IDEA: How profitable are your bids and which should be dropped from future bidding?

After finishing work for your customers, measure their actual profit margins to those estimates which caused you to bid the job. Are you close and if not, why? Is it due to your estimating errors, your employees’ inability to perform the job, unforeseen costs and cost increases, one or more specific customers or any number of other variables? Investigate where your mistakes were made to change your future estimates. There may be certain types of work you either do not do yourself, you bid and have an outside contractor do it, or you do not bid the job and focus on what your firm is good at doing.