Wednesday, December 09, 2020
A Clear Path to Razor-Sharp Estimating
Remodeling: The typical progression of a building contractor is this: You work as a carpenter, start doing work on your own, hire a helper, hire an experienced carpenter, start doing more complicated work, and, before you know it, you’re doing a half million in volume and realize you don’t actually know if you’re making any money or not. At that point, you start looking for resources that can help you move from busy to profitable.
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This article title promised a lot and this book provided sort of. The article was essentially a book review for David Gerstel’s Book Nail Your Numbers: A Path to Skilled Construction Estimating and Bidding. This book seems detailed and goes over a lot of important things that could be important for technical directors, project managers and production managers. One part of the article that stuck out to me was when the author of the article talked about how Gerstel had a chapter on General requirements. The line that specifically stuck to me was about the list of what the reviewer called a mysterious category of “from preconstruction costs like permitting and plan check, to construction costs like cleaning, getting materials, scaffolding, and snow removal, through post-construction service calls and project management during the job.” This line stuck with me because whenever talking to outside production managers they generally talk about these things such as permitting and snow removal which two things a lot of the time handled by production managers especially permitting in New York City commercial theatres and snow removal for smaller companies that might have the facilities management role covered by a technical director or product manager. I think these areas of permits, and other things that are done by our university such as FMS – who deals with general cleaning, snow removal, and other such issues would be a good thing to talk about in budgeting conversations that we have to better prepare us for situations where we must get permits for load-ins and deal with maintenance work that impacts our jobs even though it isn’t theatrically related. The review continued to talk about budgeting labor and did not sound like anything new but the section on recouping overhead was something new. This makes sense to be a new concept as production managers are concerned with the profit – that is more of marketing and the finance and development departments jobs. Overall, a good review that piqued my interest about reading this book.
This looks like a very useful read for anyone starting their own commercial shop or building/rebuilding a budgeting spreadsheet. I thought it was interesting that the first few chapters of this book cover how important it is to have an organized and effective space to work in and are prepared enough to approach an estimate. I guess it is true that having the right workspace does improve how efficiently and effectively you complete work. This article made me think about Carnegie Scenic’s budgeting system. I think our estimating worksheet works pretty well, but we don’t really track what we end up buying or using in a way that lets us compare it to the estimate. After we get the dollars and hours numbers zeroed out in the final budget, we don't really refer back to the estimate to build the show using what was estimated. It doesn't matter that much for our process, but I think it would be interesting to track materials purchased back to specific projects.
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