CIVIL · CIVIL AND EARTHWORK · FIXED BY STEP 01

Four mobilizations, one mob line item

You clear and grub in month one, come back for wet utilities, come back again for paving subgrade at closeout, and the contract still has one mobilization line.

WHY IT'S A CIVIL PROBLEM

Civil is the one scope that has to fully leave a site it will be back on four more times, because the pad, the wet utilities, and the paving subgrade happen months apart with other trades in between. Everybody else stages material and keeps a crew close. You're freighting a dozer, an excavator, and a roller down the highway each time, and the return trip has to be pulled out of whatever job that iron is on now.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Four unplanned remobilizations at $4k to $8k each in lowboy moves, setup, and lost production come to $16k to $32k of cost against one mob line item. Then add the schedule damage to whichever job you stripped the crew from.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

14%

CFOS target 13% for civil.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

21%

CFOS target 23.5% for civil.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

CFOS target 10.5% for civil.

Bid mobilization by the trip and list the trips in the scope letter. Civil's scope isn't continuous, so you leave the site and return three to five times while other people build, and every return means lowboys, oversize move permits, an operator's day of setup, and a crew pulled off a job that was making money. A trade sub who pauses between phases simply stops paying labor. When you demob, the equipment freight is cash out the door whether or not anyone is billing. Price each return separately, list them by phase in the contract, and cost code them separately so you can show what the fourth trip cost when the GC asks for a fifth.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Write every phase you'll mobilize for into the scope letter: mass grade, wet utilities, pad fine grade, paving and curb subgrade, and final grade and topsoil. Price a mobilization for each one.

STEP 02

Open a separate cost code per mobilization so lowboy invoices, oversize permits, and setup hours post to the trip that caused them.

STEP 03

When the GC's schedule slips and a phase splits into two trips, send the remob price that same day, before the iron rolls.

THE FIX

Step 01: Job cost structure

Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.

CFOS-01 · CHAPTER 1

Job cost codes that match how you bid the work

What this step changes, what it depends on, and how to tell it's installed.

BENCHMARKS

Civil by revenue band

All 7 bands are published. The CFOS target is beside the figure up to $10M to $25M, and the 4 bands above that are labelled modeled.

ACROSS EVERY TRADE

Cost codes the field ignores

You have 200 cost codes. The crews use four of them, and one is called Miscellaneous.

SAME TRADE

What else costs civil contractors money

CIVIL · CFOS-04

You bid cubic yards and pay by the ton

You bid 40,000 yards of import and every scale ticket comes back in tons. The biggest cost line on the job is measured in a unit your contract never defined.

CIVIL · CFOS-06

Your retainage is waiting on 70 percent grass

You finished grading in month three and utilities in month six, and the last 5 to 10 percent of your contract is locked behind a seed bed that has to hit 70 percent cover.

CIVIL · CFOS-06

The grading permit clock isn't on your schedule

Third resubmittal on the grading permit, the power pole relocation is six months out, and your crew and iron cost money while no party in your contract chain is at fault.

CIVIL · CFOS-08

Trench dips appear inside the bond window

The parking lot settled over your sewer line eighteen months after acceptance, and who pays comes down to whether the density test for that station and that lift is in a file.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

CONCRETE

Six Trips Back for Pads and Sidewalks, One Unit Price

You were first on the site and you're still coming back for stairs, pads, curbs, and exterior flatwork, all priced inside a per-yard number that assumed you never left.

DRYWALL

You Go Back Six Times And No Ticket Gets Signed

You hung the corridor in March and you're still sending a guy back in June, one hole at a time, on somebody else's dime.

ELECTRICAL

You make six trips and bid temp power at month zero

Electrical returns to the same building four to six times, and the rough in stays exposed between trips. Temp power gets bid as one lump sum before anyone knows the duration.

QUESTIONS

What civil owners ask

How should I bid mobilization when I have to come back to the site four times?

You clear and grub in month one, come back for wet utilities, come back again for paving subgrade at closeout, and the contract still has one mobilization line.

What does it cost?

What do I do first?

Write every phase you'll mobilize for into the scope letter: mass grade, wet utilities, pad fine grade, paving and curb subgrade, and final grade and topsoil. Price a mobilization for each one.

What are civil contractors supposed to be making?

Civil runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is right on it. The CFOS target is 10.5%.

Which part of the system fixes it?

The step is number 01, job cost structure. Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words. It comes from chapter 1 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.

OR HAVE IT HANDLED

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 civil contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.

What a fractional CFO does for civil contractors

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

MASTER ELECTRICIAN · 150+ PROJECTS · $2.1B+ MANAGED

Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.