sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Pricing Large Jobs

I was intrested to hear how other companies price large cabling jobs. Do you have a standard price per run no matter what the length? Do you estimate the amount of cable and the amount of man hours needed to mcomplete the job? Sometimes we seem to be right on top of everyone, and other times we are way off, both high and low. Just wnted to get your thoughts.

I price it by Projected T&M .

take the print , figure cable amount, number of jacks and faceplate's , patch panels , 66 blocks etc .

estimate labor

total it up , mark it up .

It really depends upon the project environment and size. Like skip555, projected T&M is a good route for small-medium size projects (though, those are relative terms).

For very large projects it can become more complex. Lots of variables can add to the complexity of the installation, and thus increase the amount of labor necessary.

For example, in schools you have to run a lot of conduit and surface raceway (Panduit LD3, LD5, LD10, etc).

In warehouse envrionments your techs will likely spend a lot of time on a scissor lift installing beam clamps, etc.

Hard lid is more difficult to deal with than is drop tile ceilings.

Every job is unique and needs to be looked at individually, IMO.

It's probably best to look at past jobs and price out the cost per drop/hole to use as a baseline. Job cost is your friend. At the end of every large job, I sit down with the labor and materials list and get a cost per drop--from a retail standpoint. For example, my last voice and video customer (only 4 data drops) cost him about $xxx per jack. Since the video distribution cost was about the same as a patch panel and it was all Cat 5e/350 PVC cable, it is a pretty good picture of cost per drop (at xx/hr labor, YMMV)

We still bid out that job on T&M. Now I did a long factory construction job and bid that at $xxx per hole flat with the patch panel already in place. That was 1 voice and 1 data jack per hole at $xx/hr.

Of course, you still have to know the site well if you're going to bid flat rate, or plan ahead for things like triple or quadruple sets of Cat-21 hangers :-)


Carl

Carl, no pricing in the public forums please.

I agree with you. What I do is start with a base price per drop that would reflect an "easy" installation with normal cable lengths such as an office with dropped ceilings and walls that can be easily fished for cut-in rings and jack plates. I add to that for the "degree of difficulty" such as raceway, no dropped ceilings, extensive fishing, long runs, inspections and permits, building access, etc. Sometimes the cost per run can be several times the base. I never discount multiple runs going to the same location.

The customer is never given the per-run price, that is only used by me to determine the total cost The total cost is only what the customer sees. 50% up front and 50% upon completion.

-Hal

I expected that if pricing didn't fly someone would fix it, thanks :-)

I do the 50/40/10 pricing, but I've just had to add a new column called draw because of customer delay. We get the old 90 day delivery and we're sitting on all the hardware and greater than 50% of the labor, so it's time to cover that scenario. I'm putting in a progress draw for each 30 days of a project.

Certainly something to consider is the cost of the cable which can be problem because you usually have to order much more than you use for one job.

If you are like me I want to pull as many runs at once as I can to cut down on labor. Even though a small job may require maybe 2000 feet of cable actual, you are going to need at least four or more reels or boxes of 1000 feet for those pulls. Unless uou are really busy and can use that cable right away, if you want to see a profit on that job your price has to be high enough to cover all of that cable even if its not used on that job.

This brings up another issue, that of using CAT3 and CAT5e only where needed. When you are talking about plenum rated cable, CAT3 is about half the cost of CAT5e so you can save a significant amount of money if you ignore the "politically correct" people who say use CAT5e for everything "in case its needed for a computer".

-Hal

"in case its needed for a computer". to me means go back and run another data cable!

I usually do T&M plus 10% for large jobs to cover project overruns.