Bid Contractor

What it is

A bid contractor gives you a fixed price for a defined scope of work. You walk the job, write the scope, video it, and they come back with one number. That number is the job. They eat the overrun; you eat the surplus. Opposite of a Cost Plus contractor, who bills you materials plus labor plus a markup, open-ended, with the scope defined in conversation as work happens.

I almost only work with bid contractors. The one time I let a job run cost plus with a loose scope, the contractor found rot in a bathroom wall, tore the whole bathroom out, and redid it. Thousands of dollars I wasn’t expecting. When I got the bill, what was I going to do? The work was done. He gaslit me on what we’d agreed to, and because the scope was loose, I had no written record to point back to.

The fix, every time: verbal + written + video. We walk the job, talk through it, write it together, then walk it again on camera. That video and that scope are what the bid gets built against. No ambiguity.

Why it matters

Bid format does three things cost plus doesn’t. It forces the contractor to understand the job completely before touching it, because they own the price risk. It kills the fear tax on change order conversations, because the baseline scope is locked. And it lets you macromanage instead of micromanage — if the scope is tight and the bid is fixed, I don’t have to watch every pour of concrete. That’s what leadership in construction looks like.

Cost plus isn’t automatically bad, but it requires way more presence from you. A cost plus guy with a vague scope is a standing invitation to get squeezed. Bid contractors on defined scopes earn trust by delivering on the number. After you’ve done a few jobs with someone on bid, you start to know what their markup looks like, what their quality looks like, and you can run the next jobs lighter. That’s relationship capital compounding.

The trade-off: bid contractors won’t bid on a vague scope. If you give them “paint the house and fix whatever’s wrong,” you get a defensive price or no bid at all. You have to do the work to write a real scope first. Which is why scope of work is the skill upstream of everything else.

How it shows up

The pattern every time: write a draft scope before the walkthrough. Walk the job with the contractor. Revise the scope with their input. Video the walkthrough, narrating each line while they confirm on camera. Send them the written scope and the video. Get the bid back via text. Get their explicit text agreement to both scope and pay schedule.

When a change order comes up later — and they do — I break the proposed new work down into tasks, not jobs. Demo, framing, drywall, paint, each with its own material + labor + markup. Strip the fear tax off by forcing the line items. Usually that reframes the conversation and the price comes down. If it doesn’t, I say “let me check with my other crew” and either accept the bid or bring in someone else. Relationship stays intact either way.

On new contractors I haven’t worked with, I micromanage the first job even under bid. I show up, I ask questions, I check the work. By the tenth job, if the quality is there, I’m mostly off-site. Bid plus defined scope plus time-tested relationship is how you run multiple flips without babysitting any of them.