Pricing · Founding cohort
$397 to be in the founding cohort. $597 once it closes.
Reserving takes no card, and this page cannot charge you: checkout is not built yet. What it does is put your name on the founding list at the founding number.
- Founding price
- $397
- After it closes
- $597
- Modules
- 8Built from real Checkered Flag jobs
- Sessions filmed
- 1 of 6The September interview covers most of session six. Five still to shoot.
What there is to buy
Three things, one problem: putting the right number on the job.
Every tier is the same promise at a different depth. Two of the three are not finished, and each one says so on its own card rather than in small print at the bottom.
Free
The Bid Sheet
Free
Email only. No call booked, no sales page in the middle.
The actual one-page takeoff and bid sheet Jay has used at Checkered Flag for 25 years, plus his walk-away rules, as a printable PDF. The sheet, and how to fill it in.
- The one-page takeoff and bid sheet
- His walk-away rules, the jobs he will not bid
- No video, no upsell page in the middle
Not published yet
Entry
Price The Job Right
$79
Ninety minutes and his working spreadsheet.
A 90-minute recorded workshop plus Jay’s live estimating spreadsheet, machine rates, haul, swell and shrink, overhead recovery, margin, walked through against one real Checkered Flag job, start to finish.
- 90-minute recorded workshop
- His live estimating spreadsheet
- One real job priced on screen, top to bottom
Not filmed yet
The course
Dirt Work Bid School
$397
Founding cohort. $597 once it closes.
The full course: eight modules taking real Checkered Flag jobs from site walk to signed contract to final cost, including the ones that lost money, and why.
- Takeoff and quantities, swell and shrink
- Machine and haul cost per hour, on iron he owns
- Hourly versus by the foot versus lump sum
- Overhead recovery, read backward off a finished job
- The contract clauses that eat the profit after you have won
- How to get on a bid list, and what to walk away from
Being filmed now
No countdown timer and no invented scarcity. The founding price is $397 because the cohort is going through the material while it is being cut; $597 is what it costs afterwards, when it is sitting finished on a shelf.
Filmed, and not filmed
The honest production status, session by session.
The eight modules are cut from six recorded conversations, Jay answering questions about his own jobs, not presenting to a camera. One of the six is effectively in the can. Five are not. If you reserve today you are reserving a seat in something being built, and this is the build.
Reading the job before you price it Still to film
Walking a site in the order he walks it, takeoff and quantities live on real plans, swell and shrink, and his one-page bid sheet filled in from the top.
What your machine actually costs you Still to film
Owning and operating cost from the ground up, payment, fuel, wear, tires and tracks, insurance, the trailer, the truck, plus haul, moves and downtime, with his own spreadsheet on screen.
Hourly, by the foot, or lump sum Still to film
The same real job priced all three ways, side by side, and how you tell which one a job wants.
Overhead, and where the money goes Still to film
A finished job read backwards, bid against cost, on the job file that lost money. Margin versus markup, and the arithmetic error that eats the difference.
The clauses that eat the profit after you have won Still to film
Retainage, pay-when-paid, change orders and differing site conditions, read off a real redacted contract rather than summarised.
Getting on the list, and pricing to win the right work Recorded 15 September 2026
Bid lists and prequalification, bonding and insurance in plain terms, the licence stack and what each licence opened up, and the walk-away rules. Most of this session is already recorded, it is the interview the quotes across this site come from. One closing question still has to be asked.
What that means if you reserve today. There is no library to log into this afternoon. There is a course being recorded, a founding price for the people who back it before it is finished, and a list you are on. Anyone telling you the whole thing is sitting there ready is selling you something different from this.
The promise, in trade language
“Price one job with it. If it doesn’t change your number, ask for your money back and keep the spreadsheet.”
That is the refund promise the course ships with, and it applies from the first day it can take money. Right now it cannot take money at all, so there is nothing to refund and nothing at risk in reserving.
Reserve a spot
No card. No checkout. A name on the list.
Stripe is not wired to this page, so there is no payment step to walk you into. This form does exactly three things: it puts you on the founding-cohort list at $397, it tells the people building the course that you want in, and it gets you a reply from a person.
- , Nothing is charged, today or automatically later.
- , Your email is what the reservation is held against.
- , A phone number is optional, and only used to call you back.
You are on the founding list.
Your reservation is held against the email you gave, at the $397 founding price.
Nothing was charged, because nothing on this page can charge you. When the checkout is open and the first modules are cut, you get told directly, and you decide then.
The fair questions
Four things worth asking before you put your name down.
“Why $597 when Excavation Academy is $259?”
Because theirs is sold out, nobody’s name is on it, and it teaches scaling to seven figures, which is not your problem. Your problem is the next bid. If this course moves one job from a $1,400 loss to break-even it has paid for itself twice, and the man on ContractorTalk who lost $47,000 to five contract clauses would have taken this trade every time.
“I’ll just buy the Craftsman book or use estimating software.”
Buy the book, it’s good, and it’s $21.75. It still cannot look at your bid and tell you the number is wrong. Software is worse in one specific way: it returns a confident figure whatever you feed it. You are not short of formulas.
“Who are you? I’ve never seen you on YouTube.”
Correct, I’ve been digging instead. Checkered Flag Excavation, founded 2000, De Soto and Festus, Missouri. WBE certified. Licensed septic installer and inspector. St. Louis County licensed Master Drainlayer. Approved land disturbance special inspector. BuildZoom 92, top third of 23,328 licensed Missouri contractors. Named on Jefferson County bid sheets. Every line of that is public. Go check it.
“Missouri dirt isn’t my dirt. Does this even apply?”
Rates and soil are local; the method is not. Swell and shrink, machine cost per hour, overhead recovery and the clauses in an AIA subcontract behave the same in every state. The course teaches you to build the numbers for your market, not to copy Jay’s. Where it is genuinely local, permits, septic code, land disturbance, the module says so.