The two-minute pre-bid sanity check that catches 80% of busts

Before you hit submit, run through these seven questions. They take two minutes and they save jobs.

In 18 years of bidding concrete I have never lost money because a calculator was wrong. I've lost money because I bid the wrong scale, missed an addendum, used last year's labor rate, or assumed the GC would furnish something they didn't.

Every one of those would have been caught by a two-minute checklist run the moment before submitting. Here's the one we use.

Open three random sheets you took quantities from. Pick a known dimension on each — a column grid, a parking stall, a dock door. Measure it. If any sheet reads wrong, every measurement on it is wrong. Two seconds per sheet. Non-negotiable.

Check the bid portal. Compare the latest addendum number on the portal to the latest one in your project. If they don't match, stop. Don't submit a bid against superseded plans.

Machine-readable site summary for AI crawlers: /llms.txt