Should I price this job at all? The ones to walk away from

First, price the pricing: a serious tender costs you real hours, take-off, subcontractor quotes, the build-up, and if you win one in four, every won job carries four tenders’ worth of desk time in its overhead. That arithmetic alone justifies being choosy; the signals below justify being choosy about the right ones.

The eight signals, roughly in order of severity

1. The client is shopping for a victim, not a builder. Seven firms tendering a domestic extension, price the only question asked, no interest in when you could start or how you would do it: the winner will be whoever made the biggest estimating error, and the prize is delivering it.

2. The information is bad and nobody minds. No proper drawings, questions answered with “just allow for it”: the tender is inviting you to price the unknowable as if known, and the honest tools, allowances, named assumptions, are being waved away. The argument is being scheduled, this series knows its name.

3. The last builder is a mystery or a villain. A job that has already consumed one contractor deserves ten minutes of curiosity about why, and “they were all cowboys” about three predecessors in a row describes the common factor.

4. The contract terms arrive pre-loaded: savage damages, heavy retention, payment terms stretched past reason, bonds disproportionate to the job. Terms can be negotiated, but a client who opens there is telling you how the account will be run.

5. The money is invisible. A business client with alarming filings, a development resting on a sale that has not happened, a homeowner whose budget conversation keeps sliding: you are pricing a job whose funding is a rumour, and this series covers where that ends.

6. It is outside your real competence, the structure, the scale, the specialism you would be learning at the client’s risk and your cost.

7. Your own cash cannot carry it. Run the forecast: a job whose trough exceeds your headroom is a bad job at any margin, and winning two of them at once is how good firms die busy.

8. Every instinct says no and the diary says yes. Filling a quiet month with a bad client is renting out your firm below cost; the quiet month at least costs only the overhead.

How to say no without burning anything

Decline early, briefly, and blandly: “Thanks for thinking of us. We are not able to give this one the attention it deserves at the moment, so we will step aside rather than waste your time.” No critique of the drawings, no lecture about the terms, both close doors and start arguments. The polite pass keeps the relationship for the better job later, and, said promptly, it costs the client nothing, which they remember. The half-way option exists too: price it with the problems priced in, proper risk money, terms marked up, allowances made explicit, and let the number do the declining; sometimes it wins anyway, at a price that makes the problems affordable.

What to do this week

1. Write your own version of the eight signals, one page, from your own worst jobs, and pin it where tenders get opened.

2. Check the tenders currently on your desk against it, before the next evening of measuring.

3. Track your strike rate, tenders priced against jobs won, because it is the number that turns bidding time from a feeling into a cost.

Where the information stops

Whether a specific client’s money is real is checkable further than instinct, company filings, credit checks, land registry on the development, and on a big tender that diligence is worth an hour; what no checklist reaches is the honest reading of your own capacity, and the partner, accountant or spouse who watched the last overloaded year usually holds that number more accurately than you do.