Plumbing Bids

You’re not bad at bidding — you’re bad at predicting behavior.
And that’s most new contractors' problem. It’s not your math — it’s your assumptions.

Let’s break this down clearly:

1. You’re not underbidding — you’re underestimating friction.
It’s not just “how long does this take?”
It’s:

How many trips to the truck?
What’s in the way?
Is the drywall open or closed?
Am I alone or with help?
What will I uncover that wasn’t in the walkthrough?
You need to start adding friction time as a line item in your head.

Every bid should include a “Murphy’s Law” buffer — 20–30% minimum if you’re still new. That’s not fluff. That’s real-world time.

2. Track. Every. Hour.
If you're consistently over — what phase is burning you?

Demo?
Layout?
Parts runs?
Finish work?
Get militant about time tracking.
You can't fix what you don't measure.

Start building your own “production rates” based on what you actually produce. That becomes your future bid logic.

3. You’re not slow — you’re learning under pressure.
Right now you're:

Doing the job,
Managing the customer,
Watching the budget,
And second-guessing your numbers.
That’s not inefficiency. That’s the cost of leveling up.

It’ll feel slow until your brain catches up to the role you’re in now.

4. Mark-up is good. Now fix change orders.
You already know free labor kills businesses. So stop doing it.

Every bid should have a line that says:

“Any work not explicitly listed is not included and will be priced separately. Change orders must be approved in writing.”
Then practice saying this out loud until it’s second nature:
“That’s outside our original scope. I can get you a change order for it.”

No guilt. No flinching. Just business.

5. Want to master bidding? Don’t just take a course. Build a template.
There are courses out there, sure — but what you really need is:

A scope checklist
A friction-time calculator
A standardized format for presenting options
And a change order template you can send in 2 minutes or less
I’ve helped contractors build these from scratch. I can show you how to structure one if you want.

Final thought:
You’re not falling behind — you’re waking up.
The trades don’t just reward skill. They reward the guys who build systems around that skill.

it's almost always that you estimate a job to be 5hrs (for example) and then once you get into it, all of the unseen variables start to pop out. I feel like the hourly rate is ok, but the same 5hrs with a lot of effort and pain, might seem to tip the scale a bit no? At least that's how it is for me. I try to use hourly rate as only the baseline, with each obstacle or variable that makes the job harder, to be accounted for.

There's not a course out there, that can teach what you to expect as obstacles on most jobs. It all starts with having some type of experience in the trade and knowing and anticipating the obstacles that you will encounter. You can teach anyone what fittings they are looking at on a blueprint, what you can't teach is understanding the structural conditions that you will encounter to install the fittings that are usually isometrically drawn on a plan. Those are the things that will kill you on an estimate. The other big thing is always job-site logistics. Most do not account for getting tools and materials to the area you have to work in. The time spent moving fixtures across a building can be a very daunting and real expense. 

The best thing you can do is learn to break large jobs in to small pieces, and do your best to interpret structural conditions, logistics and obstacles. Then do a very in depth post mortem to see where you were on and where you were off, collect and catalog your data, and learn from the mistakes that you will certainly make. It's truly all about the data, and there is not one magic number for items, different companies, and even different employees within those companies, have different production rates.