Once you’ve received multiple bids, how do you choose which pavement marking contractor to work with? These easy to follow steps will help make your decision easier.
Assuming you’ve followed our recommendations from our previous blog, “How to Gather Bids,” we will now dive into some suggestions for choosing the contractor to work with.
If your company or municipal policy requires you to take the lowest bid, your problem is (temporarily) solved. Pick the lowest bidder and that part of the process is complete. But, quite often, the lowest bidders aren’t able to perform to the standards you expected.
At G-FORCE we create thousands of bid proposals each year and we don’t win them all. But, we have been called back to fix the work from the low bidder contractor more times than we care to count.
While parking lot striping and pavement markings might seem like a commodity, they are, in fact, a service. They say there are three elements to choosing a service provider (price, quality, level of customer service) and you can only pick two.
It is indeed rare to find the lowest cost provider that can also deliver the very best in quality and customer service. It’s simply not sustainable as a business model. Something has to give and, often, it’s the quality of the workmanship or the overall customer service experience that suffers (or both).
Also, you may find contractors you have to chase to get the bid, or a call, or an answer to your question. Is it worth $500 in savings on a $10K project to have to hound the contractor for answers or a returned call? You should feel good about your choice of contractor. Find someone you feel you can trust and then hold them accountable for that trust. There are so many variables between contractors that you must play detective sometimes to flush them out.
Some customers throw out the lowest and highest bids and work their way from the middle. Occasionally, even the very best in the business will come in as the lowest bidder. It seems to me to be premature to just toss bids as a matter of course. Look closely at the bids. You can easily tell a thorough bid from one that is very short on details. You can get a feel for the business’ “personality” from the interactions with the estimator and by viewing their bid proposal.
Close examination of the various bids might reveal small details and extras that are planned with one contractor that aren’t present with the others. Ask questions!
Google is your friend (but it doesn’t always tell the whole story). Once you’ve narrowed down your choices to a couple of contractors with bids in the zone of reasonableness, now it’s time to do a deeper dive on them.
Ask to see their Certificate of Insurance (COI). For bigger dollar projects, you might request your business be added as an Additional Insured for the duration of the project (only if you choose them, not as part of the vetting process). Hit Google and type in “(company name) reviews” and “(company name) complaints”. Check their Google Business Listing for content. Do they have a website? If not, I don’t think I’d use them. It’s 2024, not 1999.
Ask them what machines they use. Most professional contractors in this space use Graco® airless striping machines and those at the top of their game will have Graco® machines with laser guidance, on board computers, and an AutoLayout function for new parking lot designs. Technology has definitely arrived in the pavement marking space!
One other step you might take is to hit up your local BBB search engine and see what it says about the business you are considering hiring. While I believe the BBB’s usefulness has been mostly displaced by Google Reviews and other info you can easily gather online, it can steer you clear of a bad operator with multiple unresolved complaints. And, it might be able to assist you in resolving a complaint down the road. But, please don’t take a lack of complaints at the BBB as any sort of validation or green light to hire a particular contractor. It’s a less than perfect system. As far as judging whether one business is better than the next because one is a member of the BBB and one is not, again, I think the BBB’s role is diminishing and membership (or lack thereof) doesn’t have the same meaning as it did 10 0r 15 years ago. That’s just my opinion.
Take in all this info and weigh it as you see fit to help you in your final decision.
Once you finally pick the winner, alert their representative and start coordinating the schedule for work. Keep in mind weather often throws a striping company’s schedule into chaos. Be patient if low temps or precipitation are plaguing your region. As mentioned above, now is a good time to ask for the W-9 and COI (optional to add your business as an Additional Insured). As the project date grows nearer, check your weather conditions and touch base with the contractor to finalize arrival times and any preparations you need to make. I go into greater detail on site prep in our next blog.
Choose wisely!
Salute!
Pavement is the first piece of your property that a customer will encounter and the last thing they see. When maintaining curb appeal, proactive care is the only way to mitigate the high costs of parking lot liability.
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G-FORCE was recently featured on 1851 Franchise. Read the full article to discover how we support veterans after their service in becoming successful franchise business owners.
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