Bidding & pricing
Bid structures that carry real overhead and margin instead of guesswork. Workbooks that price a job the same way twice, and payment schedules that keep you from financing the customer's project.
Advisory for contractors · New Mexico
Straight advisory for trade business owners — bidding, pricing, operations, and building a pipeline that doesn't depend on chasing the next job.
Run by a licensed mechanical contractor who still runs a shop — not a consultant who read about one.
NM License GB-98 · MM-98
Most trade businesses don't have a sales problem. They have a pricing problem, a systems problem, or both — and they're too busy in the field to see it.
Bid structures that carry real overhead and margin instead of guesswork. Workbooks that price a job the same way twice, and payment schedules that keep you from financing the customer's project.
Getting your field software, accounting, and card spend talking to each other so you can see job costs while the job is still open — not three months later at tax time.
Moving off reactive job-chasing and onto steady relationships — property managers, general contractors, builders, restoration firms — plus the licensing and compliance groundwork for bigger work.
I'm Chris Cowan. I own and operate Elevated Mechanical Services, a licensed mechanical contracting firm in the Albuquerque and Los Lunas area doing HVAC, plumbing, new construction, remodels, and construction management.
Everything I'd advise you on is something I've had to solve in my own shop first — pricing a job that turned out to be a loser, chasing a payment schedule that was written wrong, trying to figure out what a crew actually costs per hour. I've built the spreadsheets, sat through the licensing paperwork, and made the expensive mistakes.
I also wrote a book, Down the Rabbit Hole: Adulting 101, because explaining how things actually work turns out to be the part I like most.
First conversation is free and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help. If I can't, I'll usually know who can.