Well, we are almost done. We have now compiled all of our revenue and gross margin amounts for our 2010 year. You should have a spreadsheet that has totals that mirrors the following: Revenue Jan Feb etc... Flow $3,000 $3,000 $3,100 Backlog $2,000 $2,500 $4,000 Pipeline $600 $2,900 $3,400 Total $5,600 $8,400 $10,500 Gross Margin Jan Feb etc... Flow $300 $300 $310 Backlog $200 $250 ......

For subcontractors, the best way to control and increase profit is by managing labor productivity. Too often, project managers, foreman, and executives focus on material buyouts, squeezing subcontractors, and cutting back on overhead to make gains on profits, but these actions pale in comparison to what can be accomplished by having highly productive labor. There is no doubt money to be made by being ......

If you have been involved in bidding work you have probably at one point in time been apart of the Best and Final Offer (BAFO) routine. In private work it is typically called "scoping out" the sub numbers. It is a process where you are expected to give your best and final proposal for the work after you have turned in your actual bid number. It may be preceded with a list of questions or changes in ......

By now most of us have seen the change order and contract boat image that has been circulating around the internet over the past several years. The big boat is rightly called the change order and the small dingy is called "Original Contract". This brings forward a very interesting question about how people think. When you view the image it enters into your mind that this must be Contractor's set-up ......

Revit: An Asset or a Cool Cartoon? According to Wikipedia, Autodesk Revit is architectural building information management (BIM) software for Microsoft Windows, developed by Autodesk. It allows a user to design with parametric modeling and drafting elements. BIM is a revolutionary new Computer Aided Design (CAD) paradigm that allows for intelligent, 3D virtual rendering and parametric object-based ......

When managers in construction start beating the drum of more production, the message that is typically received from the crews is “you need to be working harder”. While this may be true in some instances, most of the time this is not what is being said. In construction, especially for subcontractors that are performing the labor, money is made or lost in the amount of work being put in per hour charged ......

Measurements are critical to good construction. Not just in constructing walls, placing tiles, and balancing mechanical systems, but also in tracking contractor's performance on the project. A minute cannot go by where workers are not measuring boards, conduits, walls, concrete volumes, and hundreds of other things on a construction site, but are contractors measuring things for their own betterment? ......

For those of us in the construction industry, we know the Estimators that are more cynical than the average Joe. They appear to be more prevalent than the fun loving young estimator. The duties of an Estimator change that fun loving young kid into the cynic through years of performing one of the most difficult jobs in construction. So what makes it such a difficult job? The most difficult part of ......

So what does weight loss and construction productivity have in common? If you track the inputs you are much more likely to get better results. In 2008, a study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that shows that keeping a “food diary” may double your weight loss. What they actually found was that the more participants recorded what they ate, the more weight they lost in the ......

Measurements are critical to good construction. Not just in constructing walls, placing tiles, and balancing mechanical systems, but also in tracking contractor's performance on the project. A minute cannot go by where workers are not measuring boards, conduits, walls, concrete volumes, and hundreds of other things on a construction site, but are contractors measuring things for their own betterment? ......

Yesterday the Department of Commerce came out with the July 2010 construction numbers and the current state of affairs is not very attractive. The numbers represent the seasonally adjusted annual value of construction work put in place and guess what, the numbers look more like the turn of the century then they do the year 2010. The drop off has been so severe over the past 3 years we have wiped out ......

So what does it take to be a good estimator? Being great with numbers? Having a desire to color on drawings all day? There are a few key traits I have found in my career that really separate the great estimators from the rest of them. Let's recall how I defined an estimator's job as: finding the lowest cost solution to the project as would be acceptable to the client while identifying the potential ......

Business management for years has taken the advice of statisticians: that if you don’t or can’t measure something, then you can't manage it. In construction, this simple truth is the key to being successful. Management of bidding, projects, labor, or profits is not just a group of tasks that you must perform, it is taking in facts, analyzing those facts, coming to conclusions, taking action, and then ......

In Construction the #1 rule is safety. Without the principal of safety, the things we build and the people we employ will not be around once we finish. I hope that fact is not up for debate, so then the question is what is the second rule of contracting? Cost Control. This past weekend millions of citizens went to their local Home Depot, Lowes, or other hardware store to purchase a new light fixture, ......

So we went through all of the steps of producing a good business plan for 2010, now what? First let's review what we have covered so far. Part 1: Building our Flow Work Part 2: Projecting our Current Backlog Part 3: Dealing with Our Pipeline Part 4: Projecting Overhead and Calculating ProfitIf we have taken time to calculate each of the numbers and analyze each step we have a very realistic ......