Losing bids to out of towners

This has been bugging me for awhile…

Last month I found out that I lost a big bid on some county buildings (court house, public works, etc). A couple years ago I KNOW that it was an out of town company that cleaned them. This year it was an out of town janitorial company that contacted me. We’re a fairly small community here and I think it’s messed up that they look elsewhere for services. I realize its a money game, but has anyone had experience with local gov’t going out of town? Were you able to make a change to keep their money (your tax money) local?

Are you on the towns bid list? In my town they only send bid requests out to those
on their list, to which anyone can sign up. Then it’s often the lowest bid.

Matthew

I’m going to have to check and see if they have one. I don’t expect to have work fall in my lap and I’m willing to earn my keep, but local tax money should be spent locally, reinvested.

When dealing with city and county governments, you need to remember, if you are from a town 50 miles away, you are an expert in your field. When you live in the town, you are too stupid to qualify for the job

Yea it bumms me out when this happens… Happens a lot around here. Were working on bidding a whole bunch of larger type commercial buildings and were finding out a lot of our local places are dealing with companies that come in from 3- 4 hours away… Pretty weird.

It really only makes sense that a local person would do the local work. However it doesn’t work that way a lot of times. I’m in that boat where I travel to do some of my cleaning. For awhile the majority of my cleaning was 2 hours away or more! I always felt and still feel that the best options are the local ones. And I do feel a little weird travelling to clean windows. The gas percentage cuts in and I just don’t think it’s very economical or good common sense.

I think the issue might be something like this: We have X number of buildings in various towns that need to be serviced. The easiest thing to do is find one person or company that does good work and is reliable enough to get all of them done in some kind of timeline. Trying to find a local provider in every area that is good and reliable can often be a logistical nightmare. Some cleaners do quality work, others don’t. Some don’t even show up to complete the work. Some do a partial job. Etc, etc, etc. You can see how dealing with numerous cleaners is harder than dealing with one. I know it’s not the best scenario but that’s what I’ve experienced. Kinda sucks I know and doesn’t make logical sense, but that’s the way it goes. Maybe you can get yourself in there somehow.

This week we were contacted by a couple very large companies out of state, and were asked to provide bids for local buildings. Pretty common really…

Start bidding the jobs in their town and put them out of business.

We lose out to out of state companies who aren’t even registered in our state or pay any Business license all the time. Yet we pay all the taxes and wage Taxes. Very tuff to compete.