[asphaltgambler]

You should be able to charge fair market for what you do and hopefully make a fair profit. If you're not making a fair profit it's a huge waste of your time and company's resources.

For what? Future business with these guys? If you win the bid, solve their problem but have either little or no fair profit to show, how have you grown your business? If you do that you're just trading dollars and giving away your company's talent. They on the other hand have their problem solved and now go on to generate a profit. Now they have the expectation that next time you will solve their problems at "cost" to your company.

At the very least I would bid initialy to what ever profit margin is the norm. If you have a good relationship / contact and feel you may get a second chance to counter bid, bid appropriately higher

I had a friend who owned a small trucking company. When business started to go downhill, he lowered his price per mile to the point he was just about breaking even. That is of course if absolutely nothing went wrong, which was rare. So he was moaning and groaning one day about how bad things were. I asked him if he was doing OK. He said he was almost losing money on every run he was making lately. So I told why even send the rigs out then?
His reply " I need the money!! ...............WTF??