Commercial General Contracting · Lakewood, CO
Every bid says what it does not include.
A commercial general contractor does not build your building. It buys one, in about thirty pieces, and almost every dollar of the contract is somebody else’s subcontract. What you are actually hiring is the buying.
Every one of those thirty bids arrives in the same shape: a price, and under it a block headed EXCLUSIONS. Read one and it is housekeeping. Read two facing each other and you find the thing that decides whether you get a change order at month seven.
9195 W 6th Ave, Lakewood, CO 80215
Mon–Fri 7:30 AM–4:30 PM MT ·
NAICS 236220
Licence and registration details on request
Bid package 07 & 08 The same parapet, two bids
- Caught at bid
- $2,400 – $9,000, priced at levelling
- Found in the field
- $18,000 – $60,000, plus the water that got in first
Neither firm did anything wrong. The roofer excluded the wall, the siding sub excluded the roof, both bids are honest, and nobody bought the flashing. It surfaces when it rains, with a crew standing in it, and it is priced with no competition because there is nobody left to bid against.
That is the whole business this site is about. The bid coverage page lists the boundaries where it recurs and what each one costs caught early against found late.
01The argument
You are not buying a builder. You are buying thirty subcontracts.
It is worth saying plainly, because almost nobody in this industry says it and the whole of an owner’s exposure follows from it.
On a commercial building, a general contractor self-performs very little. Concrete, steel, framing, roofing, glazing, masonry, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, drywall, flooring, ceilings, painting, doors, hardware, specialties, earthwork, utilities, paving — each is a separate firm with a separate bid and a separate idea of where its scope stops.
So the general contractor’s product is procurement: getting enough real bids on every one of those trades, finding the gaps between them before anyone signs, and then holding thirty firms to one schedule. Carpentry is not the skill. Buying is.
And two things follow that owners pay for without ever being told they exist.
One: coverage
A trade with four bidders prices itself. A trade with one bidder is priced at whatever that firm feels like, and nothing a general contractor says afterwards changes that number. Some trades in this market routinely draw four bids and some routinely draw one — and which is which is knowable in advance, which is why this site publishes it.
Two: the gap
Every subcontract has a boundary, and the thing sitting on the boundary is the thing nobody bid. The flashing between two trades. The blocking behind the millwork. The conduit between the panel and the equipment somebody else is furnishing. Those are not construction failures. They are buying failures, and they are found at month seven.
Which means the most valuable hour on a commercial project is not spent on site. It is spent on a table with thirty bids laid out and somebody reading the exclusions against each other.
“How many bids did you get on each trade, and what did you do about the ones where you only got one?” It is a fair question, it has a real answer, and the quality of the answer tells you more about a contractor than anything else you could ask on a first call — including of us.
The buy, in order
- Build the bid list. Which firms will be invited on each trade, and how many of them are realistically going to bid.
- Solicit, and chase. An invitation is not a bid. Coverage comes from following up, and that is unglamorous work that decides the number.
- Receive on bid day. Most subcontract bids arrive in the last two hours. That is normal and it is why the day is structured around it.
- Level the scopes. Read every exclusions block against the trades on either side. This is the step the owner is paying for.
- Close the gaps. Assign every unbought scope to a trade, in writing, before award — or carry it as a stated allowance.
- Award. With the scope matrix attached to each subcontract, so the boundary is in the contract rather than in somebody’s memory.
Step four is where the money is, and it is the step that is invisible from outside. How a building is bought walks through all six.
02Coverage
How many firms will actually bid your job
Typical coverage for a commercial project of ordinary size in the Denver metro. Nobody publishes this, and it is the single most useful thing an owner can know before a bid goes out.
| Trade | Typical coverage | What it means for your number |
|---|---|---|
| Drywall & framing | 5 bidders | Crowded. Real price tension, and the bids are comparable |
| Painting | 5 bidders | Crowded. Watch the exclusions rather than the number |
| Electrical | 4 bidders | Healthy, though the good firms book out a season ahead |
| Earthwork & utilities | 4 bidders | Healthy, but compressed into the same months as everyone else |
| Mechanical | 3 bidders | Adequate. Equipment lead time matters more than the bid |
| Roofing | 3 bidders | Adequate, and the first trade to thin out after a hail season |
| Glazing & curtain wall | 2 bidders | Getting thin. Expect to negotiate rather than compare |
| Fire protection | 2 bidders | Getting thin, and it is on the critical path for occupancy |
| Structural steel erection | 2 bidders | Thin on small tonnage. Package it with the fabricator or pay for it |
| Elevator | 1 bidder thin | Effectively a sole source. Price it early and expect no movement |
| Specialty equipment | 1 bidder thin | Sole source by definition. Buy it in design, not after permit |
Coverage is a count and a word, never a colour — a trade with one bidder is marked thin in text, so this table reads identically in black and white, in print, and to a screen reader.
03The gaps
Three boundaries where money is lost on almost every job
Each one is two honest bids that do not quite meet. None of them is anybody’s fault, all of them are findable at levelling, and all of them are expensive in the field.
- Caught at bid
- $1,200 – $6,000, priced at levelling
- Found in the field
- $9,000 – $35,000, and it holds the certificate of occupancy
- Caught at bid
- $900 – $4,500, priced at levelling
- Found in the field
- $7,000 – $26,000, because the wall is closed and painted
- Caught at bid
- $1,800 – $7,500, priced at levelling
- Found in the field
- $14,000 – $48,000, and the roof warranty is now a conversation
The pattern is always the same: two trades, one scope, two exclusions pointing at each other. The only thing that catches it is somebody reading both blocks on the same afternoon, before either contract is signed. That afternoon is the product.
04Packages
Five packages of work
Preconstruction is 01 deliberately. On this site the buying is the product, and it starts long before there is a drawing to price.
Building the budget and the bid list before there is a drawing to price. This is where a commercial project is actually won or lost, and it is the one phase most owners are never invited into.
- You receive
- Budget by division, a bid list by trade with expected coverage, a levelled scope matrix
Ground-up commercial buildings in the Denver metro — offices, retail, flex and light industrial — bought as about thirty subcontracts and levelled against each other before any of them is awarded.
- You receive
- Full drawing set, schedule of values, levelled subcontracts, closeout package
Fitting out a shell or a second-generation space against a lease date somebody has already signed. Fewer trades than a new building, and proportionally more gaps between them.
- You receive
- Permit set, landlord sign-offs, certificate of occupancy, closeout package
Expanding or rebuilding a building somebody is still working in. The phasing plan is the project, and the gaps are worse because half the scope is against existing construction nobody has opened yet.
- You receive
- Permit set, phasing plan, schedule of values, closeout package
Work for public and institutional owners, where the procurement is public, the bid tabulation is a published document, and the occupancy date is set by somebody else’s calendar.
- You receive
- Bid tabulation, certified payroll, schedule of values, commissioning record, closeout
Typical spans run from first engagement to certificate of occupancy and assume a normal permitting path and a buildable season. The span for your project comes from a schedule built against a defined scope.
05Region
What the Front Range does to a subcontract market
Coverage is not a fixed property of a trade. It moves, and here it moves for reasons that are local and predictable.
The season compresses everybody. The earthwork window is shorter than the calendar suggests, so every project in the metro wants the same trades in the same months. A bid let in February draws more firms than the same bid let in June.
Hail reprices the envelope. After a serious hail season the roofing and glazing markets are absorbed by insurance work, and a trade that drew three bids in the spring draws one in the autumn.
Soils change the earthwork scope. Expansive clay in parts of the metro changes the foundation system entirely, and a bid let without the geotechnical report is a bid every firm has priced differently.
Communities served
- Lakewood
- Denver
- Golden
- Wheat Ridge
- Arvada
- Edgewater
- Littleton
- Englewood
- Westminster
- Broomfield
- Aurora
- Centennial
- Jefferson County
- Adams County
- Douglas County
06Standing behind it
What is on this site, and what is not
There are no project photographs on this website, no client names, no award badges, no safety statistics, no bonding figure and no founding year.
That is not modesty. It is that none of it is checkable by the person reading it, and an unverifiable claim is worth nothing at the moment somebody is deciding who to hand a building to. Where you would reasonably expect one of those facts, this site says it is available on request rather than printing a number you cannot audit.
What is published instead is the thing the category keeps private: how many firms will actually bid your trades, where the scope boundaries fall, and what each gap costs caught early against found late. All of it is checkable against your own experience from the first bid day.
And every claim on this site comes with a question you can put to any contractor, including this one, and verify the answer. The about page collects them.
Pinkard Construction Co.
9195 W 6th AveLakewood, CO 80215- Telephone
- (303) 986-4555
- [email protected]
- Hours
- Mon–Fri 7:30 AM–4:30 PM MT
- Trade
- Commercial and Institutional Building Construction
- Licence
- Licence and registration details on request
Send us a bid you have already received
Seriously. If you are holding subcontract bids and the numbers do not sit right, read the exclusions blocks to us on the telephone and we will tell you what is missing between them. That costs nothing, it takes about twenty minutes, and it is useful whether or not you ever hire us.
Pinkard Construction Co. · 9195 W 6th Ave, Lakewood, CO 80215