If you run an electrical contracting business you have probably noticed that a certain kind of work stopped coming your way, without any particular moment where it happened. The bigger projects. Universities, hospitals, manufacturing facilities, owners with a purchasing department. You are busy and the work you do is good, and those jobs get awarded before you ever get a proper look at them.
This happens to a lot of good contractors, and the cause is usually structural rather than anything about how you run the business.
Sound familiar?
- Institutional projects stop showing up in your inbox.
- You hear about a job after it's been awarded.
- A spec calls for an arc flash study or protective device coordination, and you have to pass on the whole package over one line item.
- You sharpen the number and still don't get a callback.
- Longtime clients start sending their complicated work somewhere else.
- You add crew, and the mix of work doesn't change.
The cost of staying where you are
Every job you can't bid is revenue that goes to a competitor and mostly stays there. The harder part is what it does to your client list. People who used to call you for everything narrow down to calling you for the work that doesn't need an engineer, and once another firm is inside that relationship it is difficult to get back in. Meanwhile the market keeps making more of the work you can't chase: more compliance-driven scopes, more owners running a real safety program, more specs written by an outside consultant.
So what's actually going on
What the spec is asking for is a signature from a licensed professional engineer.
When an RFP calls for an arc flash hazard analysis run to IEEE 1584, protective device coordination, relay settings, or commissioning support, that work has to be sealed by somebody licensed. Installation is a different thing and it doesn't carry a seal, however well you do it. So the award goes to whoever can put both halves in one proposal.
From where you sit it looks like you lost on price, or lost a relationship. Usually you lost on a box you were never set up to check.
The contractors winning that work are rarely better in the field than you are. They have an engineering partner standing behind the bid. Worth sitting with for a minute, because the two things most contractors try first, sharpening the number and adding crew, do nothing about the actual barrier.
Once the stamp is covered
The bids you have been sitting out become bids you can put a number on, and the clients who wanted to give you more work have a way to do it. There is more than one route to that, and they are not equally good. Hiring a PE, subbing the engineering out job by job, and working with a firm that doesn't self-perform construction carry very different costs and very different risks.