Most GCs are talented at building a number — but running a tighter preconstruction operation is a different problem. We come in as consultants first. We identify where you're losing time, introduce better workflows, and then integrate it all into a platform built around the improved version of how you work.
We sit with your estimators — not your IT department, not your office manager. We watch how bid day actually runs. Where information gets lost, where things slow down, where your people are doing manually what shouldn't be manual. We ask a lot of questions, take a lot of notes, and look for the patterns.
This is the consulting part. Based on what we observed, we lay out where we think you can run tighter — better sequencing, smarter workflows, new approaches to things you've been doing the hard way for years. We talk it through with your team before we build anything. You decide what makes sense for your shop.
We configure El Bidador around the improved process — your divisions, your sub database, your templates, your markup structure. The platform is built to support the better version of how you work, not to replicate the old one. Everything connects: your subs, your bids, your leveling, your estimate, all in one place.
We're on-site when you go live — at the desk, working through real bids with your team. Once you're running, we don't disappear. As your operation grows and new efficiencies surface, we keep refining the system with you. You call, we answer. That's the engagement.
Built inside a real GC. Run on real bids. Offered to everyone else only after we knew it worked.
Every tool here is built to support a smarter preconstruction operation. We configure each one around what we build together — so the improvements we introduce don't live in a presentation, they live in the software your team uses every day.
Drop in a sub's PDF and it reads it for you — company name, total, line items, alternates, inclusions, exclusions. Structured and ready to compare in seconds. No more retyping numbers off a fax.
Put five subs side by side, see who's covering scope and who's not, and get a straight recommendation on who to award. The kind of leveling that used to take two hours on a spreadsheet now takes minutes.
Ask it what your concrete costs ran on your last three office buildings. Ask it what your average electrical number looks like per square foot. It knows your history and gives you answers from your actual data — not some industry average that has nothing to do with your market.
Send ITBs to your subs in seconds — scoped to the right trades, with the right bid date, pulling straight from your sub database. Subs get a clean landing page to review scope and submit their number. No email chains, no attachments going to the wrong people.
Upload your estimate and it sorts every line — hard costs, GCs, markup, bond, insurance, contingency. Clean breakdown, no manual sorting. Useful when you're trying to figure out where the number is heavy before you send it up the chain.
One place for all your subs — tagged by trade, searchable, and tied directly into your bid invitations and leveling. Subs can register themselves and keep their own info current. Your list stays clean without anyone on your team having to babysit it.
We spent years building numbers on spreadsheets, chasing sub quotes by phone, and losing bid day to a process that was slower than it needed to be. We didn't just build software about it — we studied what was actually causing the slowdown, developed better approaches to the work, and then built a platform that locks those improvements in.
When we sit with your team, we know what we're looking for. We've seen the same bottlenecks in enough shops to know where they usually hide — and we know which improvements move the needle and which ones just look good in a deck. We're not consultants who theorize. We're practitioners who build.
Plan sets, sub bids, your number — that's your competitive edge. Here's exactly how we handle it.
We use the Claude API — the enterprise version, not the free chatbot. Anthropic's terms are clear: what goes through the API doesn't get used to train their models. Your plans aren't someone else's training data.
When you upload a plan set or bid, it gets analyzed and the result comes back to you. We don't hold onto your documents, we don't index them, and we don't do anything with them beyond answering what you asked.
Your project information stays between you and us. We use one AI provider — Anthropic — under their enterprise terms. That's the whole chain. Nobody else is in it.
Enterprise Data Processing Addendum available upon request.
Walk us through how your team runs a bid — start to finish. We'll tell you honestly where we think you can tighten it up, what that engagement looks like, and whether El Bidador is the right fit to support it. No deck. No sales pitch.
We respond within one business day. Come as you are.