Sid Samuels, President of The Samuels Group instructs students during the bid day competition at UNI.

The Samuels Group recently participated in a bid day competition held in Professor Benjamin Ashburn’s University of Northern Iowa estimating class.  The bid day competition was designed to give students entering the construction field a real-life look at the process through which a commercial construction estimating department delivers a bid to a customer.

Five teams made up of sophomore and junior UNI construction management students competed.  Sid Samuels led the competition for the construction management students, handing out bids to the teams on simulated “fax machines,” keeping time and offering advice to all of the teams as the competition progressed.  Simplified project and subcontractor data for a fictional bank project were prepared by The Samuels Group estimating department for the competition, along with a “right” answer for the teams to shoot for.  Teams needed to constantly check for new subcontractor bids as they prepared their own bid which needed to be in a sealed envelope delivered to the “owner” at a set time near the end of the class period.

Additional stress was placed on the students by constant reminders about the time constraints they were under, giving the competition the lifelike sense of excitement of an actual bid day.  In a testament to the difficult job that a commercial estimating department performs, one team failed to come up with a bid amount in the set time, two teams had bids that far exceeded the right answer and one team bid nearly $300,000 low.  The winning team delivered a bid that was $50,000 high of the correct $1,600,000 answer.  Not too bad for their first try at a lifelike bid day considering all of the difficult factors that go into preparing a bid.  All of the students may not end up in an estimating department someday, but through the competition they all gained some appreciation for the job that the estimating departments at their future employers perform.