If you’ve ever felt like you “shoot from the hip” when estimating jobs… well, join the crowd. 😂
Ha ha, seriously though, while there’s certainly an element of that in starting a contracting business from scratch, it shouldn’t stay that way.
Over time, the shooting from the hip should evolve into calculations that produce consistent and reliable results.
The way you do this is closely related to last week’s article about tracking time.
That tracked time, those hours on those jobs, are useful for far more than just running payroll.
In fact, they are the ticket to these consistent reliable estimates I’m talking about.
And I’m throwing you this reminder to think about this, even while we are all in the busy season, cranking jobs and collecting checks as fast as possible.
Don’t get sucked into the addiction to the urgent.
Give space for the important issues. Tomorrow’s issues.
Your job data
Every job you complete without tracking time and materials is an opportunity lost forever.
That data is gold.
Without it, you are doomed to shooting from the hip forever.
You’ll never break free of the estimating-gut-feeling-and-experience cycle.
You don’t care about that?
At best, you’ll be the only one that can ever do estimates in your company.
At worst, it’ll take you much longer to estimate, and your estimates won’t be reliable.
You’ll never have the luxury of saying “Hey, we did a job similar to that 6 months ago, let me go see how many hours that one took.”
How to use that job data
You’ll want to take jobs that had the same work, (patios, mowing, planting, whatever services you provide) and average out the man hours per unit.
Patios: man hours per sq ft of installed pavers
Lawn mowing: sq ft or acres mowed per man hour
Planting: number of 1 gallon perenials planted per man hour
You get the idea.
That data can be turned into production rates and dramatically speed up your estimating workflow.
It’ll help you identify places where you are over or under bidding labor/materials and fix it.
But don’t worry, you can do all that number crunching when it’s not peak season.
For now, just track.
Do not lose the opportunity to collect that intel.
Every job you complete that you didn’t track is lost intel, and likely at times, missed profit goals.
If you want to use a quick production rate spreadsheet template, you can use mine here.
It’ll help you average out your tracked hours or materials so you can build your own production rates.
Don’t just collect checks. Collect data while you’re doing it.
Cheers!
Weston Zimmerman
SynkedUP CEO & founder
Weston Zimmerman
CEO and co-founder
