you a profit.
Long term, growing your business like this is the only way you can look to increase your earnings over and above what you earn as a much smaller painting contractor or sole trader.
Regards.
Mark
Painting Estimator-paintingestimators.co.uk