Lee Technology Group Bids Smarter with Procore Estimating

The Challenge

Lee Technology Group is the premier low voltage contractor for commercial businesses in the Central Texas region. As Lee Technology’s reputation spread, the company found itself hampered by a growing inability to quickly and accurately bid on projects, their "spreadsheet and whiteboard” bidding methodology unable to scale with their success.

The Solution

Referred to Procore Estimating (formerly Esticom) by colleagues in the field, Lee Technology found their solution in Procore Estimating’s ability to squeeze out process inefficiencies inherent in the manual approach. Procore Estimating immediately proved itself the tool that would give Lee Technology a competitive edge, and the ability to bid more jobs in less time.

The Results

Lee Technology’s Bidding Bottleneck

With a team of BICSI RCDD certified designers, estimators, project managers, and field staff, Lee Technology has the resources to be the single-source provider for workplace technology solutions within an organization.

In early 2015, though, Lee Technology was facing the challenge of being able to quickly and accurately bid on projects that would result in new business. Their outdated method of printed paper plans, spreadsheets, and whiteboards to estimate projects produced a bottleneck that resulted in losing business. Lee Technology simply could not turn the bids around fast enough.

"We started receiving an overwhelming number of project bid requests, but with an increasingly shorter amount of time to submit the bid prior to the due date," said Jesse Guenter, CEO & President at Lee Technology Group.

Time-intensive manual bidding processes and short time frames to meet bid dates increasingly began to frustrate the Lee Technology team, and in many cases meant they would have to turn away lucrative projects—largely because they couldn’t submit the bid quickly and accurately enough to be competitive. How to remedy this dilemma? Lee Technology’s initial impulse was to hire more estimators, but that inevitably led to increased overhead costs that were not sustainable over time. The company knew there had to be a smarter approach. That’s when they began to research technologies that could help solve the problem.

Procore Estimating Overwrites the Whiteboard

When in 2015 construction took off in Texas, the sudden growth market amplified Lee Technology’s need to find a solution to their outdated and cumbersome bidding process. Avidly researching and evaluating technology providers, Lee Technology was surprised to find that most of these new tech tools offered only slight improvement over their outdated spreadsheets and whiteboard model—and that the company would need to combine 3-4 of these new estimating solutions to get the bid ready for consideration.

When a trusted area contractor referred Lee Technology to Procore Estimating as a technology solution, the company’s bidding issues turned around. Lee Technology began by visiting Procore’s website and signed up for a 14-day evaluation. The evaluation period made it immediately clear that Lee Technology had found the solution that would minimize their time to bid. These initial results convinced Lee Technology to acquire Procore Estimating and apply it to their entire operation.

Efficient, Confident, Timely Bidding

Since deploying Procore Estimating, Lee Technology’s team has been using the solution to efficiently and confidently bid projects with greater speed and accuracy. A typical estimator on their team went from bidding 2-3 projects per week to bidding 7-8 projects per week, and with a much higher win rate. Additionally, Lee Technology has been able to collaborate on projects without printing a set of paper plans, resulting in a cost-effective, streamlined handoff process between their main office and field teams in real time.

Lee Technology believes Procore Estimating’s technology is bringing pre construction teams out of the stone age and allowing them to get more done with less—in turn winning more bids to generate higher profitability.

"We’ve been extremely happy with the move to Procore Estimating," says Guenter, "and would recommend that any subcontractor looking to grow their business move away from paper-based processes and spreadsheets and instead enhance their bidding methods through technology like Procore Estimating."