Not every job arrives through a bid. A lot of the time it's somebody you have worked with for years who calls you first, because you are their electrical guy and something has come up.
Maybe their compliance officer has told them the arc flash study is out of date. They don't really know what that means, only that it's electrical and you're the one they call about electrical. Or a piece of equipment is failing and the replacement is complicated enough that somebody needs to spec it properly before anything gets ordered.
Either way it's a good call to get, and it's the moment you find out how much of the job you can actually finish.
How this usually shows up
- Their compliance group has flagged a study that hasn't been updated in years.
- A relay or a breaker needs settings and nobody on site can produce them.
- The replacement is specialized enough that guessing at the spec gets expensive fast.
- Equipment went in correctly and has been tripping ever since.
- The client asks you something you can answer halfway.
The cost of handing the piece off
Your client is not going to hold the project while you work out how to cover it. They have a compliance date or a line that's down, and if you can't do all of it they will find somebody who can.
That somebody is usually another contractor who has engineering behind him, and now he is standing inside a relationship you spent years building. Nothing dramatic happens after that. Nobody fires you. The account just narrows a project at a time, and narrowing is much harder to reverse than the gap was to fill in the first place.
Why this stings more than a lost bid
Losing a bid costs you one job. A relationship narrowing costs you the ones after it too.
On a competitive bid you are one of several numbers and you knew that walking in. This is a client who picked up the phone and called you first, which is worth more than any one project, and one piece of engineering is all that stands between you and keeping the whole thing.
Worth being careful about who you bring in, too. If the firm you call also does construction, you have introduced them to your client and shown them the scope. Most of them will behave themselves. You would rather not have to wonder about it.
Covering it
Covering the engineering scope doesn't mean rebuilding your company. It means having somewhere to send it when a client asks, and knowing that before they ask. There is more than one way to set that up, and the first instinct most contractors have is rarely the one that suits their situation.