Well here's a little different slant on the situation, one that we never saw coming (live and learn).
We were contacted to give a bid for a new residential area around a golf course. There are quite a few "Private Road, No Town Maintenance" short little roads, that will have several houses with driveways coming off this shared private road. It is a new area, with only about 30 homes actually built so far. The Director of Golf Course Maintenance is who requested the bid, but he had no specifications, not much of a map, etc., for us to work with. We spent A LOT of time driving the area, mapping out where the private roads were, trying to figure out how many home sites would share each of those roads, etc., and coming up with a price. He wanted something that they could include in the homeowners' monthly dues that would cover all the plowing. It was a royal pain to come up with, but the potential for a nice chunk of work was there, with future growth as more homes are built, eventually over 100. Well, after all was said and done, he called us back and said that the Homeowner's Board had decided not to do anything, and just let each homeowner deal with it on their own. So I prepared a direct mailing and sent it out to the people who had homes already built. Then, the other day, I am in the area dropping off a bid. The people were not home and had asked me to just leave it in the door. So I am doing this, and find a flier already in the door, advertising snow removal especially for this area, with prices just under what our bid had been, and guess who this flier was from? THE DIRECTOR OF GOLF COURSE MAINTENANCE :realmad:
The second situation was similar. We were contacted by a local landscaping company (not a snow contractor) to submit a bid to them as a subcontractor on a large commercial property they were bidding on. It was going out to bid to a few different national vendors, and had to be a package bid including all outside maintenance. So this landscape company was collecting bids for sweeping, striping, and snow removal, to submit along with their landscaping bid in one package. Well, the saga went on all summer, and the customer finally awarded the contract to a different national vendor. At that time, we were successful in securing the sweeping contract, and have been jumping through their hoops for the past month in submitting a snow removal bid. Then, I found out yesterday that the snow removal contract was awarded to the landscape company, who up until now has not done snow removal, and who just happened to have all our pricing information, and underbid us. :realmad:
I guess when it is a direct competitor, we are not surprised at bid shopping and undercutting, but now we have to wonder about the person requesting the bid, and if they are going to suddenly decide to go into the business themselves, using all the information we so readily supplied!