Remaining financially stable is critical to any company’s long-term viability in the construction industry. For specialty contractors, this can be particularly challenging with the need to consistently win work and maintain a healthy backlog.
Finding new work and potential clients is a big challenge for many firms. Oftentimes, websites that list jobs are difficult to search or are already outdated by the time jobs are found. This issue has been exacerbated recently with the construction backlog dropping 9.4% in the last year, according to Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC).
At Autodesk, we’ve heard feedback from our specialty contractor customers that finding work is a major business hurdle. That’s why today, we are thrilled to announce a solution to help alleviate the strain specialty contractors experience when trying to find new work: Plan Room, now available within Bid Board Pro.
Plan Room is a new tool that allows Bid Board Pro users to easily discover projects that general contractors and owners have publicly shared on BuildingConnected. This new way of finding and bidding on work will empower subcontractors to win more jobs and build their backlog to maintain financial stability in these challenging times.
The current process for a specialty contractor to source and bid on a job is tedious at best, and painful at worst. Most companies have a sea of bad options when it comes to finding new work.
The most typical route is to leverage existing relationships with multiple GCs. That way, when new projects come out for bid, hopefully they’ve enjoyed working with you enough in the past, to send you that request for proposal. This model is only successful for specialty contractors that have a decently robust network of GCs they’ve worked with over the years.
For those contractors who don’t have those relationships in place yet, cold calling GCs might be a decent option to introduce their business to them. However, this is an undeniably slow process that can take critical team members away from bidding and building.
Another option for specialty contractors to find work involves crawling the websites of local-based GCs for jobs they’ve posted. Companies opting for this route might develop a methodical system over time, but they still need to go through websites one-by-one until they have an adequate number of projects to bid on.
With Plan Room, you don’t have to have a robust network of relationships with GCs, sacrifice valuable work time make cold calls, or manually scan websites to find and bid on new work. Simply log in with your Bid Board Pro account and immediately begin searching for new work using Plan Room.
Jobs can be filtered by work performed, location, due date, and more, to help find the jobs that fit your business needs. Jobs are also displayed in a list or map view to show the distance from your service area. Easily view the project details, scope of work, and automatically add the jobs directly to your Bid Board where you already do all your bid tracking. What was once a department’s responsibility is now done by a single person while drinking their morning coffee.
There are plenty of benefits that come from centralizing the process of finding and bidding on jobs, but let’s look at some of the main ones.
Plan Room helps you find new GCs in your area, or new GCs in an area that you’re looking to expand to. You can build your relationships and let your quality of your construction work be the reason you’re brought into more opportunities.
By having available jobs to bid on in one system, you can cut down on business development and focus on which jobs work best for your company. With Bid Board Pro, you can also utilize the analytics tool to understand which projects your team is best positioned to win, reference the bidding calendar to see what estimators are available, and easily manage the entire bidding process from one place.
By consistently winning more work and building your backlog, you can help attract investors and employees. This allows you to build a financial lifeline for potential hard times and expand your capacity to take on more jobs and grow as a company.
If your company is struggling to find new work and build that backlog, Plan Room within Bid Board Pro is here to help.
