One install line in the bid becomes three trips
Frames go in at framing, doors hang after paint, and hardware goes on at punch. That's three mobilizations, and most bids price one.
The building's own sequence splits your scope, and no amount of scheduling collapses it back together. Holes drilled through frames for somebody else's anchors, paint on strikes, bent hinge preps, and clearances thrown off by a new floor build-up all turn up on your last trip. A trade that installs and leaves never inherits three months of other people's traffic on its own material.
The size of it
You eat two extra mobilizations plus repair labor on damage you didn't cause. With no dated frame acceptance, the fix hits your cost code instead of a backcharge to the trade that did it.
Bid three mobilizations, because you're making three trips. Frames go in with the studs. After drywall, prime, and paint, the doors get hung. Hardware, closers, cylinders, and cores go on at punch, sometimes months behind the frames. Between trip one and trip three your frames live in the wall while drywall, paint, flooring, and every forklift on the job work around them.
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 door and hardware contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What door and hardware owners ask
How to bid frames doors and hardware as three separate trips?
Frames go in at framing, doors hang after paint, and hardware goes on at punch. That's three mobilizations, and most bids price one.
What does it cost?
You eat two extra mobilizations plus repair labor on damage you didn't cause. With no dated frame acceptance, the fix hits your cost code instead of a backcharge to the trade that did it.
What do I do first?
Break the estimate into three labor lines with their own hours: frames at framing, doors after paint, and hardware at punch.
What are door and hardware contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates door and hardware, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Interiors, which runs 19% gross margin, 13% overhead and 6% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not door and hardware'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, and CONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for door and hardware 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.