Standard Price Book Strategy - How do you make standardized prices with unstandardized Projects?

Question

I've been thinking a lot about quoting speed lately and wanted to open this up for discussion. As a GC, almost every project I take on looks different from the last — different scopes, different conditions, different moving parts. That makes it hard to build a price book the way a trade contractor might, where you're doing the same tasks repeatedly.

But I know quoting faster would help me and my team tremendously. Right now we're rebuilding estimates from scratch too often, and I feel like there's a better way.

So my question for the group is: do any of you have a price book built out while doing GC work or anything with a lot of project variability? If so, how did you structure it? Are you pricing at the unit level, bundling common scopes into packages, or something else entirely? And how do you handle the stuff that doesn't fit neatly — older buildings, difficult site conditions, sub pricing you can't fully control?

I'm not looking for a perfect system, just something that gets my team quoting faster and more consistently. Curious what's actually working for people in the real world.

stephenjobe · Answer

Obviously not a GC here BUT- we do large scope TI’s with a ton of variation.

Our process is simple.

We’ve taken the time to figure out what an one-off call out for a specific part of the job would cost at our target margin. Over the course of several projects we’ve built up a solid list of rotating line items.

The line items are professionally written and basic enough that minor adjustments can be made if needed to add to the specificity of the project.

Each line item takes into account our hourly and labor with mark up. (Flat rate- but you know)

With that- when we quote jobs I can literally just walk down the scope and select my line items- select my quantities and send it.

With GC work it’s way more scope and variation but that’s worked for us. You could also try working one out the normal way and then take that same plan and upload it to ChatGPT and prompt it by saying: “I need you to estimate this from the position of a Pro GC Estimator, my hourly rate goal is (fill in the blank), parts mark up is (fill in the blank).” And upload that with the file.

See how accurate and how close it gets to yours.

Best of luck!

-Stephen Jobe

Forum Discussion

Standard Price Book Strategy - How do you make standardized prices with unstandardized Projects?

1 Reply