CONCRETE PUMPING · CONCRETE AND MASONRY · FIXED BY STEP 04

The Cheapest Hour of the Day Is the One You Can't Skip

Half the day is windshield time at drive rate, and your operator is into overtime by ten in the morning on job two.

WHY IT'S A CONCRETE PUMPING PROBLEM

Most trades set up once in the morning and tear down once at night. You set up and tear down two to four times, and the hours between those setups are unavoidable and billed at the discounted rate. Overtime runs $25 to $40 an hour past eight and up to $80 past twelve, so the last customer of the day is the most expensive one you serve and usually pays the same posted rate as the first.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Almost no pumper costs a truck-day end to end, so a bad route reads as a pricing problem. The owner raises the pump rate on a day that lost its money in the drive time.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

16%

CFOS target 15% for concrete pumping.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

23%

CFOS target 25.5% for concrete pumping.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

CFOS target 10.5% for concrete pumping.

A boom truck sells mobilizations, two to four a day, across different jobs and different customers. Pump time bills $210 to $400 an hour, while travel bills port to port at only $130 to $185. Every mile between two customers burns a $700K asset at the lower number, and pours start at four to six in the morning, so your operator crosses into overtime tiers during job two while job two's customer pays the standard hourly step. The sequence dispatch built that morning decides whether the truck-day made money, and the rate sheet has very little to do with it.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Cost one truck-day this week clock in to clock out: pump hours, drive hours, fuel, and the operator's burdened hours including the overtime tier he crossed.

STEP 02

Rank your top ten customers by drive minutes per pump hour, and quote the far ones a different mobilization number when they call.

STEP 03

Give dispatch one hard rule: the third pour of the day falls inside a set radius of the second, or it moves to another truck or another day.

THE FIX

Step 04: Estimating system

The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.

CFOS-04 · CHAPTER 4

Make the estimate and the job cost report match

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

BENCHMARKS

Concrete pumping 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

The estimate and the actual never match

You can compare the estimate to the job cost report, but the two use different words, so the comparison means nothing.

SAME TRADE

What else costs concrete pumping contractors money

CONCRETE PUMPING · CFOS-02

You Bill Hours. The Steel Wears by the Yard.

Two four-hour pours bill the same, and one of them wore out a whole pipeline. The invoice meters time; the machine meters yardage.

CONCRETE PUMPING · CFOS-02

A Back-Ordered Boom Part Parks Your Whole Revenue Unit

That truck is the whole shop. It waits three weeks on a part, and the equipment payment keeps clearing the whole time.

CONCRETE PUMPING · CFOS-05

Six Hours of Pumping, Eighteen Months of Retainage

You were on that job for six hours in March. Someone is still holding retainage on it two years later.

CONCRETE PUMPING · CFOS-01

Grout, Diesel, and Payroll Go Out Before the Invoice

You mix grout and throw it away before you pump one yard you can bill for, and the busiest month is the thinnest month in the bank.

CONCRETE PUMPING · CFOS-06

Outrigger Damage Comes Back Netted Off Your Next Check

A letter reaches you in June about a driveway your outriggers cracked in April, and the amount comes straight off your next check.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

CIVIL

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.

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.

QUESTIONS

What concrete pumping owners ask

How to price concrete pump travel time between jobs?

Half the day is windshield time at drive rate, and your operator is into overtime by ten in the morning on job two.

What does it cost?

Almost no pumper costs a truck-day end to end, so a bad route reads as a pricing problem. The owner raises the pump rate on a day that lost its money in the drive time.

What do I do first?

Cost one truck-day this week clock in to clock out: pump hours, drive hours, fuel, and the operator's burdened hours including the overtime tier he crossed.

What are concrete pumping contractors supposed to be making?

Concrete pumping runs 23% gross margin, 16% 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 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 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 concrete pumping contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.

What a fractional CFO does for concrete pumping contractors

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

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

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