How to Create Estimating Templates and Production Rates

Estimating Templates and Production Rates

You want to cut estimating time by 90%? You want to eliminate estimating mistakes? Well… let me introduce you to the power of templates and production rates for estimating your jobs more accurately and in less time.

In my years of helping contractors streamline their estimating process by building templates and production rates, I’ve found that many times they believe that they don’t know how to set up them up.

They feel like they don’t know how to find their own production rates.

Often when hearing the words “production rate”, we immediately think that means something like “I need 0.423 tons of base rock per 1 sq ft of patio installation…”

(Yeah, that is hard, I agree! 😅)

Or it feels like they’d have to get out a stopwatch and time certain tasks to find production rates for labor.

And while you certainly can do that, I’ve got another way.

And I’ve got news for you.

You actually do know your own production rates!

At least well enough to get started, establish a base line, and course correct from there.

So, what’s the hack?

The easy way to find your own production rates

Here’s how:

• pick a type of job that you are so familiar with that you could estimate it in your sleep.
• pretend you’re bidding on a hypothetical job, what size is it? (Pick a size, ie 500 sq ft for a patio)
• Ask yourself how long it would take your crew to complete it.
• Ask yourself what materials you’d need.
• Done ✅

Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say you can bid on a 500 sq ft patio in your sleep. You do it day in day out, and you’ve been doing it for years.

How long would it take your crew to build that 500 sq ft patio?

You say: 3 days.

Cool, how many people are on your crew?

You say: 3 people

How many hours a day do they usually work?

You say 10 hours.

Ok, so 3 people a day at 10 hours a day means 30 man-hours a day. Multiply that by 3 days, and you have 90 man-hours to do a 500 sq ft patio.

Bingo.

500 sq ft divided by 90 man-hours is 5.55…. your production rate is 5.55 sq ft of patio installation completed per 1 man-hour of work.

Let’s try it with materials.

How much base rock would you need for this 500 sq ft patio?

You say: 21 ton

Cool. 500 sq ft divided by 21 tons? That equals 23.81 sq ft of coverage per ton.

Bingo.

See how easy it is?

Yes, you did not know that your coverage per ton of stone was 23.81 sq ft. But you did know that it would take 21 tons of stone to build a 500 sq ft patio just from experience or whatever method you have been using to calculate that.

See what I mean? You do know your own production rates.

You simply need a way to calculate that knowledge into a formula.

There’s your formulas:

5.55 of patio can be built per 1 man-hour

1 ton of base rock will cover 23.81 sq ft for a patio.

Why this stuff matters

Templates and production rates have a ton of benefits.

Production rates help you

• cut estimating time drastically by not having to run all those manual calculations each time.
• Get repeatable consistent results for more accurate estimates.
• Do “brain surgery” on the estimator’s head and experience, and convert that to formulas that anyone else can use. As long as you can run a tape measure and plug in measurements, you can now generate accurate estimates.
• Produces repeatable systems and processes for your estimating in your business. As I’ve said many times before, systems and processes are the keys out of the entrepreneurial prison, smashing bottlenecks and allowing the business to get work done by people other than you.

Templates help you

• never forget the little things anymore.
• When using templates in SynkedUP, it allows you to also do things like save templates of customer-facing descriptions for the types of work you do all the time, saving the time it takes to write out a nice-sounding description for the client
• In SynkedUP you can also record instructions to the crew and internal notes for each template you build.

As owners/operators, we are the busiest people on the face of the earth. We work 16-hour days at times, and building templates and production rates feel like taking the time I don’t have to do “office work”.

But I promise you, the hour you spend building a template or two will come back to you a hundred times over.

Imagine what your life would look like if you could crank out an accurate estimate in 5 minutes without even using a calculator.

That’s what’s possible in SynkedUP’s estimating system with templates and production rates.

I’ve got a little gift for you.

I built a little cheater spreadsheet that’ll allow you to build your first template and set of production rates in minutes. Just to prove to you that it is possible and that you can do it and that you already know how!

Get access to it here.

Here’s a quick video showing how it works.

Let me know how it goes for you. Reply to this email or drop a comment on the blog.

Cheers!

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP co-founder and CEO