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Normally my postings are written hours or days after the event I'm describing, but today, on a very special installment of Deep Beam, I give you a posting mere minutes after the event.

I just had a phone conversation with a GC that I thought was simply to arrange a time to have a different phone conversation tomorrow with my boss. Instead it led to her almost walking away from the job. I'm stunned not only at the direction the call took, but also at how cool I remained through it.

First off, yes I said that the GC was a she, which many of you may know is rare, and I'll continue to call her that even though she is not actually licensed in this state. It's just convenient; she owns the company that has a licensed GC but so far I speak with her more than him.

The gist of things are that she's the higher of two bids by about $300K, and she knows it. Our internal agenda for tomorrows call was to make sure that the low guy hadn't missed something that she had caught, but we told her it was to better understand her costs (also true). When I picked up the phone I hoped I'd get her to say that we're on for tomorrow and that's that. Instead she went right into talking about her number for the Electrical scope of work and how they priced the drawings and specs and her number was fair. Then she went on to say that it was professionally disrespectful to her that we were having phonecalls and not meetings. That was the first time I was stunned by her call. I tried to explain that we hadn't even gotten to the call yet since we kept having calls to set up the call!

The conversation went on and at a certain point I just decided to let her go and I'd say as little as possible since she was off on a tear and going a mile a minute. Pretty soon it came out that each number in the price had a 15% fee added to it for potential mistakes or other cost overruns. She's also charging about 13% straight overhead and profit on everything, therefore the client is paying 28% of the cost of the job that potentially does not go to any physical thing that will be part of his house when it's done. Amazing. When I told her that the other GC wasn't charging the additional 15% overrun fee because if he made a mistake it would come out of his profit she was floored. Basically she wasn't willing to put her profit at risk in the way that is pretty standard in the industry. That 15% delta is going to lose her this job.

At this point I still hoped to get a time to talk tomorrow, but then she went on. She straight out told me that there was no way she could do the job for the lower GCs price. Effectively she was taking herself out of the running in this competition! I thanked her for being candid and told her that if that's the case it was the clients call. A few minutes later the call was over and there was no need to have the one tomorrow.

I'm proud of myself for keeping cool and not punting the call to my boss, but also because I realize that I couldn't have had that conversation a year ago. Not only am I more confident now, but I also have more experience and know better what to say to people who are older and more/differently experienced than I am. It's amazing to have experiences that allow for such clear self-examination.

Feels good.