Trainee Estimator

We have a brand new role for a **Trainee Estimator **based in Billericay** or Shifnal to support our existing Estimating team. The overall aim this role is to help Ground Control to win the right work at the right price always

This exciting commercial role will help the team to develop tenders by gathering information and obtaining prices as well as eventually starting to prepare bids.

This is a great opportunity for an experienced administrator looking for a change into a more commercial role. Whatever your background will need a good head of numbers including manipulating data within Excel.

In addition you will need;
- Strong analytical and numeracy skills
- Strong Excel experience
- Great attention to detail and focus on accuracy

You will be driven to succeed and draw on your experience to provide estimates which consider a wide range of technical and practical impacts on the anticipated margins. You will support your colleagues in the wider business with pricing queries and attend site as required.

You will be responsible for delivering £3.0m of contract wins per annum’ of which 75% of all secured contracts must have the required level of opportunities to ensure the operational team can exit with the required margins

Key responsibilities are as follows;
- Identify whether potential tenders meet the criteria including but not limited to resources, preferred work type, size, and risk/opportunity and inform the senior manager of your findings.
- Prepare tender enquiries by trade and materials identifying and referencing required documents to be issued with the enquiry, you will identify companies to be sent enquiries in sufficient numbers to ensure at minimum two returns are received for each trade/material to allow comparison for competiveness.
- You will carry out a site visit to gain a better understanding of the local conditions that may have an effect on the pricing, programming and methods of construction Site photographs must be taken as an aide memoir and to assist the bid team in understanding the site constraints during the Tender phase.
- Build up estimates from first principles to ensure that tenders are investigated and treated as individual and produce unique rates for each and every tender.
- Build up a tender phase programme for larger, riskier projects, or when required as part of the tender submission by the client.
- Ensure that all tenders that are submitted are built up on an approved template using our estimating software to ensure that information obtained from the estimate is in a format that can be used by other functions in the company such as procurement, operations, commercial and finance.

On winning tenders you will be responsible for preparing a detailed tender handover summary document identifying key elements of the tender including, but not limited to, basic tender philosophy, strategy, financial and resourcing analysis, risks and opportunities, critical and long lead in times for materials and sub-contractor procurement.

In addition you will provide support and develop the Estimating Assistants and Administrators ensuring that they are effectively performing their key accountabilities for the company on each project.

The person.

In order to be considered for this role you will either be a highly experienced Contract Manager within Grounds Maintenance or Landscaping or already be an experienced Estimator with a solid commercial background in bid and tender management.

In addition you will have;
- Excellent analytical, writing and presentation skills with the ability to shape written solutions independently
- Excellent commercial skills, with a good working understanding of frameworks /contract and risk management.
- Demonstrable experience of understanding and developing service solutions in an efficient manner.
- A track record of success in winning and retaining service industry based accounts
- Strong stakeholder management skills
- A hands on approach to your work - you will rarely have the opportunity to delegate