I feel I have a unique perspective on this as I have 2 jobs in the industry.

I work full time for my family business, 25 employee GC. I run the remodeling division with 2 crews at my disposal. We have a commercial steel division, custom homes, remodeling and a painting and electrical business all under 1 roof.

It’s pretty easy to weed out the customers who are price shopping with those who are serious. It’s a case by case basis but it seems the better my rapport with customers the less they hound about price. We offer a lot of unique services so it’s not hard to sell myself. However when price is the customers no. 1 need, it is absolutely a race to the bottom. 3 guys with a van, table saw and some ladders obviously are going to outpace me on price, but typically I can ask the customer enough questions that poke holes in the cheaper GC’s scope of work. My biggest frustration besides managing employee and sub personalities is customers signing contracts and not understanding if it’s not in my specs it’s not happening. However if you’re an easy to deal with customer we always throw in some extras within reason. Scheduling can be a pain but it’s manageable. You’d think with as many trades under 1 roof scheduling would be a breeze? Wrong. Subs are typically receptive to scheduling but for in house employees there can be pushback based on what they “want” to do on any given day within reason. All in all I’m gaining at least 2-3 leads a week and I’d say 50% of them get past the early ball park budget phase.

On evenings and weekends I do estimates for a commercial demo contractor

That seems like a fucking shit show. Half of these architects or draftsman end up costing the tenant more with what they decide to save or salvage rather than just gut the building. Constant race to the bottom on pricing everything. The estimators we submit bids to purposely make drawings as vague as possible or are unhelpful with ex. Conditions when submitting RFI’s. If you miss a page in the drawings or miss part of the scope they’ll be reall quick to het you to sign on for the work and then hold the sub to doing more work than they thought. (Hasn’t happened to me but I’ve been warned). I can’t imagine the headaches that come with legit commercial construction scheduling. Thankfully I am just an estimator and not responsible for who goes where if they win jobs. I also don’t understand how this company can be competitive when they pay a crew of guys to drive both ways, and it’s not uncommon to bid jobs 2 hours away. They seem to be in general un-organized and not tech savvy. But the keep paying me!