How to Send a Concrete Proposal From Your Phone (And What Belongs In One)

A number scribbled on the back of a business card is not a proposal. It is a conversation you will have again in three weeks when the general contractor says he remembers a different figure. A proposal is a document: it says what you are doing, what you are not doing, what it costs and how long the price holds. Getting that document out the same day you walk the job is the single biggest thing most concrete contractors can do to win more work.

Here is what belongs in one, and how to send it without going back to the office.

Why speed beats polish

A GC pricing a job calls three subs. The first real number he gets becomes the number in his budget. Everything after that is measured against it. If you are the third sub to respond, you are not bidding on the job, you are bidding against a decision that has already been half made.

This is why a plain, correct proposal sent the same afternoon beats a beautifully formatted one sent next week. Nobody has ever lost a concrete job over the font.

What has to be in a concrete proposal

Six things. Leave any of them out and you are inviting an argument later.

1. Who and what. Your company, the customer, the project name and address, and the date. Obvious, and still the thing most often missing when a proposal gets forwarded around.

2. Scope, by phase. Not "concrete work." Spell out the phases: footings, stem walls, slab, block, columns, stairs. For each one, the quantity and what you are doing with it. "Form, place and finish 32 CY of 3,000 psi concrete for a 40 x 60 slab at 4 inches, broom finish" is a scope. "Pour the slab" is not.

3. Inclusions. What your price covers that someone might assume it does not — the pump, the rebar, the vapor barrier, the saw cutting, the cleanup.

4. Exclusions. This is the one that saves you money, and the one most contractors skip. Excavation, fill and compaction, engineering, testing, permits, dewatering, removal of existing concrete, winter protection, anything by others. Every exclusion you write down is an argument you do not have to have at the end of the job.

5. The number, and what it is built on. The total, and enough of a breakdown that the GC can see it is real. Splitting material, labor, equipment and subcontract also makes it far easier to defend when someone asks why you are higher than the other guy.

6. Terms. How long the price is good for, your payment terms, and a line stating that the price assumes the quantities shown. Concrete and steel pricing moves; a proposal with no expiration is a proposal you are honoring in six months at last year's cost.

The price hold clause nobody writes

Two sentences worth more than the rest of the document combined:

"This price is valid for 30 days from the date above. Quantities are based on the dimensions listed; changes in scope or field conditions will be priced as a change order before the work proceeds."

That is the difference between a change order and an awkward phone call. Say it in writing, up front, every time.

Sending it from the jobsite

The workflow that actually works looks like this. You walk the job with a tape and your phone. You enter the dimensions phase by phase and let the calculators return the quantities. Your unit pricing is already saved, so the cost summary fills itself in across material, labor, equipment and subcontract. You apply your markup, generate the PDF, and email it before you pull out of the driveway.

The part that makes this possible is not the phone. It is having your pricing stored somewhere other than your head. If every proposal starts by trying to remember what you paid for ready mix last month, you will always end up doing it at the kitchen table. Set your unit costs once, keep them current, and the proposal becomes a two-minute job instead of an evening.

Common mistakes

Sending a quantity list instead of a proposal. A page of cubic yards is a takeoff. The customer needs a scope and a price.

One lump sum with no breakdown. It reads as guesswork, and it gives you nothing to point at when you are asked to justify the number or to reprice a reduced scope.

No exclusions. Covered above. This is where money goes.

Editable formats. Send a PDF, not a spreadsheet or a Word file. A document that can be altered after you send it is a document you cannot rely on later.

No follow-up. Send it, then call two days later. Proposals sit in inboxes.

Doing it without software

None of this requires an app. Build one proposal template you are happy with, in whatever you already use, with the six sections above and your standard inclusions and exclusions already filled in. Then each job is only the project details, the quantities and the number. Most of the time saving is in not rewriting the boilerplate.

What a purpose-built tool adds is that the quantities and the pricing flow straight into the document instead of being retyped, and that it works on a phone. If you want that for concrete and masonry specifically, Cornerstone Bids does it — calculators for each phase feeding one cost summary and a PDF proposal, free to try at cornerstonebids.com. If your template already works, the template is fine. The proposal being sent today is what matters, not what produced it.