At HTL Aircon, the gap between an average contractor and a great one is risk management

HTL Aircon has been doing MEP and HVAC contracting for 30 years, almost entirely in the private sector. The work spans the real estate classes: industrial, data centres, commercial, with a few infrastructure projects alongside.

Roughly 95% of the business comes through private tenders. The rest is the occasional government undertaking, picked up year on year through civil contractors. Private packages run upwards of 50 to 100 crore on average, so a single bid that goes out late is not a rounding error on the year.

Harkirat Duggal is the business strategist and the second generation in the company.

The response rate is a revenue number

He states the relationship without hedging it:

"The scale of business is directly dependent to the scale of tenders that flow into the company."

And then the part that turns it into an operating problem. The rate of reply, how quickly and how often HTL responds to what arrives, feeds straight through to billing. A tender answered slowly and a tender not answered at all sit closer together than most contractors like to admit. Both are revenue the company never got to compete for.

So the question is not whether HTL wants to bid more. It is what has ever made that possible.

The one lever the industry has

"Tendering and estimation is a very human dependent function in any contracting company."

Mr. Duggal describes the standard fix in the same breath. You add an estimator, and your response output goes up roughly in proportion. That is the whole mechanism. It has worked for 30 years, and it prices every increment of growth at the cost of another salary.

His account of looking for an alternative is short. He never came across a product that did this. He found ContraVault by scrolling LinkedIn.

There was no shortlist and no bake off, which is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. He was not choosing between vendors. He was reacting to the first thing he had seen that attacked the constraint at all.

What the manual version costs

Long tender documents, read by people, under a deadline. Contradictions buried across a package that take time to find by hand. A checklist of what has to be answered and how, assembled from scratch each time.

The whole of that, done at once

The feature he named as most interesting is exactly that: the platform reading the full tender and coming back with the checklist, the response requirements and the contradictions.

He is direct about why. Done manually, there are chances of human error, and he expects that to drop sharply with the analysis running first. That is his expectation rather than a measured result, and the platform's job is narrower than removing the person. It puts every contradiction in front of an estimator who still decides what to do about it.

Risk is where he thinks it lands

The line he chose when asked what mattered most:

"The main difference between an average contracting company and a great contracting company is the risk management."

Risk work is the first thing compressed when a bid is due on Friday and the package landed on Tuesday. It is also the thing that determines whether the job you won is the job you wanted. Mr. Duggal expects surfacing those risk points, and protecting the contractor from them, to be the part that actually separates outcomes.

Where this stands

Early. There is no before and after here, no hours saved and no change in bid volume to report yet. What exists is his read on the constraint, from someone who has watched a 30 year old contracting business be governed by it.

Asked whether ContraVault could be a growth factor for companies that want to bid faster and more confidently, he gave a one word answer.

If how many tenders you can answer is set by how many estimators you have, send us one live package and we will show you what comes back.