Your longest lead item is 3 percent of the square footage
The lobby ceiling is on a boat somewhere and it's holding your last mobilization, your final pay app, and your retention.
A custom cloud is fabricated to your field dimensions after somebody outside your contract signs a finish sample, so your longest lead item is gated by a desk you can't call. Other trades can start on approved typicals and finish the fancy part later; your specialty package can't enter fabrication at all until that submittal comes back. That puts your closeout date on the architect's calendar.
The size of it
The 800 SF lobby cloud is about 3 percent of your square footage and 25 percent of your material cost, and it's the room that gates substantial completion. Five weeks on an architect's desk plus twelve weeks of fabrication moves your last trip, your final pay app, and your retention release by a quarter, and none of it appears in job cost until the ship date is already blown.
Standard tile and grid wait on a distributor's shelf and turn in one to two weeks. Custom metal panel, wood, linear, torsion spring, curved clouds, and baffles get built to your field dimensions, and nothing releases to fabrication until shop drawings and physical finish samples come back approved. Armstrong sells a FAST134 program at one, three, or four weeks order to ship, and it does that by waiving shop drawings and sample approval; the normal path includes both. Real lead time on a genuinely custom package runs eight to sixteen weeks after approval, and approval waits on the design team's calendar.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone chasing them.
What else costs acoustic ceiling contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What acoustic ceiling owners ask
Custom ceiling cloud lead time delaying substantial completion?
The lobby ceiling is on a boat somewhere and it's holding your last mobilization, your final pay app, and your retention.
What does it cost?
The 800 SF lobby cloud is about 3 percent of your square footage and 25 percent of your material cost, and it's the room that gates substantial completion. Five weeks on an architect's desk plus twelve weeks of fabrication moves your last trip, your final pay app, and your retention release by a quarter, and none of it appears in job cost until the ship date is already blown.
What do I do first?
On day one, pull the specialty ceiling out of the ceiling scope and give it its own submittal log line with the sample approval date and the fabrication weeks written beside it.
What are acoustic ceiling contractors supposed to be making?
Acoustic ceiling runs 21% gross margin, 13% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point above it. The CFOS target is 11.5%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone chasing them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for acoustic ceiling contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.