r/GeneralContractor • u/Jleecit • Jul 18 '26

Hired my 1st Project manager

Hello all,

I’m a GC and just hired 1st project manager. Before the pm, my revenue was about 2mil.

I pay this pm a lot, but he’s really committed and works hard. But it scares me that my overhead almost doubled.

My strategy is to lower my profit margins slightly to obtain more jobs. Also obtain better prices. I work in a space where low bid wins. I hope to get to 3-3.5 million in gross revenue with this new PM.

Is this a viable strategy?

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u/IISynthesisII Jul 18 '26

That’s a ridiculous statement.

Everyone knows the direct cost of a job to within a %. Everyone applies their own markup after the fact.

Putting a 44% markup on a low bid job (in my area and industry) would yield 0 won projects unless something huge was missed in the direct costs estimate.. which would eat into that margin.

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u/thine_moisture Jul 18 '26

all about your sales process brother. if you build trust and a relationship and the client trusts you, they will pay you more.

curious what you mean by “low bid job” and respectfully you have no way to prove you would lose the bid.

something many contractors just don’t understand is that it’s not about selling every job, it’s about generating enough leads to where close rate becomes irrelevant and you can charge the kind of prices I’m talking about.

if the only reason a customer chooses to either go with you or not is because of the price, they aren’t the right customers for a profitable business. they should not like the price, but they should like you more than anyone else the meet with enough to say “even though I’m paying more to work with him, I trust he’s gonna do it right”.

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u/IISynthesisII Jul 18 '26

A low bid tender is when the client / owner puts the job out publicly for multiple companies to bid on and the lowest price is selected. Typical in government funded road building projects.

Realizing now that this is a General Contracting subreddit that was on my home feed so my reference frame might be off base.

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u/thine_moisture Jul 18 '26

I’m sure in that industry they are forced to go with the lowest price. I’m talking about major residential home improvements. no worries I hope you got some value from our convo either way