You go fishing to catch fish, not just fish. The person who catches the biggest or the most fish wins and gets to brag about their accomplishments until the next fishing trip. Catching lots of fish takes preparation, planning, tactics, time, and a winning technique. It also takes knowing the right bait and the right place to fish. To win the best customers, contracts, or profitable jobs in construction, you also need the right bait and targets. Consider your bid or proposal tempting bait that customers will want to bite. Think of your target market as fishing holes with many fish that wish to know what your company offers.
Like fishing, when you bid on specific projects or customer types, you aim to catch large ones or lots of fish. To succeed, you must research and look for the right fishing holes (markets) where fish (customers) are hungry and bite often. You also must seek profitable projects to go after, opportunities that’ll give you the best chance to make the most money and earn jobs with low competition because the entry barrier is high.
When you offer the right bait and fish in the right spots, these fishing techniques will work, and customers will bite your offer at a fair price. The wrong bait in the wrong fishing holes will keep you bidding on the wrong projects against too many competitors with prices that are too low. To be successful, you can’t keep bidding the same way and doing the same things, hoping customers will bite. And when you finally catch a customer, reel them in and decide if you want to accept their offer.
What happens when the fish don’t bite?
When you don’t catch any fish, you try different fishing techniques, change your bait, or move to other fishing holes. Unlike fishing, stubborn contractors don’t look for new markets, customers, or tactics to land more contracts. Frustrated contractors keep bidding on the same customers repeatedly, using the same bait and proposal strategies they’ve always used. Contractors often think that if they bid enough jobs, eventually they’ll catch their share of work. This strategy won’t work. Like fishing, you must change your estimating and bidding strategies to get the big ones to bite more often and only eat your bait. You must use the correct tackle, different techniques, and tastier bait to get fish to think your bait is better than your competition and keep looking for better fishing holes.
Track your catch ratio
If the fish don’t bite where you’re fishing, you stop fishing and move on to another fishing hole. In contracting, you need a system to track and determine if your customers are biting often enough. By monitoring your catch success rate or bid-hit-win ratio—the rate at which you successfully hit and win projects you bid or propose on—you’ll know what bait to use, customers to bid to, and where to fish for projects. A 5:1 (20 percent) bid-hit-win ratio equals one win for every five jobs you bid or propose on. Unfortunately, most contractors don’t track their win ratio and keep bidding to customers or projects against too many competitors without knowing why or when they’re successful. To me, this is like going fishing every day, not knowing if you catch any fish, and starving because you do not track which bait works and which fishing hole has the big, juicy fish that bites more often.
Do you know your bid-hit-win ratio? You must keep track of your bids and proposals to determine how many jobs to bid on, what type of jobs to go after, and which customers give you a higher percentage of their work. Keep track by project types, customers, job size, and location. As you study your trends, you’ll find specific customers who give you more work than others, and you’ll discover that you are doing better with certain kinds of projects and markets. From these facts, you can decide where you want to fish in the future to improve your win success rate. You can also determine what type of new customers and jobs you need to target to improve your bottom line.
Use better bait to get a meeting
For most construction opportunities, your bid’s primary goal should be to meet with the decision maker. At this meeting, you can discuss the project in depth, review how you can help your customers meet their goals, explain why you’re the best choice, review pricing options, get a second chance to be the selected contractor, negotiate, and get the last look. It isn’t easy to accomplish this with a standard written proposal emailed or faxed to your customer, or over the phone. When you meet in person, you can look your customer in the eye, sell confidence, negotiate the price and scope, and shake hands on a contract agreement.
Discuss every aspect and option that might influence their decision at the meeting. Include discussions about enhanced quality, finishing ahead of schedule, lowering the budget, eliminating change orders, your supervisor and project manager, reducing risk, and meeting their goals. As you present and discuss the entire project’s requirements and demands, carefully look at your customer’s face, expressions, body language, and reactions to the pricing and ideas you present. Look for clues and suggestions on how you can offer more than what they want and be the chosen winner. To get a copy of Winning Ways To Win More Work! email GH@HardhatBizcoach.com.
Have fun catching more fish!
For example, not every bidding tactic and type of proposal bait in fishing will work for every job. But try them and you’ll like the outcome as they improve your catch ratio and win more work. When you’re not getting the desired results, change your tactics, use better bait, and find
new fishing holes as you look for profitable work.
George Hedley, CPBC, is a certified professional construction business coach, consultant, and speaker. He shows contractors how to double their profits, accelerate growth, get organized, and get their company to work like a machine! He is the author of “Get Your Construction Business To Always Make A Profit!” available on Amazon.com. To talk, start a personalized BIZ-BUILDER program, or get his free e-newsletter email GH@HardhatBizcoach.com. Visit his YouTube channel to watch his videos. To download online courses or get his contractor templates, visit: constructionbusinesscoaching.com
