The Lath Inspection Owns Your Crew's Calendar
Lath is done Tuesday, the inspector gets there Friday, and eight skilled plasterers wait three days that never get coded to anything.
Trades installing exposed work can keep producing somewhere else on the building while an inspection is pending. You can't cover the lath, so the whole crew stops at one specific line in the sequence and there's no second face to move to. An inspection delay is a full-crew stoppage here and a partial one almost everywhere else.
The size of it
Every inspection cycle costs two to five idle crew days per building at full plastering crew burden, and the labor-per-square-foot number you bid does not include any of it.
Lath, weep screed, casing bead, and the water resistive barrier are concealed work, so the AHJ has to sign off before plaster covers any of it. That inspection clock belongs to the building department. It isn't in the GC's schedule and it isn't in your subcontract, and a failure over somebody else's flashing detail restarts it. A stacked plastering crew can't be flexed down for two days, so you either pay them to wait or you lose them to the contractor across town. The wait posts to job cost as labor with no square feet against it, and afterward no report can tell you which job absorbed it.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them.
What else costs EIFS and stucco contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What EIFS and stucco owners ask
How do I track crew standby time waiting on a lath inspection?
Lath is done Tuesday, the inspector gets there Friday, and eight skilled plasterers wait three days that never get coded to anything.
What does it cost?
Every inspection cycle costs two to five idle crew days per building at full plastering crew burden, and the labor-per-square-foot number you bid does not include any of it.
What do I do first?
Add an idle-on-inspection cost code and have the foreman put standby hours there by building, never on the production code.
What are EIFS and stucco contractors supposed to be making?
EIFS and stucco has 23% gross margin, 15% overhead and 8% net profit after taxes at $1M to $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 following up on them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: C.F.O.S. 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 EIFS and stucco contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, led by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.