Chapter 15 — Self-Check Quiz

B. A missing addendum acknowledgment goes to responsiveness — whether the bidder bid what was asked, the way it was asked — and it is generally not curable after the opening, because letting a bidder confirm coverage after seeing everyone else's number would let them choose whether to be bound. Owners sometimes waive it where the addendum had no price effect, but you may never plan on that.

C. Profit $672,000; cost budget $21,728,000; actual cost $23,900,800; result −$1,500,800. Recovery revenue = $1,500,800 ÷ 0.03 = $50,026,667 — about 2.2 more jobs the same size, all of them perfect.

C. Licensing goes to whether the bidder can do the work — responsibility — and is usually curable through investigation and explanation. A, B, and D are all responsiveness defects judged from the four corners of the submission at the opening.

C. $28,000 × 6 = $168,000. On a $22,400,000 win at 3% margin, that is 25% of the job's entire profit spent before notice to proceed.

D. Negotiated work cost $22,167 per win against public hard bid's $155,214 — seven times cheaper, and it carries roughly double the margin. This is why experienced contractors are constantly, quietly trying to move up that table.

C. The proposed team, at 25 of 100 points. Kestrel scored 24 of 25 there, lost the fee category to every competitor, and won the selection by twelve points. The owner is buying a group of humans for two years, not a logo.

B. You cannot price your way out of a clause. Contingency makes you a higher bidder who still owns the risk, and in a deep field the winner will be whoever carried the least contingency against it — usually the bidder who did not read it.

B. The error must be clerical or mathematical rather than a judgment call, material, promptly noticed in writing, provable from contemporaneous documents, and raised before award. The relief is withdrawal, not correction — you do not get to raise your number and keep the job. Requirements and remedies vary substantially by jurisdiction.

C. When five estimating departments read the same documents and reach roughly the same conclusion and one does not, the probability that one firm simply out-executed five simultaneously is small. Being low by a lot is a diagnostic result, not a victory.

B. Self-perform content is the one number on a go/no-go page that feels like an advantage instead of a risk. It is real, and it is also the reliable seduction — both the RMTA garage (62% concrete) and Bell Harbor ($6.9M of tilt-up) score a 5 there and fail on everything that determines whether you get paid.

B. A mathematically unbalanced bid is not automatically improper. A materially unbalanced bid — one where the imbalance creates reasonable doubt that the owner will pay the lowest ultimate cost — can be and is rejected as nonresponsive by public owners.

C. Nadia locks at 1:25 for a 2:00 deadline — about 35 minutes out. The lock exists so that the most expensive decisions of the year are not made by tired people at 1:50 p.m. Everything after the lock is clerical, and clerical failures are what actually kill bids.

False. It protects the owner, using the contractor's credit. If you refuse to sign, the surety pays the owner up to the penal sum and then collects from you under the general indemnity agreement — and your bonding program takes the damage on top.

False. Conditioning a sealed public bid generally makes it nonresponsive, because a conditioned bid is not the same offer everyone else made. Your clarifications go into the question period, in writing, before bids — and the answer returns as an addendum binding every bidder equally.

False as a general statement — it is usually lawful, though many public agencies prohibit it by rule, some jurisdictions require subcontractor listing with the bid and bar substitution without consent, and some private contracts forbid it. The practical case against it is stronger than the legal one: you lose your best subcontractors, and the sub who beat a shopped number by 8% did it by cutting scope, cutting supervision, or making a mistake.

False. In the United States it is prosecuted under federal and state antitrust law — the Sherman Act and its state analogues — and can be charged criminally against individuals, not only companies, with debarment, treble damages in private suits, and loss of licensure alongside. There is no small version of it.

False, and this is one of the largest scoring differentials in qualifications-based selection. Every person on a selection committee has lived through a project going wrong. Naming the risks proves you thought about their project and establishes that what you tell them later will be true.

False unless the instructions to bidders expressly allow it. Attendance is typically proven by the sign-in sheet, and if the meeting is mandatory and you are not on the sheet, the bid is dead before it is written. Read the instructions; do not assume.

A job bid without a named superintendent runs with someone who is learning or someone stretched across two sites. Understaffed jobs are where competent-person inspection tags go stale, toolbox talks get skipped, and pre-task planning stops happening — because those all require somebody with time. The Northgate scaffold near-miss investigation found three failures, and the third was a crew running behind under an unwritten pressure to make it up. That pressure was created eighteen months earlier, in a conference room, by a decision to take on work the company could not staff.

The garage scored 262 of 500 and tripped a knockout on contract terms — no differing site conditions clause, a no-damage-for-delay clause, and $9,500/CD in liquidated damages. Its whole upside was $775,000 at 2.5% margin, while one plausible subgrade event cost $515,600, or 66.5% of that upside, with no recovery mechanism. Expected value of the pursuit was −$37,300, and expected value given a win was −$23,250 — winning was worth less than nothing. Ashfield scored 384, with a client that pays, a delivery method that bounds the downside under a GMP, and a real fee; expected value of that pursuit was +$405,250 at a 25% win probability. Both pursuits cost roughly the same to chase, which is the entire decision.

The arithmetic first. The gap is $364,000. If the unknown firm cannot perform, your replacement is the known sub at $1,842,000 and you own that $364,000 — 72% of the entire job's profit riding on a fax.

Steps, 1:14 to 1:25. The second estimator calls the unknown firm immediately while the first keeps leveling. Three specific questions, not "do you have everything": Did you include Addenda 1 through 5? Did you include the test and balance in Section 23 05 93? Is the controls package in your number or by others? Simultaneously check licensing in the jurisdiction and whether they are bondable to the subcontract bond amount the documents require. Then request a one-line email confirming full scope per plans and specifications including all addenda, controls, and test and balance. If that email lands before the lock, you may carry it. If it does not, you carry the known sub at $1,842,000 and you probably lose the job — which is the correct outcome.

What you do not do: call the known subcontractor, tell them they are $364,000 high, and ask them to sharpen their pencil. That is bid shopping, and the cost of it is that your best subcontractors stop quoting you.

Three days ago. Confirm coverage by division at T−2 days and chase the gaps: a division with only one real bidder is a division with no market. Prequalify unfamiliar subcontractors before bid day rather than in an eleven-minute phone call. And carry a defensible plug for every division so that a late quote is an opportunity to improve, not a forced decision.