Hit 500 commercial installs and that number changed how I bid jobs

I crossed 500 commercial alarm installs last Thursday on a bank job in Toledo, and it hit me that my material cost estimates were off by about 12% on average the whole time. That milestone made me go back through my spreadsheets and I found I was undercharging for conduit and wire pulls on anything over 30 zones. Anyone else hit a number like that and totally reworked their pricing model after?

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leo10715d ago

Rethink whether you’re actually counting every hour on those big pulls, not just the materials. I noticed after a certain size job, the labor time for conduit bending and wire fishing goes up way faster than the zone count does, and that’s where the real money leaks out. You might be pricing the parts right but still eating the extra man-hours on splice time and testing. Maybe track your actual hours per zone on the last ten jobs over 30 zones and see if your bid rate lines up with what you’re really billing. Did your profit margin per job drop as the system size went up, or was it just the estimate looking off?