Everybody in this trade wants to talk about the number. Almost nobody wants to talk about the twenty minutes before the number, which is the only part that decides whether the number is any good.
What follows is a site walk in the order a working excavation contractor runs it. Not a checklist assembled from a textbook. An order, repeated on every job for twenty-eight-years, because an order is what stops you from missing the one thing that takes the profit.
The Belief That Has to Go First
Most contractors walk a site to confirm what the plans already told them. That is backwards.
The plans are a drawing of what somebody wants. The site is the thing you have got to dig. The walk exists to find what the drawing left out, and the gap between those two things is where every dollar of an underbid lives.
Foresight is not a talent some men are born with. It is a checklist, run in an order, every single time. Here is the order.
One: Water, Before Anything Else
The first thing to look at on any site is where the water goes. Not the dig. Water.
Where does it come from, where does it sit, and where is it going once you change the shape of this ground? Off-site water is the one that gets people, because it is not on the plan and it does not care what your scope says. A neighbour's yard draining across the property line. Gutters dumping at the corner of a foundation. A ditch line somebody filled in years ago that still wants to be a ditch line.
It is worth knowing what a failed job looks like, because it is always the same list. A backyard with three contractors already through it and none of them fixed: no water provisions, nothing slowing the water down, nothing redirecting it, nothing pushing the off-site water around, gutters not redirected the way they should be, not enough topsoil, and the grading completely wrong.
Every one of those is a site walk item. Every one of them is cheaper to price than to fix.
Two: Access, and How Many Times You Are Going to Move
Can the truck and trailer get in? Where does the machine sit? Where does the spoil go?
If the spoil has nowhere to live it gets stacked and then moved a second time, and that second move is real money and completely invisible on a drawing. So is the return trip when another trade is not finished and you have to come back.
Access is also a walk-away item. When a path is being cleared it is going to be two machines wide. If limbs are raking down the side of the machine, that is a job to walk away from, because destroying your own equipment to make a customer happy is not a trade worth making.
Three: What Is Underneath, and How Much of It You Can Actually Know
Rock. Water table. Old fill. An old system nobody has a drawing for. A tie-in somebody else was supposed to have finished.
You are not going to know all of it, and that is fine. The job of the walk is to sort what is out there into two piles: what you can see, and what you cannot.
That second pile is what decides the pricing method, and the rule is short enough to run in about ten seconds. If you can see the whole job before you start it, price it. If you cannot see the bottom of it, go time and material. Rock you cannot see, water you cannot see, a tie-in somebody else was supposed to have done, an old system nobody has a drawing for: that is not a job you put a flat number on.
Four: The Finished Shape, Decided Before the Dig
Stand on the site and look at the job after it is done. What does this slope want to be? Where does the low point end up?
One hard rule is worth stealing outright: if you cannot run a riding lawnmower across a finished slope sideways, it is not good enough.
That reads like a quality standard. It is actually an estimating tool, because it tells you how much dirt has to move to make the finished thing right instead of merely legal. That is a quantity, and quantities belong in bids. Most arguments about yardage are really arguments about what finished means, and they are always cheaper to have before the machine arrives.
Five: Now Open the Plans
Quantities first. Existing contours against finished contours, area by area, and what you are looking for is the average depth of cut and the average depth of fill across each area. Depth times area gives bank yards.
Bank yards is the only honest starting number, and it is the number most people skip because they jump straight to how many trucks.
Then deal with the fact that the dirt in the ground and the dirt on the truck are not the same dirt. It swells coming out and it shrinks going back in. Clay does one thing, sand does another, and rock does something else again. Carry a rule of thumb rather than a decimal place, carry the same one on every job, and check it against what actually came out of the hole. That is the only way anybody ever learns what their own dirt does.
Estimating software will return a number to two decimal places and it will be confidently wrong, because it does not know what your dirt does. You have to know what your dirt does.
Six: Spec Decisions Are Bid Decisions
Some material calls have to be made on the walk, not at the supply house on day two.
No corrugated pipe for drainage. Slick pipe for gutter drains and drainage, because corrugated collapses and clogs and does not have the vertical strength PVC has. There is a schedule 20 plastic pipe a lot of people use for gutter drains: schedule 35 is the minimum worth using. At code or above code on everything, with nothing short changed.
The contractor who priced corrugated is cheaper on paper. He is not cheaper by the time somebody digs it up again.
Seven: The Bid Sheet, Filled In From the Top
Only now does the sheet come out. The same page, filled in the same order, on every job.
The value of a standard sheet is not the arithmetic. It is that a page you always fill in the same way makes you notice the line you left blank.
Eight: The Honest Conversation on the Spot
If you see a problem, say it right there, whether it wins the job or not.
Here is what actually happens in this trade. A customer wants a decorative sidewalk down to a beach by her lake. One contractor says great, I can do that. He builds the walk and the beach and never thinks about the water coming at it, and that turns into a change order for him later. The honest version is to notice it at the start, build the walk, do the drainage all at one time, and be straight about a real price going in.
They are going to pay what it is going to cost no matter what. It is just how the contractor packages the way they sell it. And if you do not see those problems, you are probably not ready for this type of work yet.
Being honest from the get-go, whether it wins the job or not, has got more jobs than it has lost over twenty-eight-years.
Run It Monday
Water. Access. What is underneath. The finished shape. Then the plans. Then the sheet. Then the honest conversation.
Run that order on the next job you look at and you will find at least one thing you would have priced wrong. That is not a talent you were born without. It is a walk, in an order, every single time.