RTG Contractors
RTG Contractors cuts 3 hours of data-entry with Downtobid's Bid Board
Roy T Goodwin (RTG) Contractors is a concrete contractor serving Metropolitan Nashville and Montgomery County Tennesee. They specialize in concrete, infrastructure and curbing. The estimating team is led by Brad Babre who is both the VP of operations and lead estimator.
Challenges
“Construction in Nashville area has just blown up, but trying to keep up with incoming bids has just proved very futile. Either you miss some or you spend 3 hours a day trying to keep up with them.”
In the last few years, the concrete market has exploded in Nashville. While the market-boom was good for business, the estimating team started seeing an influx of emails (bid invites, addendas, RFIs) and struggled to process these emails.
Like many contractors, RTG used a manual process for processing bids.
- Brad would check his emails twice a day (in the morning and before leaving)
- Brad would record new bids on an outlook calendar
- Brad would type in information about each bid (job name, bid deadline, location, GCs)
As the VP of Operations and lead estimator, Brad Barbre's time is best spent preparing estimates and winning bids for the company. However, despite a market boom, Brad and his team struggled to capitalize on the influx of opportunities.
They spent 3 hours each day manually tracking bids. This was frustrating because this was time not spent on bidding and the estimating team was ultimately losing out on great jobs.
“If I'm spending 3 hours a day sorting through bids and emails, that's 2 jobs a day that I could be bidding on.”
Solution
Using Downtobid's Bid Board, RTG Contractors cut out 3 hours of daily manual data-entry instantly. Downtobid's Bid Board enabled RTG to route all bid-related emails into a single email folder so estimators did not have to incessantly check email. Behind the scenes, the technolgy in Downtobid's Bid Board automatically organized bids into a easy-to-see dashboard. Job name, location GC name and deadlines are automatically pulled out of emails and organized project by project.
All emails in one place enables focus
Prior to Downtobid's Bid Board, Brad felt the need to check emails frequently because he worried about missing important details. However, this disrupted his takeoff process.
“Takeoff processes are very fluid. Every estimator knows that you're basically building a job in your head so every time you stop, there's a good chance for mistake.”
Since Downtobid's Bid Board pulls all emails related to a job into a single record, Brad now has peace-of-mind that emails, links to plans and addendas will always be sorted and organized in the relevant job record, eliminating distractions during takeoffs.
"[Downtobid's Bid Board] keeps all the addendums, all of the clients for one job in one spot. That just saves me time"
Analyzing reasons for declined bids grows the business
Beyond streamlining the processing of bids, Brad leverages the built-in data analytics. RTG has started to attribute reasons for declined bids.
- Is it out of scope?
- Did we not have enough time?
- Is it outside of our geography?
This was not possible using the old system because there was too much overhead from data-entry. With Downtobid's Bid Board, tracking declined reasons requires minimal effort and enables the team to go back and analyze how to grow the business. Do they need to hire an additional estimator? Do they need to expand their scope?
"Being able to track what we're turning down is just as important as what we're bidding."
Conclusion
Since using Downtobid's Bid Board, RTG Contractors has started to use their own company data to make their estimating operations smarter by using the analytics feature to understand declined reasons and market trends. With Downtobid's Bid Board, RTG Contractors achieved 2 benefits immediately.
RTG cut 3 hours of manual data-entry each day
RTG estimators could focus on bids without being distracted by one-off emails