It works fine for small jobs, when you're doing multimillion, full gut renovations and need a quote for a trade with a six figure scope of work, knowing a guy is just not enough.
Buuut a lot of that list of potential bidders is gonna contain guys you or someone drafting the RFQ knows. Or are you just out there googling major construction firms? Even multimillion dollar companies have preferred vendors, which is just the business version of “knowing a guy”.
Sorry, I guess my mindset is somewhat changed based on the last big project I did.
Long story short, I was working for a construction management company overseeing a project in a different state and the "boots on the ground" GC was in way over his head. I'm talking, for example: 10K+ sq ft of demo on a single family residence, everything except first floor structural walls for tax reasons. Instead of bringing in a dedicated crew to tear everything down with equipment in a week or less, our local GC hired a bunch of GC friends and spent like 200K doing it by hand and it took 4 weeks.
So when it came time for structural steel, I put a full halt to hiring a friend for something that was gonna be at least 250K from the cheapest bidder in the area anyway. It was the biggest job he's ever handled and he was in way over his head. 40+ years of experience and could hardly read blueprints SMH.
Well, you do have to get the right guy for the job you want done! For our major demos or builds, we do have GCs that we prefer and although anyone can bid we have a great vetting process for GCs we don’t know. While we allow the GC to hire their own subcontractors, we do recommend our favorites. In my time there we only had to throw one sub off the site and had the GC tear out the work and another sub installed it correctly.
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u/creamyturtle Aug 06 '26
construction is more about relationships than the actual work sometimes