If you don’t get it right here it’s up hill all the way and you may as well forget about profit.

 

We put a lot of faith into someone else to get it right and you have to wonder if they take into account the complexities and subtleties of each individual job i.e. weather, environment, access, staff expertise, ground type etc etc. You know this stuff matters because it’s your Intellectual Property and knowhow, but does the person pricing your job know it, and if they do, are they applying it. It’s like getting an accountant to run your business because basically, a big percentage of them sit behind a computer working numbers all day. Do they know how these numbers relate in the real world and on the building sites? Fact is they don’t! The following example illustrates this clearly because to achieve accuracy and efficiency you cannot rely solely on tables, meter or room rates.

 

There must be a break down costing approach or you must ‘tag’ the price with assumptions and when the assumptions are wrong you need to force a variance.