We're hoping so..(all of the career Changing, in the pipeline, up and coming, and genuinely Interested in the profession as it was and is evolving too people)
"There was never any good old days"?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ(Jump to 3:52 for the money line)
?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) in My Name is Nobody, 1973
Some days the answer is NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Sometimes, managing a single person operation is more difficult than management of a five person operation.?ÿ At least with a multi-person operation, you can delegate duties & responsibilities. As a one-man operation, you work at your own pace, answer only to your creditors, but have to do everything yourself. Some one-man operators on this forum are highly motivated and do very well for themselves and their families.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
a lot of truth here
I think the main trick with not overwhelming yourself as a one-person shop is to make sure you don't take on any projects that are more than you can handle. And if you aren't sure, don't take it. I made that mistake once.
Once.
?ÿ
Don't you mean
1/3 office production
1/3 office admin
1/3 field production
1/3 changing it all when the client remembers what he really wanted
Yes!
25 years ago before any us here were using robots or GPS, a asked the owner of a 10 person surveying co. what he thought of a 1 or 2 person business. He said the problem is you will wind up doing an awful lot of clerical work. And there is something to that.?ÿ
Guess I'd better change the fraction to:
2/3 - changing it all when the client realises that what he really wanted wasn't what he showed on his design drawing!
Having spent a full day last week surveying a couple of fabricated bits of piping for an offshore platform - all in accordance with a procedure we put forward and the end client agreed (coordinates and orientations for each flange centre line/ bolt pattern) -?ÿ now comes back and asks for all bolt holes and flanges fully in 3D ( his new sample drawing of what is wanted shows dimensions given to 0.1mm ).
Not sure how many welders can handle 14in. pipe and get it to 1mm., never mind 0.1mm. (that's 4 thou for those who aren't metricated). Not sure either why you would want to know exactly where the back of the bolt hole was.
Still, it all provides a distraction from the task of actually surveying things.
Sounds like he's trying to expand the liability pool to me, so there's more pockets to pull out of if he doesn't get it just right.
???ý
I suspect it's more a case of draughtsmen who have never been outside an office and think the whole world just exists on a screen.
Digression - many years ago when I worked as an engineer on the railway, design side, we all had to go on various practical courses so we learnt the hard way about problems poor design could cause for those who had to make/install our designs.
Weighted mean duration of jobs: 11 days. Weighted mean hours expended on research, fieldwork, GPS post-processing?ÿ & note reduction, drafting: 40 hours. Assuming 8 hour days that's 5/11ths crew time, or stuff that could be delegated, and 6/11ths undivided clerical or sublime professional worries that need better metrics.
I have six crews and our are of practice includes a mix of boundary/topo, constructing staking for both residential and commercial work, ALTAS, etc.?ÿ Out of the seven total stations we own, two are Leica TS 16 robots, the others are TS 12 total stations.
I very rarely send out a one man crew, I just don't believe in it, maybe I'm just old school. We work statewide, often in urban areas a few hours away from the office and when we are working locally, traffic is a nightmare on virtually every road in the area.?ÿ The personal safety of my crewmembers is my primary concern, followed by the safety of our equipment.?ÿ Despite cones and signs, we've had two guns mowed down in the last two years and people almost run over on several occasions.?ÿ Another concern is the rising theft of unattended equipment in our region.
I know I am going to sound like my grandfather "Back in my day....." So forgive me but let me give you some advice.
I can tell you that if you don't know how your time is allocated, then you do not know how much you should be billing, and how much you are actually making.?ÿ
I got to start my career when a survey crew was three guys, a crew chief, one on the instrument, and one to carry and throw stuff out of the way. By the time I ended my private practice and switched to the dark side (government), one person crews would suffice on most jobs. Personally I prefer two, both for safety and camaraderie.
When times are good, getting jobs are easy and the money is flowing, paying attention to time ratios seems like (ironically), a waste of time. But when the lean times come, clients are scarce, you have to make every minute of your (and your employees) day count. You see, all you have to sell is your time. There is no viable markup for stakes, irons, monuments or maps. Your time is what you sell. So think of it like you have an inventory of widgets, and those blocks just happen to be time. You also have to realize that there is a limited inventory of those widgets. Now if you hire employees, it will boost your inventory, but with added cost. You can't just call up the supplier and say, hey send me a few hundred more widgets by next Tuesday to sell.
So a 40 hour week starts the yearly inventory with 2080 hours. Now if we take out 7 days for the major holidays( Christmas, New Years, July 4th, Labor and Memorial Day), a two weeks of vacation, a couple of sick days, maybe four days for a conference, we are left with 1864 hours to sell to clients. How many of those hours are spent on admin, payroll, taxes, maintenance, continuing ed, etc? Would you estimate 20%, 33%, 40%, 50%? Let us assume for a moment it is 1/3 (from this thread). So that means 621 hours are taken off the top. Now we are down to 1242 hours of billable time that have to pay for everything and generate a profit. Now if we underestimate how much time a project will take, or we make mistakes we have to correct, to we spend time on a project that we forget to bill or do for goodwill, then those hours you can sell go down, they don't go up.?ÿWhat most end up doing is working a lot of overtime to makeup for those free hours that we (and our employees) tend to give away.
But if you do not know what that percentage is, then you do not know how much time you have to sell and do not know what you have to sell it for to reach your financial goals. When I figured out what my time inventory actually was and what I had to charge for each hour of billable time, that's when surveying became profitable.
?ÿ
I grab a helper here and there as needed.
After 6 years of having no employees I finally dropped my workers comp coverage this year, so "grabbing a helper" is no longer a prudent option for me.?ÿ Should the need arise I can rent a body from a colleague's firm (technically a subcontract arrangement), but so far haven't needed to.
