LIEF's bidding relationship with a patented prefab wall-system manufacturer had grown into a real pipeline. But we were still pricing bid by bid, on judgment, with no model connecting labor cost to material cost across the whole book of work.
I had my team derive a pricing model straight from every bid the group had actually run, instead of continuing to price each new bid on judgment alone.
Once you've got enough real transactions, the relationship between two cost variables, labor and material in this case, becomes something you can actually measure instead of guess at. A model built off real bids removes the guesswork and warns you early when a new bid looks wrong before you send it.
Across fourteen live bids, labor fit to material at an R-squared of 0.999. Tight enough that any bid falling far off that line is now a signal to double check it before it goes out. The margin of error on pricing tightened from plus or minus 14 percent to plus or minus 6 percent as the model matured.
Once you've run enough real transactions, stop pricing the next one from memory. Start pricing it off the pattern your own data is already showing you.
A person still decides what to do when a bid falls off the line the model expects. The model narrows where judgment is needed, it doesn't replace the judgment.