Pricing Your First Bid

Pricing

The stack, in order

• Labor — real hours at real wages, including drive time, setup, cleanup, and your own paperwork hours. Underestimating hours is the most common pricing error in service work.
• Materials and equipment — at prices you verified this month, not prices you remember from last year.
• Overhead — insurance (a real line on services bids — your premium belongs in the cost stack), fuel, vehicle wear, software, the office hours nobody sees.
• Margin — added last, on top of true cost. Margin is not greed; it's the money that absorbs the bad week, the callback, and the price increase you didn't see coming.

The break-even line you do not cross

Add the first three layers and you have your break-even. A bid below it doesn't buy experience or a foot in the door — it buys a job that pays you to lose money, plus a buyer who anchors on that price for every future negotiation. If the work can't be won above break-even, the winning move is to pass, and let a competitor buy the problem.

This is the hardest discipline in the whole game, because losing a bid feels worse than winning a bad job — for about a day. The bad job lasts the whole term.

Homework: what did it go for last time?

Many portals and award notices are public: the same work, last cycle, often shows the winning amount. Look it up before you finalize. You're not obliged to match the number — scopes change, and the last winner may have underpriced and suffered for it — but bidding in ignorance of it is volunteering for a surprise.

Also weigh the shape of the deal, not just the total: a one-year term with renewal options rewards a sustainable price; a one-off job must carry its full setup cost in one number.

After the bid — win or lose, write it down

Record what you bid, what won if it's public, and how complete your cost picture turned out to be. Three or four of those records and your pricing stops being guesswork: you'll know your true hours, your real overhead, and where your market's prices actually sit.

That record-keeping is unglamorous and decisive — like most of what wins in this business.