Had three requests for bid come up for a government agency, we had been awarded one last year and except for the issues of conflicts it was a fun interesting job. One thing we were assured was that through the bidding process price was low on the priority list.
Two out of the three were awarded,,,,,,,,, each was the lowest bid.
Ahh well, live and learn.?ÿ
"It will be awarded on technical merit" translates to "we'll give everyone the same technical score".
Well... it wasn??t right up until it was.....
Years ago I would bid on forest service road surveys, they were very competitive, the bids had to be sent to the region office 200 miles away. Bids were usually awarded to someone 1/3rd of the ones I wrote up, they always took the low bidder, there was no way to make money on them. Often you would see 10 bids, 9 ranging between 10k-20k and the low bidder would be at 4k.?ÿ
Finally I wised up and stopped spending time trying to get them.?ÿ
We did do one last year, nice job, they were great to work with. But it was close to the office, these are 1/2day trek from here, so motels, per-diem, it adds up quick. Didn't expect to get them, they showed everyone, and each item broken out, the winners will need to hustle.?ÿ
When I was including construction as a part of our work, very often we would be contacted by several contractors to bid for surveying on the same project.
We would send out the same price to each contractor and the range of emotions was as big as the range of prices the contractor turned in for their bid.
From their highway contractor backgrounds and 100ft grid layouts mindset they were so inclined to never trust any radial stakeout of their reference points, it totally blew their mind when we went to work and the Iman setup somewhere he felt safe and comfy, tied into control and stayed in place most of the day unless we moved to a new section.
I was always the one who had to sit down and work out the bids and at the same time keep up with 3 crews in the field, compute and make drawings and reports and whatever descriptions came along, aka the lone office manager and our lady up front was busy with accounting, 9am gossip meetings, prayer sessions and coffee making.
Solo work has no time for any of this, land surveying only.
In the early '80s things got very slow around here, and I wound up working for a small engineering/surveying firm that was hungry for business.?ÿ We decided to bid on some USFS boundary jobs -- which, at the time anyway, were always awarded to the low bidder -- but we kept getting beat by a factor of 2 or more.?ÿ My boss and I figured that everyone else knew something we didn't know, so we started paring our bids down until we finally got one.?ÿ Apparently what everyone else knew is that you couldn't make any money doing those jobs, and we quickly gained that knowledge.?ÿ But there wasn't much of any other work available at the time, so we ended up doing 6 or 8 of them.?ÿ We never made any money for the owner, but we got paid our wages (which were very low, even for the time), had a lot of fun and got to work in some gorgeous country, so from my perspective it was a good experience.
The early '80s were some lean years around here too.?ÿ The firm I was with got into some State Department of Mines?ÿprojects?ÿfor strip-mining site?ÿreclamation in the SE part of Oklahoma.?ÿ There was lots of beautiful, remote terrain?ÿand usually about three or four original GLO corners per section to be found.?ÿ While it proved to be a not-so-profitable endeavor, the surveying experience was priceless.?ÿ Living in cheap hotels (with a few nights in a tent)?ÿand digging up old corners was just about all a young surveyor could ask for.
The engineering end of the job required preparing P&P sheets for the reclamation projects.?ÿ In that terrain we found our 14 1/2 foot Philly rods to be totally useless; but we were armed with a couple of top-mounted EDMs.?ÿ While our bosses, the old WWII vets, were being made to accept electronically derived horizontal distances, they were adamant?ÿelectronic vertical data wasn't reliable.?ÿ Instead they wanted us to use trig leveling with?ÿa standard theodolite and stadia.?ÿ After a few closely noted 'level loops' with?ÿour new equipment we were able to change their minds about the capabilities of the new equipment.
Can you imagine using a?ÿfixed location instrument to derive xy & z data??ÿ ;)?ÿ
I once bid proposed on a job for a small local city, along with 2 other outfits. The low bidder won because they "best understood the needs of the job".?ÿ?ÿ
All years are lean around here I guess.?ÿ They always find someone who will do the 10k job for 2k.?ÿ Tried lowballing ones right next door, but 5k for a 10k isn't low enough to stop the 2k from 4 hours away getting it.?ÿ Don't bother with it anymore either.?ÿ Unfortunately, the process has spread to the whole boundary sector, at the same time the scope of practice is being limited to boundary only.?ÿ But you have to put a lot of time into the state or federal proposals, so no sense doing it.?ÿ Heck, I can have 20 private proposals defeated in the time it takes to get one state one rejected.?ÿ Gotta go where the volume is.
My last private sector job was mostly public work. All done under quality based selection and all very lucrative...
The last job was "awarded", all bids were too high, they may try again in 2020.
I generally prefer working do public agencies because they're less inclined to argue about cost, but at the same time I like to keep a mix of public and private as a hedge against one sector cratering suddenly.