When a bid comes back lost, the easy answer is price. Somebody was cheaper, the owner went low, and the next bid gets cut a little. That answer skips the real problem. Many bids are lost on labor productivity rates that no one has checked in years.
A labor productivity rate is the number of labor hours your crew needs to install one unit of work: one square of shingles, one device, one cable drop, one foot of conduit. Every unit rate you bid sits on top of that number. If the hours per unit are stale, every rate built on them is off, and so is the bid.
Why stale productivity rates lose bids
Production numbers get written once and then copied forward. They came from an old job, a different crew, a different spec, or a number someone carried over from their last company. Nobody goes back to see whether the crew still works at that pace.
The drift can go either way. If your hours per unit run high, you carry labor your crew does not spend, and your total lands above shops that know their numbers. If your hours per unit run low, you win work that loses money in the field, and then you pad the next bid to make up for it. Either way the price on the page looks like the problem, when the problem is the hours underneath it.
Run the five-job check
You can find out where you stand with records you already have. Pull your last five finished jobs, residential or commercial, and work through each one:
- List the main units of work you bid and the hours per unit you carried for each.
- Find the hours your crew actually logged on those same items, from timecards, daily reports, or the foreman's notes.
- Divide the actual hours by the installed quantity to get actual hours per unit.
- Put bid hours per unit and actual hours per unit side by side.
If those numbers match, your productivity rates are doing their job, and your losses are coming from somewhere else. If they don't match, your unit rates need work. Look for the same gap across several jobs, not one bad day on one job. A gap that repeats is a rate problem. A gap that shows up once is a job condition worth writing down.
Keep the units honest while you do this. Compare hours per square to hours per square and hours per device to hours per device. If the crew logged time against a whole phase instead of a unit, split it as well as you can and mark that number as rough.
Rebuild the unit rate from production and your billable rate
Once you know what your crew actually does, build the labor side of each rate from two numbers you control:
Production is the measured labor hours per unit from your own jobs. Your billable rate is what you charge for one hour of that crew's labor. Multiply the two and you get a rate you can defend line by line, because both numbers come from your own records.
Write down the conditions behind each rate: the crew, the access, the height, new work or remodel. A rate built for open, easy access will not hold on a cut-up remodel. Two named rates are clearer than one number stretched over both.
If you are starting a scope from nothing, the published unit rates give you an editable starting baseline. They are not a national price book or a market average. Start from one, change the production and billable rate to your own, and it becomes your rate.
Measure and tighten it on every job
A rebuilt rate is only as good as the next job that tests it. Track crew hours against the same units you bid, on every job, not once a year. When a job closes, compare bid hours per unit to actual hours per unit again and adjust the production number that drifted.
Tighten in small steps and keep a note of what changed and why. If one rate keeps moving, split it by condition instead of averaging it. Over a few rounds the gap between bid and actual shrinks, and your price starts to reflect how your crew really works.
Do the same with your losses. When you log why a bid was lost, note whether the hours behind the price matched your field numbers. A loss tagged price on a rate you just measured tells you something different from a loss on a rate nobody has checked. The guide on what to log for bid win rate covers the record to keep on each bid so those patterns show up.
Start with your own numbers
Price is the part of the bid the owner sees. Productivity is the part that decides whether that price is right. Check your last five jobs, rebuild the rates that don't match, and keep measuring.
If you want to see measured unit rates turn into a client-ready bid, try Unit Rate AI free and build a sample bid from your own rates.