Recently, one of our project managers priced a rather small, straight forward project. We negotiate a lot of our work, but on this particular project, the prospect had asked another couple of contractors to estimate it as well. The prospect selected another contractor who was about 25% below our cost, coming in about $125,000 low on this $650k job.

While there might have been some secret sauce to this low price–and maybe there was–one cannot compete against stupid.  After all, there’s no free lunch.