Edgevanta Weekly 🚀 🛣 12.15.23

Edgevanta Weekly is your essential guide to dominating the construction bidding and building world with the latest tech, market trends, and wisdom. We made this for construction folks who are interested in continual improvement 💪. 

Social Post Of The Week: Doing things that don't scale

This came from this essay about Airbnb.

Carbon Removal in the Midwest

Last fall, on a farm in Northern Wisconsin, a farmer spread 1,421 metric tons of crushed volcanic rock on his fields before planting soybeans and corn. The rock dust, from a startup called Lithos, serves two purposes: For farmers, it increases yields. It also helps capture carbon.

A Favorite New Tech Tool

We use a tool called Loom to record videos internally at our company and also to get messages to customers. It saves us countless meetings per week. We have been kicking around a Loom use case for bid reviews.

Imagine this: Instead of sitting through a 3 hour bid review, you toss in your earbud and watch a quick video of the estimator running through the their bid on your phone. Then, you provide comments before doing a final review. You just saved everyone a lot of time and no one had to sit in a 3 hour meeting. What would prevent you from trying out this strategy on an upcoming bid? How could you still save time and minimize downside? Send us your ideas!

Biggest Bid Spreads Ever? Forever, ever?

Last week we thought a $350 million bid spread would raise some eyebrows, but that's nothing compared to one shared by one of our readers!! 😳

We understand that it was awarded. The next time a job doesn't awarded due to being over estimate, pass one along!! 😉

Credit to our friend JL for the share.

Stoic Wisdom 🦾 for the Week

“Measure your success against others and you'll be unhappy when they win - and less likely to receive help from them due to your jealousy. Measure your success against yourself and you can be happy when others win - and more likely to receive help from them thanks to your support.” – James Clear

Reflect on this as we embark on another week of bidding and building.

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Warm regards,

Tristan

About The Author:

Tristan Wilson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Edgevanta. We make software that helps contractors win more work at the right price.

He is a 4th Generation Contractor, construction enthusiast, bidding nerd, ultramarathoner, and paving nut. He worked his way up the ladder at Allan Myers in the Mid-Atlantic and his family’s former business Barriere Construction before starting Edgevanta with his Co-Founder Matt in Nashville, where the company is based. He can be reached at [email protected]