Lessons learned from a successful contractor. Never submit the lowest bid or the highest. Submit a reasonable bid that you both can live with. Cutting corners or cheapening your product to make a sale will come back to bite you. An astute customer will almost always throw out a low bid that is out of line with the rest of the bids. And, If a customer always takes the lowest bid, we don’t want them for a customer as we will lose money on them.