LIEF's Strata partners had three bids to turn around the same week, including a big office campus job where word came back that an out-of-state general contractor with no local crews had already put in a competing bid.
Before I priced our own number, I had the team reverse-engineer the structure of the competitor's bid. What they priced high, what they priced low, and why, instead of quoting blind.
A competitor's number tells its own story. A shop bidding drywall high specifically so its labor number can look low, with no in-house crews and no local presence, is pricing on hope, not capacity. That gap is exactly where our actual crews had the advantage, and it set a realistic range for our own labor number instead of us just guessing.
We prioritized the two live bids that week around a target range grounded in the competitor's own numbers instead of an assumption.
Read the other bid before you write yours. The shape of someone else's price tells you exactly where they're weak.
That's judgment under partial information. Reading what a stranger's number is protecting, and where their confidence is real versus performed.