I-square foot

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sparky76

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So Cal
Does anybody here use I square foot? If so how so you like it? I went to one of their sales semminars last week and tomorrow a rep is going to give me a one on one demo. We're a very small company and want to grow...not sure if its a good fit??
Appreciate any opinions good, bad or ugly. Also is it necessary to get set up w/ a plotter if you use them?
 
I have been using it for a few years now, and by far it is my favorite jobs service.

It lists all the public jobs and quite a few private jobs that out for bid and even tracks them through bid to contract. Often times I will get calls after I have been awarded a job, asking me if I would like pricing for FA, DataComm, and LP which is nice for the times I did not have a number going in and just made up a budget.

It lists all the plan pages, specs, addendums, and other players bidding the job, so during bidding it you can stay up to date easily.

All the docs are in CPC format which I did not like a first, but then realized they could all be printed to scale in PDF or TIFF which made them pretty useful.

Once you are in the system you start getting unsolicited bid invitations via email which is nice if you are looking for work.

The sort and search functions could use some improvement but they do work and you can easily find more work to bid than you want, with a list of the other GCs bidding the project.

One piece of advice, if you do it, a printer that does 11x17 is really helpful. You can take a lot of stuff off 11x17. Currently I have a 36" plotter but the 11x17 does cheaper prints and is a lot faster than the plotter. Also anything you can format to fit on a 8.5x11 and PDF to the supply houses will save you paper too.

As for growing your business, yeah it will do that.
 
sparky76 said:
Thanks ITO. If you don't mind me asking how much did the plotter run?
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I paid about $6,500 for my HP DesignJet 1050C and after googling I see they are running about $6k now and around $2k used. Its a good color plotter, but for what you are doing you should be able to pick up a black and white plotter for around $1,500 (just sold my old HP black and white for that price).

Another option is to print the CPCs to PDF or Tiff, and get them to a local reprographic shop. My local shop has an FTP that I can upload to, and will deliver the printed plans the same day for a resonable price.

The plotter takes for 2-6minutes per page to print on paper that runs about $75 a roll, and ink that cost $100 a pop for each of 4 colors. Sometimes its more cost and time effective to just upload them to the Reproshop's FTP and get my plans later that afternoon.

My rule of thumb is anything over 20 full size pages, I send out for printing.
 
How Much

How Much

How much is I SqFt charging? Is it per month, per year, or what? We have another service here, but it is really more geared for the "public" work.

I remember before I SqFt really took off, actually they bought a company and I can't remember that company's name and that company did a really good job keeping in contact with local architects and engineers and publishing upcoming projects that they were currently designing. Is I Sq Ft doing that now?

Thanks!
 
i sqft is what we used for about 2 years until we were contacted by reed connect. there service is what we use 100% now. isqft is mostly for national vendors like small restaraunts, and retail companies. they didnt have much local jobs for bid. it was just a different customer they were in tune with.
 
It occurred to me that this type of service probably is only as good as the local people they have working for them for each area.

ISF is great in my area, but that does not mean it will be great in every area. As we all know you are only as good as your help, and not all help is created the same.
 
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Ito- I defer to you as the expert. Do you think that I square foot is a viable tool for a 2-3 man shop that will remain that way until enough capital is gathered to finance expansion?
 
sparky76 said:
Ito- I defer to you as the expert. Do you think that I square foot is a viable tool for a 2-3 man shop that will remain that way until enough capital is gathered to finance expansion?
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If you are on the hunt for small commercial jobs, I would say yes. However if I recall ISF gave me a 30-day trial for free, maybe the best way to see if its a good fit is to try it out for 30-days and see if it generates the leads you are looking for.
 
ITO said:
However if I recall ISF gave me a 30-day trial for free, maybe the best way to see if its a good fit is to try it out for 30-days and see if it generates the leads you are looking for.
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I just talked to someone at their office about two weeks ago and they told me that they no longer offer the 30 day "trial" period because too many people were bidding jobs off of the trial period. I said "well, isn't that how you would try it out, you know, research the jobs you have during the trial period and then bid them to see if these are worthwhile leads?" The "salesman" said that their were too many complaints from "paying" subscribers that these people with "trial" memberships were getting the information that they were paying for. He offered to do a 30 to 45 minute "walk-thru" of the system. I told him I wasn't interested in a walk-thru, I learned better with the "hands-on" method.

I remember the name of the company they bought out - US Projects. They had a really good network built up here in Minnesota.
 
Hmmmm maybe with some smooth talking or a written agreement they might work something out, or maybe they would commit to sell you a months worth of service for an introductory price.

It sales, anything is possible.
 
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