Your Start Date Belongs to the Permit Reviewer
The GC has you mobilizing Monday, and you're still waiting on a discharge authorization and an Engineer's stamp on your means-and-methods submittal.
No other trade on that job needs a regulator to approve where its water goes before it can begin, and no other trade has to get its methods reviewed before the first wellpoint goes in the ground. Both of those clocks are held by people who don't answer to you or to the GC's schedule. Your mobilization date is therefore a forecast made by an agency reviewer and an Engineer, while the equipment reservation and the crew are already committed.
The size of it
Reserved pump sets, header pipe, and a crew are committed against a date that keeps moving, and standby isn't a billable line on a lump-sum dewatering item. Start without the paper and you get shut down, the hole floods, and the re-dewatering comes out of your number.
Two pieces of paper have to clear somebody else's desk before a pump turns on. The discharge side needs NPDES coverage and, in a lot of states, a separate state or water-district dewatering authorization that stormwater coverage doesn't include. The design side needs a submittal to the Engineer covering technique, equipment, discharge piping, discharge points, sediment control, drawdown extent, and a water budget where a district governs withdrawal. SFWMD guidance says dewatering applications are reviewed concurrently with the environmental permits and can't be considered complete until those are finished, so your start depends on an application you didn't file. Plan on a couple of weeks of lead just for the permit, longer when the agency is backed up.
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 dewatering contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What dewatering owners ask
How do I cover standby cost while waiting on a dewatering discharge permit?
The GC has you mobilizing Monday, and you're still waiting on a discharge authorization and an Engineer's stamp on your means-and-methods submittal.
What does it cost?
Reserved pump sets, header pipe, and a crew are committed against a date that keeps moving, and standby isn't a billable line on a lump-sum dewatering item. Start without the paper and you get shut down, the hole floods, and the re-dewatering comes out of your number.
What do I do first?
Put two dates on every job setup sheet before you reserve a single pump: the day NPDES coverage and the state or water-district dewatering authorization were applied for, and the day the means-and-methods submittal went to the Engineer.
What are dewatering contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates dewatering, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Excavation, which runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10.5% net. Those are derived figures, not dewatering's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
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 dewatering 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.