Tristan WilsonCEO & Founder at Edgevanta

How Top Contractors Turn $10M of "Lost" Profit Back Into Backlog

1 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Tristan Wilson describes the "winner's curse" that contractors experience after winning a bid. He explains that even successful bids often leave profit on the table because the pricing was too aggressive. Top‑performing contractors typically leave only 3–5% of potential profit unclaimed over a year, whereas the broader market leaves about 9–12%. On a $100 million portfolio, that difference translates to roughly $10 million of profit that could be retained and reinvested in the business, highlighting a significant, often overlooked source of lost earnings.

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It's called the winner's curse, is what they call it. So every job that you won, even if you did win it, you're always gonna look back and say like, what could we have done a little bit differently? And how could we price this job better to reduce the amount of money that we leave on the table? And like the best in class contractors are leaving like 3 to 5% on the table over the course of, you know, a year or, or a given period of time. And the rest of the market is leaving probably, you know, somewhere between 9 to 12% on the table, which if you're doing $100 million worth of work, that's like, that could be $10 million of potential profit that could be going to your business and reinvesting in your company. That's not, that's basically being left on the table.