In the growth phase of a General Contracting firm, administrative labor often expands faster than revenue. This is known as “administrative friction”—the time spent searching for emails, re-typing subcontractor data, and chasing missing quotes.
For a firm doing $1M to $5M in revenue, this friction can easily consume 10 to 15 hours of high-value labor per month. Reclaiming this time requires moving away from manual habits and adopting structured pre-construction workflows.
The average GC spends up to 20% of their day searching their inbox. When a bid arrives, the instinct is to “deal with it later” or forward it to an estimator. Both actions create a delay. The Fix: Use a “One-Touch” filing system. As soon as a bid is opened, it is moved to a project-specific database or folder.
Sending custom, one-off emails to every subcontractor is inefficient. The Fix: Create a standardized Invitation to Bid (ITB) template that includes links to plans, a specific deadline, and a scope of work checklist. When the process is repeatable, the time required to “send the project out” drops significantly.
Chasing subcontractors for quotes is a major time drain. The Fix: Instead of manual follow-up calls, use a system that sends automated reminders 72 hours and 24 hours before the bid deadline. This shifts the burden of memory from the GC to the software.
Manually transcribing numbers from a PDF bid into an Excel spreadsheet is prone to error and consumes hours of clerical labor. The Fix: Use a parser that automatically extracts the bid total and line items from the PDF directly into your budget.
Searching your “Sent” folder to see who was invited to bid is a sign of a fragmented system. The Fix: Maintain a centralized dashboard where you can see the status of every trade at a glance—who has viewed the plans, who has declined, and who has submitted.
Tools are only as good as the habits that support them. We recommend implementing a strict 15-minute “Pre-Con Pulse Check” every Monday morning before the phone starts ringing.
By front-loading this organization, you prevent the “Friday Fire Drill” where you are frantically calling subs hours before a proposal is due to the client.
Saving two hours per week across these five areas results in ten hours per month of reclaimed time. This is time that can be redirected toward business development, client relations, or site management—activities that actually drive revenue.
Reclaim your time.
Bid Bench was designed to remove administrative friction from the bidding process. Start your free trial at app.bidbench.com/signup.