Priced work vs bidding: what the estimate hour is worth

Nobody bills for estimating. It sits outside the job, outside the invoice, and outside almost every crew's sense of what a job costs to win. It is still the second largest labour line in a small contracting business, behind the work itself.

This post is about putting a number on it, and then about the thing you have to give up to make it go away.

Start with what you give up, because it is the part most pages like this leave until the end: on priced work you do not set the price. The engine does. If your edge is that you are a better closer than the crew across town, or that you can hold a premium because of who you are, priced work takes that away and you should stop reading. If your edge is the work itself, keep going.

Costing an estimate

One site visit is not one hour. Count the whole thing:

1. Drive out and back. In Los Angeles this is usually the largest single piece and the one nobody counts, because it does not feel like work.
2. Time on site. Measuring, photographing, listening to what the homeowner thinks they need.
3. Write-up. Pricing it properly at the kitchen table or, more often, at nine at night.
4. Follow-up. The call, the revised version after they talk to their spouse, the second revision after they get another bid.
5. The tail. The three that go quiet and the one that comes back four months later.

Add those to get the hours in one estimate. Now multiply by how many estimates it takes you to win one job — if you do not know that number, it is the single most valuable thing you could work out this month. That product is the labour cost of winning one job, and it is paid in your own hours at whatever you think an hour of your time is worth.

Do it for a full year and the figure is usually larger than the crew expects, because the losses are invisible. You remember the jobs you won. The unpaid hours are all attached to the ones you did not.

The other side

On priced work the homeowner gets a price from the engine, you see the job with the price already on it, and you either take it or you do not. There is no site visit to win it, no revision, and no second bid to lose to. Here is what a driveway-sized concrete job pays:

The number that matters for this comparison is not in the table. It is that the hours you would have spent winning that job are zero, and the hours you would have spent losing the four before it are also zero.

What the price actually is

Worth being precise, because overselling this is how these platforms lose crews. The price comes from a rate table for the trade plus the job's own factors, and it produces a band rather than a single figure. It is an instant estimate, not a final contract. It is built to be right about the middle of the market, not to be right about every job.

Which means it will sometimes be wrong about yours. A slab with no truck access, a wall that turns out to be three colours down, a site the photographs flattered. You are not obliged to take a job whose price does not match what you see, and declining one is not a mark against you — that judgement is exactly what a crew is for. Look at the price before you commit, not after.

Who this suits

Crews that are better at the work than at selling it. Crews with a hole in next month they need to fill without discounting into it. Crews where the owner is also the best installer and every hour spent in a truck writing bids is an hour not spent on a job.

Not: crews with a real sales operation and a close rate to show for it, or anyone who can consistently price above market and get it. Priced work is a worse deal for them, and there is no version of this argument where it is not.

One more thing that changes the arithmetic: DPOC holds CSLB licence #999194, and every job runs under this licence — ours, not a subcontractor's. A crew without its own active licence works under DPOC's and carries a higher platform fee for that coverage. There is a separate guide on this site covering what that costs and how to remove it.