What’s your social media presence like, and have you built any workflows or automations around your content? Curious what people are actually doing here — what’s your presence like, what content works, and have you built or developed any workflows, content automations, scripts, etc. to make it easier?

Why most of small and medium businesses are not hiring schedulers to build a detailed plan for the works on site ?

A bad estimate doesn't just lose you the bid — it loses you the bid you actually wanted to win. Here's the thing nobody talks about: contractors don't usually lose money because they bid too high. They lose money because they bid too low on the wrong items, and too high on the wrong items — and it cancels out into a number that looks "competitive" but is quietly broken. Most people treat estimating as a math exercise — measure, multiply, add markup, submit. But estimating is really a risk exercise. Every line item you rush through is a bet you're making with your own margin. The pattern I see over and over: 70% of a takeoff is straightforward (walls, slabs, standard finishes). The other 30% — site conditions, scope gaps, ambiguous specs, exclusions — is where the actual risk lives. And that's exactly the part that gets rushed when deadlines are tight. Fix isn't "estimate faster." It's knowing which 30% deserves the time, and building a system so you're not re-solving the same risk every single bid. I've been doing takeoffs and bid prep for 6+ years now (residential, commercial, industrial). Happy to share the checklist I use to flag high-risk line items before a bid goes out — let me know if anyone wants it.

We’ve been cost plus over the years- mostly because the work is self performed and we’ve more or less created ourselves a job but not really a business. We are looking to move into more fixed price model, and wondering what you all are doing and any advice would be great!

I’ll go first. I’m building a system to have AI dig through years of my old supplier and labour invoices and back-calculate what my work actually costs — real unit rates pulled from jobs I’ve already done, not gut feel and a sharp pencil. Tested it on a few invoices so far and it works. Pulled the labour hours, tied them to the right cost codes, spit out a rate. Now the job is scaling it across the whole pile. The thing is, every contractor already has this data. It’s just buried in years of PDFs nobody ever opens again. Mining it turns estimating from guessing into pricing off your own history. Early days, but even those first few invoices had me realizing how much I’ve been leaving on the table. What are you building? Doesn’t have to be finished — what’s the project that’s got you going “if I can pull this off…”?