MEP Services Opportunity
CM fee gets you in the door. Everything else pays the bills.
Turner can bid 1% on a job and still be more profitable than most GCs at 2% or 3%. Because they’ve built the ancillary services that make CM fee irrelevant. Most GCs know this. They know they should be buying equipment direct. They know the margin is there. But they don’t have the OEM relationships, the pricing intelligence, or the bandwidth to actually run procurement at scale. As a result, they’re losing margin to companies that do.
That capability gap is costing them jobs they’re pursuing and profit margins on the jobs they’re winning.
As an example, consider this $500M project:
On a $500M project, a contractor with ancillary services (insurance, procurement, self-perform, equipment rental, etc.) generates $8.9M EBITDA with 0% CM fee. A traditional GC at 1.5% fee? $1.9M. That’s a 4.8x difference in profitability while bidding with a lower CM fee number.
MEP procurement alone: 5% gross margin on $75M of equipment. $3.75M in revenue. 55% EBITDA margin. Over $2M in profit from one service line on a single project.
We’ve heard countless times from the industry “that $100K in equipment savings could be the difference between winning and losing the job. And if you don’t win, none of your other profit levers even activate. It’s all zero.”
The uncomfortable truth is that the fee gets you in the door. Everything else pays the bills and grows the bank account. But if you don’t have a suite of capabilities and can’t compete on fee because you haven’t built the services, you never get the chance to make real money at all.
We’re building BuildVision for this exact problem.
This model is based on work we’re doing with GC partners right now. We bring the OEM relationships, the equipment expertise, and the systems to run procurement across your portfolio. You bring the projects. Together, we help you win more work and make more money on every job.
When you look at math, it’s clear that this is how GCs compete in 2026 and beyond. By building the profit centers that allow GCs to treat their CM fee as the cost of winning the job.