This episode is aimed at both sides of the table. Brent Oberlink talks with Shawn Galloway of ProAct Safety about how work actually gets awarded, and what happens downstream when price is the only criterion.
Two kinds of buyer
Brent opens with the split he sees. Either procurement handles the buy on behalf of a field team, or the field supervisor makes the call themselves.
The difference in outcome is stark. Procurement often has nothing in front of them about what a contractor actually does in the field. The field team, by contrast, knows that two contractors with identical A ratings in the system are not the same, because one responds to hazards and mitigates them and the other does not. Given room, they choose the better one when price is in range.
The buyers who do this well use best value rather than lowest price. Brent describes the approach of taking five bids and assuming the lowest is a problem and the highest is a problem, then weighing safety, quality and whether the contractor left landowners angry.
The contractor who wins on the bid they should not be able to make
The most concrete example is one Brent has lived. A competitor holds a contract for ten years straight because they bid the work with fewer crews and less equipment than the scope requires, and they get away with it. An honest contractor bidding the scope as written cannot match that number.
He also points to what is visible from the road on those jobs, starting with basic things like hard hats. The safety corners are not subtle, they are just not anyone's job to enforce once the contract is signed.
Galloway's structural version: if procurement is squeezing a contractor so tight there is no room for anything to go wrong, safety is what absorbs the pressure and production becomes the only focus.
What good looks like
The best example in the episode is a client who put their entire system out to bid a year ahead, selected about three contractors on best value, and assigned regions rather than rebidding section by section.
Then the part that made it a partnership. Every year they paid to bring all the contractors together, safety teams and the foremen who ran the jobs, into one place. The message that went out was that this organization cared about contractor crews' safety as much as the contractors did, and the industry noticed. Companies competed to work for them.
That is the opposite of the annual price squeeze, and it produced better contractors rather than just cheaper ones.
What contractors can actually do
Asked how a contractor should market to procurement, Galloway's answer is to lead with the story. People remember stories and pictures, not facts and figures, so the case is about how the organization is better served by partnering with you.
Then the harder advice, which he gives twice: if the project is purely low bid, consider not bidding it. Walking away changes the story procurement is being told, and changes the experience they have when the cheap option underperforms.
Brent's own example lands on the same conclusion. One client ran a low bid, narrowed to the bottom two, and then auctioned between them for one more cut. They stopped bidding that client years ago.
Accountability is the missing piece
The fix both circle is holding procurement accountable for the performance of the work, not just the price of it. When the person buying is measured on project success, including safety, the calculation between a cheaper contractor with average safety and a more expensive one with real oversight changes immediately.
Galloway closes with a utility that did not realize its own buying decisions were making it impossible for its contractors to keep staff. When leadership saw it, they created a forum between operations, procurement and contractors. That is the unglamorous version of a fix: the people buying the work and the people doing it in the same room, talking about what the contract is actually producing.
Listen to the full episode, or find The Better Contractor Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.