Going with the flow

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ivsenroute

ivsenroute

Senior Member
Location
Florida
mdshunk said:
Charge for all of them, since you're not itemizing anyhow (or shouldn't be) and then you'll have some free one's to charge for the next time you use them.
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That is how I have always looked at it. It increases profit for future jobs. My dad even run his construction company like that. Great for service calls on weekends or at night.
 
H

hardworkingstiff

Senior Member
Location
Wilmington, NC
mdshunk said:
Charge for all of them, since you're not itemizing anyhow (or shouldn't be) and then you'll have some free one's to charge for the next time you use them.
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Sorry but I must disagree with that thinking Marc.

It's sort of like a gambler winning a few hands and being up some chips and thinking he/she is playing with "house" money. It's not the house money when they win it, it's their money (they just have more since they won).

You are being paid a fixed amount of dollars for the job. If you buy an extra few widgets to complete it, then you purchased the extra stock of widgets and they are not free. You made the same amount of money, but instead of putting cash in your pocket, you put stock in your inventory.

Now, saying all of that, I rarely take little stuff back to the supply house and wind up tossing hundreds of $ of material (after it's taken up space for years and got old looking even though it was never installed). It's often cheaper to buy new than it is to go back to the shop and pick up the "extra" stuff left over from previous projects. I still have stuff I purchased 10+ years ago that I look at and ask, "Why am I still holding on to this? I sure wish I had just taken it back".

Just my 2 cents.
 
ivsenroute

ivsenroute

Senior Member
Location
Florida
hardworkingstiff said:
Sorry but I must disagree with that thinking Marc.

It's sort of like a gambler winning a few hands and being up some chips and thinking he/she is playing with "house" money. It's not the house money when they win it, it's their money (they just have more since they won).

You are being paid a fixed amount of dollars for the job. If you buy an extra few widgets to complete it, then you purchased the extra stock of widgets and they are not free. You made the same amount of money, but instead of putting cash in your pocket, you put stock in your inventory.

Now, saying all of that, I rarely take little stuff back to the supply house and wind up tossing hundreds of $ of material (after it's taken up space for years and got old looking even though it was never installed). It's often cheaper to buy new than it is to go back to the shop and pick up the "extra" stuff left over from previous projects. I still have stuff I purchased 10+ years ago that I look at and ask, "Why am I still holding on to this? I sure wish I had just taken it back".

Just my 2 cents.
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That is because you are a hard working stiff
 
480sparky

480sparky

Senior Member
Location
Iowegia
mdshunk said:
Charge for all of them, since you're not itemizing anyhow (or shouldn't be) and then you'll have some free one's to charge for the next time you use them.
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Whether you charge them to the job you just did, charge them to the next one, or both. It's more towards benchmarking your material. In order to get an accurate dollar amount on material, you need to keep track of what you actually used.

If you had 10,000 fittings delivered to the job, and returned 2,278, then you know that you used 7,722 fittings. That goes into your estimating database. It's cheaper to calculate that when you have two papers in front of you.... an invoice and a credit slip.

If you keep the material, you have to pay for having them counted. Then someone must put the stuff on the shelf. And you are paying for the shelf. And paying for the space the shelf sits in. And paying for someone to go get them off the shelf when they are needed. Who knows how long that will be. In the meantime, it's money sitting on the shelf doing nuthin'.
 
C

charlietuna

Senior Member
Best one i ran into was a contractor that underbid me by $38,000.00 + on a $130,000.00 office buildout. We were the building's prime electrical contractor and they asked me to re-consider my price. The job had a $30k power conditioner and that's the only thing i could think of that would compensate for the price difference??? But they told me it was included in the $92,000. price??? With such a difference, i told the building to let the guy have the job!! We noticed this job was constantly being held up by the Electrician's work pace. Finally, the job was completed and the tenant(a large law firm) moved in. The first day the tenant called the building since they were having trouble with their copy machine. The building's maintainance man opened the ceiling tile to access the copier's junction box and found this 50 amp copy outlet fed with 2 #12 wires(on a 50 amp breaker). He called the building's cheif engineer, who went in the ceiling to varify his man's findings and got shocked by an open splice on a 277 volt/120 volt EXPOSED transformer feeding an emergency lighting fixture close by! The building called me and i looked at a few things--everything you could imagine was wrong--like each item being worse than the last!! I suggested bringing in a crew of seven men to quickly evaluate the situation. I set up three - two man teams and appointed myself as the recorder armed with a camera and clipboard. We stopped after four hours since we recorded over 200 serious code violations.

We called a meeting with the building manager and law firm's lead attorney at 7:00 PM. The attorney looked at me a said "what's the bottom line" as he leaned against the $30k power conditioner. I told him "it was unsafe to lean against his $30k power conditioner since it had absolutely "NO GROUND" ! The law firm had no place to move since their old building was sold, and considering the gross problems found, i was not going to take over the liability of this mess! Besides we were very busy at the time! The building hired us to oversee the entire scope of work with all repairs being accomplished AFTER HOURS. I explained the amount of work was intensive and would require more work than a normal installation since more than 50 percent of the installed work would have to be removed! The other contractor was very apologetic and explained "he was not qualified to do this type of work". We would list out violations in certain areas as we systematically went through their entire installation, and then they would correct it and we would inspect it. At first they tried to take short cuts--but soon learnt we checked EVERYTHING ! Foolishly i felt sorry for this contractor who told me over and over "I will never try this again!!" . My bill ran over $14k which came out of his pocket and he had three men working nights for four months??? Months later he was again working in another building down the street and again he ran into major problems? I asked my electrical inspector how this job ever passed inspection?? She told me that when the job first started she turned down the first three inspections and the contractor called her boss to complain about her being too hard on his men! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I had a good laugh when i was talking to the drywall contractor who worked on this job. He stated "man, i never lost so many extention cords on a job" -- the electricians were actually using extention cord materials to wire the many recessed fixtures in the office! Thats how bad it was !!
 
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O

ohm

Senior Member
Location
Birmingham, AL
Fulthrotl said:
it helps if i remember not to help the homeowner remember how
screwed up it is. rubbing salt in his wounds is not considered
rehabilitation or therapy.
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I feel the same way Randy, after I state my case and the HO agrees to pay for the fix, I don't bring it up again.
 
M

macmikeman

Senior Member
Location
Planet macmikeman
I absolutely get enraged when something is installed by a hack that presents a life hazard, like the time I found a pegboard wall covering in a garage workshop that had receptacles screwed to the pegboard directly using sheetrock screws thru the outlets ears. All wired up with zip cord to boot. And didn't at least use a bit of tape to insulate the exposed connections.......


But I love flat rate pricing the replacement and repairs of this stuff. I get all warm and fuzzy when I separate the property owners from large amounts of their life savings in hack replacements. I like the idea from another poster about sending a gift basket to the hack. Might encourage him to keep up the bad work.
 
steelersman

steelersman

Senior Member
Location
Lake Ridge, VA
tonyou812 said:
Those are usually the guys that have trucks without any real material. You know the type that buys only for the job.
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Hey now wait a minute! I'm the type of guy that uses a pickup truck and doesn't stock materials on it. I usually go to the big box stores for the majority of my materials and I get must the materials for the job at hand. However I also work full time for another company so when I do this it is for myself on the side and the customer doesn't have to bring another electrician to fix or finish what I did. :)
 
ivsenroute

ivsenroute

Senior Member
Location
Florida
steelersman said:
I can't help but find it funny that between post 15 and 16 on page 2 Iwire deleted route66electric's post. Reason: sexiest. :)
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I noticed that too. Don't ask don't tell. But I did not want to say anything for fear of getting my post deleted which I am sure will happen now.

Maybe we should have just not said anything.
 
steelersman

steelersman

Senior Member
Location
Lake Ridge, VA
iwire said:
There was nothing funny about the removed post.


Now you two have now 'made the list' :wink:
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I never read the removed post, as it was removed before I could read it. What was funny Bob was your reason. Sexiest. Get it sexiest instead of sexist. I'm sure you meant sexist. Againg sexist, not sexiest. Was his post the sexiest post of them all. Was his post the Victoria's Secret of them all? :)
 
S

satcom

Senior Member
charlietuna said:
Best one i ran into was a contractor that underbid me by $38,000.00 + on a $130,000.00 office buildout. We were the building's prime electrical contractor and they asked me to re-consider my price. The job had a $30k power conditioner and that's the only thing i could think of that would compensate for the price difference??? But they told me it was included in the $92,000. price??? With such a difference, i told the building to let the guy have the job!! We noticed this job was constantly being held up by the Electrician's work pace. Finally, the job was completed and the tenant(a large law firm) moved in. The first day the tenant called the building since they were having trouble with their copy machine. The building's maintainance man opened the ceiling tile to access the copier's junction box and found this 50 amp copy outlet fed with 2 #12 wires(on a 50 amp breaker). He called the building's cheif engineer, who went in the ceiling to varify his man's findings and got shocked by an open splice on a 277 volt/120 volt EXPOSED transformer feeding an emergency lighting fixture close by! The building called me and i looked at a few things--everything you could imagine was wrong--like each item being worse than the last!! I suggested bringing in a crew of seven men to quickly evaluate the situation. I set up three - two man teams and appointed myself as the recorder armed with a camera and clipboard. We stopped after four hours since we recorded over 200 serious code violations.

We called a meeting with the building manager and law firm's lead attorney at 7:00 PM. The attorney looked at me a said "what's the bottom line" as he leaned against the $30k power conditioner. I told him "it was unsafe to lean against his $30k power conditioner since it had absolutely "NO GROUND" ! The law firm had no place to move since their old building was sold, and considering the gross problems found, i was not going to take over the liability of this mess! Besides we were very busy at the time! The building hired us to oversee the entire scope of work with all repairs being accomplished AFTER HOURS. I explained the amount of work was intensive and would require more work than a normal installation since more than 50 percent of the installed work would have to be removed! The other contractor was very apologetic and explained "he was not qualified to do this type of work". We would list out violations in certain areas as we systematically went through their entire installation, and then they would correct it and we would inspect it. At first they tried to take short cuts--but soon learnt we checked EVERYTHING ! Foolishly i felt sorry for this contractor who told me over and over "I will never try this again!!" . My bill ran over $14k which came out of his pocket and he had three men working nights for four months??? Months later he was again working in another building down the street and again he ran into major problems? I asked my electrical inspector how this job ever passed inspection?? She told me that when the job first started she turned down the first three inspections and the contractor called her boss to complain about her being too hard on his men! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I had a good laugh when i was talking to the drywall contractor who worked on this job. He stated "man, i never lost so many extention cords on a job" -- the electricians were actually using extention cord materials to wire the many recessed fixtures in the office! Thats how bad it was !!
Click to expand...

What you are talking about, is common with a lot of fit up work, new guys want to get into comercial work, usually can't estimate a simple $100 job and they try to bid commercial fit up's, the usual result is they under bid most os them, and then panic after the jobs start, and two weeks into a job, they are running out of cash, and qualifed guys, so they fix the problem by puting off the street, green guys, with little of no experience, and then do a rain dance of shouting and screeming at them to hurry up, all this usually equals a mess, that even the best EC's can't fix without charging more then the original cost, and still the just do EC's keep bidding like bed bugs, in a $10 motel.
 
steelersman

steelersman

Senior Member
Location
Lake Ridge, VA
satcom said:
What you are talking about, is common with a lot of fit up work, new guys want to get into comercial work, usually can't estimate a simple $100 job and they try to bid commercial fit up's, the usual result is they under bid most os them, and then panic after the jobs start, and two weeks into a job, they are running out of cash, and qualifed guys, so they fix the problem by puting off the street, green guys, with little of no experience, and then do a rain dance of shouting and screeming at them to hurry up, all this usually equals a mess, that even the best EC's can't fix without charging more then the original cost, and still the just do EC's keep bidding like bed bugs, in a $10 motel.
Click to expand...

I'm having a hard time deciphering what you said. Have you been drinking?
 
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