What hourly rates do you folks use for:
1) 1 person field crew
2) LS
3) Computations & drafting (CAD)
and if you estimate & bill jobs lump-sum, do you end up making the above rates?
Thanks! SS
All I can say about us is that we target at least a 3.5 multiplier of wages for hourly rates. Lump sum varies greatly depending on the type of job with a clear goal of being substantially above the 3.5 multiplier. Lump Sum is where you can really make $.
I use Lump-Sum on everything.
extra work is negotiated case by case, based on actual cost, and I include my desired Profit.
Lump sum for almost everything, otherwise $200 an hour. I usually beat that rate on lump sum.
Very dangerous topic, folks.
If your clients aren't complaining, you're not charging enough.
~Dan Beardslee
Very dangerous topic, folks.
Not really. There's no law against discussing your billing rates. What somebody else does with that information is up to them. The laws against price fixing are all about collusion. You know, agreeing to charge the same amounts to eliminate competitive pricing.
Suuuuuuure.
You can find most firms rates in the meeting minutes of almost any municipality. It can take some digging, but there is a ton of info out there. It's all publicly available in situations like that. Not a dangerous topic at all IMO.
You can find most firms rates in the meeting minutes of almost any municipality.
Very True. Nevertheless, most savvy business people have a billing rate list for public consumption, and another, private, one for calculating fixed fee proposals.
Taboo topic.
PLS hourly rate...
The subject would be taboo if the people discussing it had a significant market share. That's obviously not the case here.
Union rates in downtown L.A. versus finding boundaries on residential tracts worth less than $10,000 in BugTussle.
Meaningless numbers. Why incite those looking to call us names in the first place?
Meaningless numbers.
Yeah. With the number of posts contrasting the difference in fees over the years, from a national (or more importantly international, as Surveyor Connect is) board, how much value can be placed on numbers posted.
Won't be helpful to the OP, but as a solo person now, I don't differentiate between the various functions of research, field, drafting, etc. It is all the same to me.
Yeah, no, I don't answer those types of questions.
Other professions train their people how to run a business. Surveyors hold everything close to the vest. Hence, all the complaints about not charging properly to make a profit and a professional salary.
Hence, problem getting people into the profession.
The economics of surveying needs to be talked about more than anything else. But no one will do it.
Something one guy said recently at a seminar is if you're not making enough to pay for health insurance for your family and your employees families, then you should not consider yourself in business.
I have no problem answering questions as posed in the OP. But it doesn't mean anything.
The question is how to be successful, not any particular number. But if you teach a boilerplate way to be successful, then fees will naturally be more similar than they are and have been.
Other professions train their people how to run a business. Surveyors hold everything close to the vest. Hence, all the complaints about not charging properly to make a profit and a professional salary.
I think the challenge is how to decouple the value of a survey from the number of hours it will take to complete it. Hours per task is a concrete, easily quantified value, but they rarely reflect the actual value of the deliverables that we produce.
It might take 10 hours of fieldwork + 8 hours of office work + 3 hours administrative work to produce a basic boundary survey for a residential homeowner. That survey might very well be worth only the time we put into it.
But the same amount of time might be spent performing an intensive topographic survey on an expensive parcel of land for a lucrative civil design project.
We tend to price both jobs as if they were the same. They're not.
And the value of data already collected is not reduced just because we don't have to survey it all over again. Other data-driven industries don't give a discount on data just because they already have it. We shouldn't either.
