Competitive Bid Coordination.

We help New Orleans asset owners write roofing scopes detailed enough to run honest multi-contractor bid processes — then we submit our own bid on equal footing with every other contractor.

Most commercial roofing bids in New Orleans fail as competitive processes before the first contractor sets foot on the roof. The scope is too thin. One contractor prices 60-mil TPO with mechanical attachment; another prices 80-mil fully adhered. One quotes a 20-year NDL warranty path engineered against ASCE 7 hurricane-prone-region uplift requirements; another does not address wind-uplift design at all. A building owner operating under a Jefferson Parish school board capital policy or an Orleans Parish government procurement directive receives three numbers with no basis for comparison.

The Louisiana Public Bid Law — LRS 38:2211 et seq. — applies to public entities including the Orleans Parish School Board, the City of New Orleans, and the Orleans Parish School Board's building portfolio. These entities must run documented competitive processes for work above the threshold amounts set by state statute, and the bid documentation has to be defensible to an auditor, a legislative committee, and sometimes a protest. A scope that leaves membrane thickness, attachment method, and warranty path open does not survive that scrutiny. We write the scope document that closes those gaps and levels the field before the bid goes out.

We then participate as one of the bidders. We do not charge for scope-writing as a precondition of winning the work. If you select another contractor on price or relationship, we have done the work anyway — a credible public bid process protects our standing in the New Orleans owner and procurement community, and that is worth more to us than any single project.

A bid-ready roofing scope for a New Orleans commercial building specifies at minimum: membrane product line and thickness (60-mil or 80-mil TPO; 60-mil EPDM; 50-mil or 60-mil PVC), attachment method with the wind-uplift design calculation documented to the building's ASCE 7 exposure category and risk category (open-terrain Exposure C sites along the lakefront and the New Orleans East corridor require higher fastener density and may require full-adhered specification), insulation stack (polyiso R-value to IECC 2021 minimums for Climate Zone 2A, cover board type, tapered package if needed for slope-to-drain compliance), flashing details at all parapets, penetrations, drains, and curbs by reference to the manufacturer's published detail library, warranty path (15-year, 20-year, or 25-year NDL), and closeout documentation requirements including the wind-uplift design documentation that some Louisiana insurers require as a condition of binding wind coverage.

Scopes that leave membrane thickness and attachment method open allow bid spreads that have nothing to do with contractor quality. A single membrane thickness change from 60-mil to 80-mil shifts installed cost $0.40-0.60 per square foot — a $40,000-60,000 swing on a 100,000 square foot roof. In a post-Katrina New Orleans market where contractor reference checking is essential and where underfunded roofs have failed in Ida and Zeta, letting that gap stay in the scope is a liability, not just a procurement inconvenience.

We write the bid form — the table structure that forces all bidders to separate labor, material, warranty, and wind-uplift design costs as distinct line items. This surfaces apples-to-oranges gaps that a lump-sum bid format conceals and produces the documentation a Louisiana Public Bid Law protest reviewer or an internal auditor needs to confirm the process was run correctly.

Once the scope document goes out to all bidders, we submit our own bid on identical terms. We do not see other bids before finalizing ours. We do not get a last-look or a right of first refusal. The bid process is the bid process, and we participate in it the same way every other contractor does.

Where we are useful after bids come back: reference checking on contractors the owner does not know. The New Orleans commercial roofing market has a core of established contractors with post-Katrina rebuild history, a rotating group of mid-size specialty firms with variable wind-uplift track records, and an influx of out-of-state contractors that arrives after every major storm event and is gone when the post-storm work dries up. For public entities and institutional owners, knowing which contractors have actually closed out manufacturer NDL warranties on Gulf Coast commercial projects — and which ones have warranty-inspection failures on their record — is critical procurement information. We share it honestly, including when it favors a competitor.

When Competitive Bid Coordination Makes Sense

Projects above roughly $300,000 installed value almost always benefit from a formal competitive scope process in this market. Below that threshold, the scope-writing overhead can exceed the bid savings, and an informal telephone reference check plus a written scope drafted with our input often gets to the same place.

Public entities and board-governed private owners in Louisiana often have no choice: the Louisiana Public Bid Law mandates documented competitive bidding above statutory thresholds, and scope equivalency documentation is the difference between a defensible process and a bid that gets protested. We have scoped projects for the Orleans Parish School Board capital program, for nonprofit hospital-adjacent medical office facilities, and for church capital campaigns where the vestry's procurement policy required three documented competing bids. We know how to format scope documentation so it satisfies a public bid reviewer as well as the contractor reading the spec.

Do you charge for writing the scope document if we don't select you?

No. We write the scope as part of our business development process. If another contractor wins the project, we have built a relationship with an owner who ran a credible process and knows we participated honestly. In the New Orleans owner and procurement community, that is worth more to us over time than a single project fee.