How to Bid Plumbing Jobs Profitably: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Bid Plumbing Jobs: 7 Steps

From our experience working with hundreds of plumbing businesses—as well as HVAC, electrical, and other trades—we’ve identified seven essential steps in the bidding process. These steps are geared toward commercial projects, but also apply to most residential plumbing jobs.

Step 1: Review the Specifications

If the type of work you’re building an estimate for is commercial, such as a construction project, you’ll usually receive an RFP (Request for Proposal) containing detailed specifications of the plumbing job. 

Study the specifications carefully and ask questions before you start working on your plumbing bid. 

Step 2: Analyze the Drawings

Examine all drawings carefully, including blueprints and architectural drawings, if available. These, in addition to the specifications, should give you a detailed overview of the scope of work involved, which will influence your labor costs, the cost of materials, and the equipment necessary to carry out the plumbing work. 

Step 3: Perform a Quantity Takeoff

A quantity takeoff is a list of all the materials required for the job, including their costs. Using the blueprints, calculate exactly how much of each item you’ll need. 

Add up the cost of all the materials (including any markup) and include this in your cost estimate to calculate your total price.

Step 4: Work Out Labor Costs

Now that you know the scope of the job, you can work out how many plumbers (including journeymen and master plumbers) you’ll need to carry out the work and how long the job will take to estimate your total labor costs.

Step 5: Factor in Overhead and Profit Margin

Now that you know your operating costs (steps 3 and 4 above), make sure to include a percentage of your overhead costs, too. These include costs such as rent, utilities, insurance, admin staff, trucks and travel to the job site, equipment, and more.

Finally, you should add in profit to the overall estimate.

Step 6: Create Your Plumbing Estimate

Now, you are ready to build your estimate, which should include a clear description of the plumbing service, remodel or installation you will provide (for example, “water heater replacement”), and the estimated cost of that service. 

You should also list the materials you will be using, with costs for each, and the total price of the estimate, including taxes.

Remember to include the date, a reference number, and state how long the estimate is valid (for example, 30 days).

Step 7: Review & Present Your Proposal

Once you have drafted your estimate, review and consider having someone else review it. It’s also wise to compare your bid to any previous plumbing jobs of a similar size to ensure there is no discrepancy in price.

Once you have completed these steps and you are satisfied with your estimate, your bid is ready to present to the potential customer. 

The Challenges of Traditional Estimates

Many plumbing businesses compile estimates manually or use spreadsheets or estimate templates to help them. This can be problematic, especially if your business is commercially focused or if you want to grow it beyond a couple of trucks. 

Common issues include:

• Difficulty managing and tracking multiple tasks: Such as following up on past estimates, ordering parts, and rescheduling appointments.

• Miscalculations that lead to over- or underestimating: This can result from errors like pairing up the wrong photo with the wrong property, or failing to relay a critical detail to a CSR over the phone.

• Poor presentation: Delivering an estimate drawn up in the truck in a disorganized way appears messy and unprofessional. 

• Delays in delivering estimates: Creating estimates manually is time consuming, which can lead to you being outbid by a competitor.

In our experience, the most efficient way to produce accurate plumbing estimates that win you profitable plumbing jobs is to use plumbing bidding software like ServiceTitan. This helps to organize the entire bidding process all from one place, including creating an accurate bid with tiered pricing options, automating follow-ups to ensure no outstanding bids are forgotten, and tracking bid performance. This is tedious or nearly impossible to do with a manual bidding process.

How ServiceTitan’s Plumbing Bidding Software Helps Win Profitable Plumbing Jobs

ServiceTitan’s plumbing estimating software helps plumbing contractors save time and produce accurate estimates for commercial and residential customers swiftly and efficiently, with no need to use any manual processes. Our solution provides a complete project management system that gives you an exact view of the time, costs, and margins for every plumbing job and helps you manage the entire bidding process and plumbing workflow. 

Here are nine tips on how to improve your bidding process for plumbing jobs using ServiceTitan’s estimating software, where applicable:

Tip #1: Improve Plumbing Estimating Training

• Boost frequency of training sessions

• Provide training in key growth areas

Train your team on how to perform a comprehensive analysis of residential and commercial plumbing projects, so they can identify all potential problems and the best solutions to satisfy clients' needs. This becomes even more significant in the world of commercial plumbing contract jobs, which typically rely on the lowest bidder from subcontractors' construction bids.

“If you win, you start wondering, ‘OK, I was the lowest price…Did I miss anything?’ I never want to be competing on that,” says Ian Goldberg, president of the commercial division at Frank Gay Services, a Central Florida-based provider of commercial plumbing, HVACR, and electrical services. “You’d rather be competing based on work quality, establishing a relationship, and getting calls. You want to own something from start to finish,” he explains.

Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air in Virginia invests in weekly training sessions for the technicians and salespeople to improve communication skills, the art of upselling, and how to explain complicated topics to customers to close more contracts.

The best plumbing estimators excel at problem-solving, communication, and maximizing sales opportunities. Find out where your team can grow, and provide specialized training in key areas so your entire team can succeed.

Tip #2: Dispatch for Profit

• Send the right person to the right job

• Focus on communication skills

When it comes to big-ticket plumbing proposals, your best communicators are indispensable.

"It’s really important to send the right person to the right job,” says Nikolai Matveev, owner of Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air. “Good communicators are not always really good on the technical side, or it’s the opposite, and somebody really good at the technical stuff isn’t really good in communication. That’s one of the biggest obstacles, to find the people who can do both really efficiently.”

Many plumbing companies find it’s more efficient and effective to separate these two jobs, relying on a salesperson with time and expertise to evaluate and estimate larger jobs for homeowners or commercial clients. Dedicated estimators who know how to bid commercial plumbing jobs (such as a new construction) will likely produce a more accurate plumbing bid sheet since they thoroughly understand blueprints, specs, and bidding documents.

While not every tech has the ability to fluently communicate with customers, with ServiceTitan’s dispatch software, you can make sure you send the most skilled communicators with plumbing sales experience to high-value jobs. This means you don’t need to hire outside sales representatives to pitch for specific plumbing sales jobs. You can utilize staff who have the skills and years of experience in sales from your existing team. 

That’s the strategy of Nikolai Matveev, who sometimes sends his plumbing manager to do estimates for big-ticket projects, such as water- or sewer-line replacements.

ServiceTitan dispatch software enables your company to attribute certain skills to certain technicians, and build a technician scorecard so you know who’s capturing the highest average tickets and generating the most leads. You can also adjust the schedule accordingly in cases where a plumbing contractor is only working part-time (versus full-time). 

With ServiceTitan, you can dispatch the most suitable technician to every single job. 

Technicians are also given a head start on the sales process with integrated property data information, so they know as much about the customer’s property as possible, including past work and any other communication with your company. The software records the complete service history, the techs who conducted previous services, plumbing systems, and any current warranties, memberships or service agreements. 

Note: ServiceTitan offers an add-on product, Dispatch Pro, with more advanced dispatching features. Using machine learning, Dispatch Pro’s algorithm runs thousands of scenarios to find the best technician for every job. This, plus its intuitive dispatch board automations saves your dispatchers time, improves customer service, and maximizes profit. 

Tip #3: Utilize a Flat-Rate Pricebook

• Maintain a uniform pricing structure

• Clearly communicate to customers

Plumbing contractors calculate their prices using one of two pricing models:

1. Time & Materials (Hourly Rate): Costs are based on the time spent doing the work labor cost), and for the materials used on the job (material costs).

2. Flat Rate: Charges one fixed total cost for the job, where time and materials are included.

We recommend plumbing businesses use the flat-rate pricing model so that customers know exactly how much a job will cost, regardless of how long it takes. Flat-rate pricing also incentivizes plumbing techs to work efficiently, so they can cover more jobs and bring in more revenue. 

Ron Lutwiller, chief operating officer at The Roby Family of Companies in Charlotte, N.C,. was hired to make operational system changes. A “true operations guy,” Lutwiller needed freedom to move the company forward. 

“I was a huge opponent of flat rates,” he says. “I thought people would kind of balk at the idea, you’re only here for this long but you’re charging me this?”

But instead of complaints, he found benefits. 

“What it does is it takes the nit-picking out of it,” Lutwiller says. “With time and material, inevitably the customer is standing over our technician and looking at his watch. That doesn’t happen with flat rates.” 

“They understand what the price is and to a certain extent they really don’t care how long it takes you. You’ve already given them a price and there’s no surprise to it.” 

ServiceTitan’s Dynamic, Integrated Pricebook

ServiceTitan’s pricebook features help plumbing business owners ensure that every bid is accurate, every detail is documented, and every lead is followed up on. There are several ways to do this:

• Upload a pricebook that your business is already using, so you don’t need to start from scratch if you already work with one. 

• Build your pricebook from scratch by adding each item or product one by one (useful if you are a small business). 

• Use ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro add-on product, which comes with a wide range of prebuilt, flat-rate plumbing services to give you a head start on building out your pricebook.

Standard pricebook features include:

• Quick and Efficient Editing Tools:

  • Apply bulk edits or markups on multiple services or materials to select groups or across your entire pricebook.

  • Edit individual services or items.

  • Set up rules to dynamically automate pricing updates.

• Automated Pricing Updates: Prices are accurate and up-to-date across all devices (desktop, tablet, Android/iOS mobile app), eliminating outdated pricing, obsolete products, and manual updates.

• Access to Industry Suppliers via Pricebook Connect: Create a plumbing pricebook that’s connected to our range of key suppliers so that your proposals reflect the actual materials that will be used (rather than generic placeholders).

You can also upgrade to Pricebook Pro, which does the heavy lifting for you by: 

• Giving you a well-built plumbing pricebook from the outset, based on plumbing industry average prices and best practices, saving you hours of pricebook setup time. 

• Keeping on top of price updates. Our team monitors changes in supplier pricing on your behalf and updates prices on a monthly basis.

• Providing a comprehensive range of pre-designed flat-rate services based on industry best practices and trends, which keep track of updated prices. 

These features save a huge amount of time and streamline the whole process of managing your plumbing pricing. This means you can be confident that your plumbing business is always offering the latest prices and the best flat-rate services, at the right prices for profitability when you build your estimate.

Tip #4: Present Customers with Tiered Options

• Empower customers in buying decisions

• Explain the benefits of each option

While plumbing system work requires technical expertise, it's equally critical that your team can explain important information to the customer. Presenting customers with good-better-and-best options at different price points empowers customers to choose the option that's best for them, enabling your team to finish the job.

At Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air, field techs present customers with multiple options for each portion of the job estimate.

“They’re required to give the customer a couple of options and educate them,” Matveev says. “We don’t leave customers in the dark. We want to make sure we’re taking advantage of every call we go to, and that it’s benefiting the customer.”

A well-written, detailed plumbing proposal helps your commercial or residential customers understand the costs associated with installation, repairs, or equipment upgrades.

With ServiceTitan, plumbing contractors can easily prepare Good-Better-Best proposals, either in real-time when out in the field (via their mobile tablet) or back at the office. 

In particular, using ServiceTitan mobile on a phone or tablet enables plumbing techs to access estimate templates and create proposals while at the job site by selecting and attaching pricebook items to the relevant photos and visuals. This helps explain the need for each repair or service to the customer, so they can select their option and approve and e-sign the estimate there and then. Then, once the estimate is approved, ServiceTitan connects it to the rest of the plumbing workflow such as scheduling and billing. 

Tip # 5: Recommend Memberships (Service Contracts)

• Generate recurring revenue

• Bring in reliable work for the slow season

Signing up customers to memberships or maintenance agreements is one of the most reliable ways of generating recurring income for a service business. It’s also an effective way to bring in reliable income during the slower seasons.

When plumbing techs visit a site for a routine service call or to price a new job, training them to look more holistically at the property can often uncover opportunities for other work, including recurring service contracts.

With ServiceTitan, you can create membership agreements from scratch or adapt and improve an existing agreement.

Plumbing contractors can select agreements from a wide range of customizable templates and set up and store as many as needed to suit different membership types, such as residential or commercial. 

Agreements are easy to set up and, once up and running, can be integrated with your plumbing estimates and workflow.

Tip #6: Offer Instant Financing

• Present affordable options to customers

• Expand ticket sizes

Plumbing contractors who offer financing increase sales opportunities, because all options become more affordable to their customers.

With ServiceTitan Mobile's integrated customer financing, a tech's tablet automatically displays financing options to customers when they view the good-better-and-best options.

"If you walk into any sales opportunity and you have multiple different options, it's an absolute game-changer," says Carly Armstrong, National Account Manager at ServiceTitan. 

"Offer these each and every time, and you're going to see a huge impact on the bottom line of the business."

ServiceTitan's partnerships with top providers GreenSky, Service Finance, Turns, and Financeit streamline the process so companies in the plumbing industry can easily offer monthly payment options to customers. Plumbing companies customize their own financing plans, so all financing solutions remain profitable and can be approved within seconds, on-site.

“When you talk about integrated financing, it’s not just whether they finance or not,” says Darius Lyvers, Chief Operating Officer at F.H. Furr Plumbing, Heating, Air Conditioning and Electrical in Northern Virginia. “It opens the door for the customer to afford all your products, and they may buy something they otherwise wouldn’t have if you hadn’t presented financing options."

Tip #7: Automate Lead Follow-Up

• Establish follow-up procedures

• Focus on customer solutions

When customers hesitate to commit on the spot, follow-up procedures are critical. Determine who follows up on open estimates, and establish a system to document every interaction with a customer. 

With ServiceTitan’s estimating software, you can automate this process by sending reminder emails or texts to follow up on open plumbing estimates. This eases the workloads of office and field staff and means that no outstanding estimates are forgotten.

Because all the data for every estimate is stored within ServiceTitan — customer information, the estimate details, and any queries — this can be easily accessed and used to follow up the estimate, increasing the likelihood of closing the sale. 

Tip # 8: Integrate with Other Business Processes

• Streamline the entire workflow to save time

• Improve the customer experience

Using an integrated software solution like ServiceTitan means you can incorporate every step of the estimating process within the same software as your entire workflow, from the initial phone call, to creating the estimate, fulfilling the job, and collecting payment. This saves time compared to using different software for each process, reduces the chance of errors, and improves the whole customer experience.

Once the customer has agreed to the plumbing estimate, ServiceTitan lets you:

• Generate electronic purchase orders. 

• Order equipment and materials.

• Manage the job by logging any change orders as they arise and have those changes automatically apply to all relevant processes.

• Schedule and dispatch the work order.

• Generate the plumbing invoice, send it via email to the customer, and automatically file it electronically.

• Accept check or credit card payments at the job site via mobile or through the ServiceTitan portal, speeding up cash flow and reducing the need for follow-up calls.

• Integrate directly with accounting tools such as Intacct and QuickBooks so you don't have to change your current processes.

Tip #9: Track Plumbing Job Data

• Capture real-time data

• Evaluate business growth

Monitoring data from your residential and commercial plumbing jobs is essential to increase your company's efficiency and boost your bottom line.

ServiceTitan's software provides an overall snapshot of your company's performance, as well as the ability to run detailed reports down to each tech, including generated revenue, average ticket price, and closing rate. 

With our technician scorecard, you can stay up-to-date on every plumbing tech’s stats, such as number of calls per day, estimates closed, revenue generated, memberships sold, and more. Likewise, our CSR scorecard lets you monitor metrics for your customer service team, such as number of calls handled, conversions, etc. 

Real-time data gives you insight into how you can improve your plumbing estimating and bidding process, so you can increase leads and grow your plumbing company.

5 Bonus Tips for Building Plumbing Estimates

In addition, consider these five extra tips when building plumbing estimates:

1. Charge a Service Call Fee

No matter your billing method, consider a fee for a service call to weed out customers simply looking for the lowest price. If you get the job, discount the fee from the total. 

2. Always Do a Site Visit

Always visit the job site, rather than doing an estimate over the phone. You need a thorough understanding of the type of job you’re estimating for, and you never know what you might run into. 

3. Overestimate

Overestimate the time you think a job will take, especially for big jobs. Coming in under the anticipated cost is always welcomed by the customer. And don’t forget to factor in any additional expenses such as permits, rental equipment or concrete work.

4. Consider Potential Problems

Consider the difficulty of the job. Will parking be tough because of the location, or is extra travel time necessary? Is the age of the structure likely to cause problems you don’t expect? Will any facet of the plumbing job need to be subcontracted? 

5. Educate Customers

Explain to the customer what’s included in the plumbing estimate and what’s not. This is particularly important for renovation jobs where you could discover problems like code violations or deteriorated pipes that should be replaced. 

And, if yours isn’t the winning bid, don’t lower your price to get the job. Not every opportunity is the right one.

Ready to Try ServiceTitan to Help Bid for Plumbing Jobs?

When it comes to bidding for construction projects or plumbing contracts, it's imperative to know how to price plumbing jobs accurately and profitably.

Plumbers who use ServiceTitan's plumbing estimating software remove the guesswork and uncertainty from commercial and residential HVAC estimations, equipping their teams to accurately price all plumbing contracts, and clearly communicate to customers what the cost covers. 

"If you don’t have the right procedures, then even if you hire the right people, they still aren’t going to be very productive," concludes Nikolai Matveev of Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air.

ServiceTitan gives you the ability to estimate plumbing jobs from anywhere, follow up and track those bids, and integrate them into the rest of your business processes so you can bring in more revenue and grow your plumbing business.