Hello, I'm Chris. I've spent 20+ years in the electrical industry; starting in the field as an electrical apprentice to becoming a superintendent with my JW license. But, with the next project requiring a relocation from my home state, I had an opportunity to stay put, but with a slight twist...it was a position in the office. That was when I became an estimator and eventually, Chief Estimator.
After reviewing estimate after estimate and projects becoming larger with more complexity, the estimate takeoff was becoming just big numbers without any detail or value. We could verify most material and labor units were right, but how could we easily validate 1,000,000’ of wire, or that we didn’t miss a unit price of per 100 (c) when it was supposed to be per 1,000 (m)? These oversights can lose money, either by not winning the bid, or by winning a losing project.
Working with my mentor Kurt, I learned an immense amount about many aspects of preconstruction. However, there is one important concept however that encompasses most of what Kurt taught me, critical thinking; the ability to step back and ask a simple question, does it make sense? I learned to do that with comparison built rational (metrics); for example, we have 1,000 light fixtures, 15,000’ of conduit and 600,000’ of wire. With a quick calculation, I see there is 15’ of conduit per light (makes sense), and 600’ of wire per light… giving us a wire fill (# of wires in the conduit) of 40… that doesn't make sense. I don’t need to know all the details of the estimate to know that’s not right. Going back through the estimate, it was a simple input error, 600,000 feet of wire instead of 60,000, which would give a wire fill of 4.
Critical thinking combined with data comparisons is a recipe for success and confidence. Every estimate is filled with data to analyze it by or to build future estimates with. In addition, provide backup information for your post bid meetings. All that data can be culled and calculated to create useful metrics. Bid Core Metrics was created to produce those metrics in a streamlined, reliable way but still with the amount of detail required by today’s standards.