How a Midwest GC Won 40% More Bids After Outsourcing Takeoffs
By moving quantity takeoffs off their estimators' desks, a regional general contractor freed its team to pursue — and win — far more work.
About the Client
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Cornerstone Builders Group
Cornerstone Builders Group is a regional general contractor in the upper Midwest specializing in mid-rise multifamily and mixed-use developments between $5M and $40M. With two in-house estimators and a growing pipeline, their bid capacity had become the single biggest constraint on growth.
Client
Monet
Industry
Commercial General Contracting
Year
2025
Services
Concrete, Masonry & Structural Steel Takeoffs
"
We stopped turning down RFPs. EstimatesPro became the extra estimating department we could never afford to hire.
Marcus Delaney, Director of Preconstruction at Cornerstone Builders Group
The Challenge
Cornerstone was receiving more bid invitations than its two estimators could process. Every RFP meant days of manual takeoff work — measuring concrete volumes, counting masonry units, and quantifying structural steel from PDF drawings before a single price could be assigned.
The math was unforgiving: each estimator could realistically turn around two to three complete bids per week. Anything beyond that was declined. The team was turning away roughly a third of qualified invitations simply because they couldn't produce the numbers in time.
40%
more bids submitted per quarter
98%
takeoff accuracy
2.5x
effective estimating capacity
The Solution
EstimatesPro took over full quantity takeoffs across Divisions 03, 04, and 05 — concrete, masonry, and structural steel — on a reliable, agreed turnaround. Cornerstone's estimators stopped measuring and started doing what only they could: applying local pricing, vetting subs, and refining bid strategy.
Every takeoff arrived as a clean, line-item quantity report mapped to CSI divisions, ready to drop straight into their pricing workbook. Our 3% accuracy guarantee meant they could trust the numbers without re-checking them by hand.
Results & Outlook
Within one quarter, Cornerstone was submitting 40% more bids without adding headcount. Because their estimators were now spending their time on strategy rather than measurement, their win rate held steady even as volume climbed — translating directly into a fuller backlog.
Cornerstone has since made outsourced takeoffs a permanent part of its preconstruction workflow and is evaluating expansion into a second regional market.
End Note
For a growing GC, the bottleneck is rarely pricing — it's the hours buried in manual measurement. Removing that constraint let Cornerstone compete for the work it had been quietly walking away from.
