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I believe you are asking where you get your leads from. I don't have all the answers but hopefully some of this will help. There are many different resources you can use. In our city we can get access to structures that have been condemned (garages, sheds, homes, buildings etc), you have online lead services (bluebook, reed construction data etc), we have a business courier newspaper that talks about real estate develop and plans which may give you a heads up on structures that may be coming down. I recently came up with an idea (which I'm sure is not original but I'm young in age and in this industry) to start to go to pre-bid meeting, even if it's a job I'm not interested in, in order to meet specific contractors and have a few minutes of face time to tell my story. I'm sure that other members that have more success and experience will share more with you. Good luck.
Most of the jobs, come either from referrals or from relationships.
The best way to start out to start getting invited to bid on projects, is to start calling on your local general contractors and getting information on how to get onto their bidders list.
They will ask for information about your company, insurance, bonding, previous experience, etc. Soon afterwards you should start seeing results. To keep you bidding and looking for more work, this can be done but your front desk person or a competent person that can understand what you do and talk intelligently.
One thing I used to do as a marketing manager for a company, was to make a route where I visited GC's offices about every 2 weeks or once a month depending on the work load. See what they are bidding on, there is a lot of stuff that was out there that you may never see. As the old saying goes, early bird catches the worm. It was amazing how much handshake work you can get from it.
Also if you have a contact at company, ask them to pass your information on to the other estimators in their offices. You may even set up a meeting to see if you can meet them all at one time.
I get most of my leads from advertising in the Blue Book in NY & NJ. alot of tail chasing, but i'm fairly new to the game. Contacts are always good to have. I had one good hit and now the GC is using me exclusively. I need to hit the pavement some more.
Thankyou so much for all the info I just signed up for the reeds report. And last month we started getting on the bigger GC bid list. The yellowbook has given me all my demo work so far. I got it cheap with my Excavation ad.
I use the constrcution data news ... cdcnews.com. It provides a good amount of leads for GCs that i havent worked with before. It only covers a few states in new england though.
I'm fairly young to the business so I don't have a million contacts that'll keep the phones buzzing just yet. So I've sort of had to be creative in finding leads for jobs. You think it's tough finding demo work, try being a concrete cutter :)
There are lots of places to find leads, some are free but you have to do a fair amount of digging. As far as paid services go I've tried alot of them and none of them even came close to Reed Construction Data The trick to free leads is bookmarking. Always save what you find so you can find it again.
Not sure what size jobs you look for and where but here are some examples of different agencies I've bookmarked.
Question for all Estimaters
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