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Issue No. 02
The Steel Erector's Playbook
Field-tested systems for steel erection owners
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The Confession
I was guessing my labor rate for 15 years.
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I'll tell you something most owners won't.
For most of my career, our hourly billing rate was an educated guess.
We'd look at what we charged the previous year. Bump it up a few bucks. Check what we thought the market was doing. Talk to a couple of other guys. Settle on a number that felt right.
That was the process. For years.
And we weren't lazy about it — we'd play around with the math, adjust when things felt off, raise rates after a bad year. But nobody had ever sat me down and said here is every single cost that goes into one man-hour and here is exactly how you calculate it. So we approximated. And we hoped.
It took us way longer than it should have to get this dialed in. Years longer. And when we finally did, the thing that cracked it wasn't a consultant or a CPA.
It was AI.
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The full labor cost workbook — with the burden and blended rate formulas already built out — is part of the Job Profitability Report I'm putting together. Coming soon.
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Section 01
What I actually did
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I sat down with ChatGPT and asked one question: what should be included in a fully-burdened hourly rate for a union steel erection company?
Then I worked through it line by line.
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What I Fed It
Every document that touches a man-hour.
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Workers' comp sheets
Rate per $100 of payroll
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GL policy
With labor-hour allocation
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Umbrella premium
Yes, this is a labor cost
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Union rate sheets
Base wage, pension, annuity, H&W, training fund
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Overhead numbers
Rent, trucks, office staff, building insurance — everything that spreads across productive labor hours
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Then I asked AI to break it down by trade. Foreman. Journeyman. Apprentice. Because they don't cost the same and they shouldn't be billed the same.
It took a lot of back and forth. Overhead allocation alone took us a few rounds to get right — what percentage of office salary gets charged to labor vs. carried as fixed overhead, how to handle non-productive time, how much to layer in for cash flow drag when GCs are paying you 60-90 days out.
But at the end I had something I'd never had before: a real number. Not a guess. Not last year plus a bump. The actual fully-burdened cost per productive man-hour, by trade, with every line item traceable to a document.
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Section 02
What the number told me
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Two things hit me when I saw the final number.
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01
We'd been under-billing on T&M for years.
Not by a little. By enough that I don't want to do the math on how much money walked out the door over the years.
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02
Our crew mix was costing us more than I thought.
A job with heavy foreman hours was burning margin we'd never priced for, because I'd been billing a blended rate that assumed a crew mix we weren't actually running.
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Neither of those things shows up on your P&L at the end of the year. They show up one job at a time, in margins that come in 4-6 points light, and you never know exactly why.
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Section 03 — Your Checklist
What you need to pull
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If you want to run this exercise yourself — and you should — here's what you need in front of you.
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Pull These Before You Start
Every line needs to trace to a real document.
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□Workers' comp declaration page — rate per $100 of payroll by class code
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□General liability policy — premium and labor allocation
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□Umbrella policy — premium
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□Union rate sheets — base wage and every fringe line, by trade
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□Payroll tax rates — your share of FICA, FUTA, SUTA
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□Last year's overhead — office salaries, rent, vehicles, shop insurance, software, everything
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□Productive vs. non-productive hours — what % of clock hours actually puts iron in the air
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Put all of that in front of AI. Ask it to walk you through the calculation. Push back when the overhead allocation doesn't feel right. Don't stop until every line is traceable to a real number on a real document.
Block an afternoon and knock it out. Don't spread it across weeks like I did.
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The Bottom Line
The lesson I wish someone had given me at 30
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Nobody is coming to teach you this.
The union won't. Your CPA won't — they'll tell you what you spent, not what to charge. The GC sure won't. Your competitors don't know their own number, so they can't tell you yours.
You have to sit down and build it yourself.
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“
The tools to figure it out didn't exist five years ago. They exist now. If you've been guessing your rate the way I was — and most of you are, whether you admit it or not — stop.
— Dino
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Until next week,
Dino
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P.S.
If you run this exercise and the number surprises you, you're not alone. Reply to this email and tell me how far off your guess was. I'm collecting these because I think the gap is bigger across our industry than anyone's talking about.
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The Steel Erector's Playbook
Systems beat hustle. Pass or premium.
Dino DePasquale · DinoDePasquale.com
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