You Bid One Mobilization and Paid For Five
Lath, scratch, cure, brown, cure, and finish adds up to five or six trips to the same building, and the bid priced one.
A trade that installs in a single pass mobilizes once per building and absorbs overhead across twelve months. Your production calendar has cure windows and a temperature floor written into the product itself, so eight or nine months have to cover a full year of overhead and every building gets five setups you bid as one. A cold snap stops this work outright, and the payroll keeps accruing while it does.
The size of it
Mobilization gets bid once and incurred five times, and overhead absorbed over eight or nine productive months means the business that looks healthy in July is underwater in January with no warning.
Three coat work is a sequence with waiting built into the material: lath, then inspection, then scratch, then a moist cure and set window, then brown, then a float and cure window, then finish. Each pass is a separate mobilization of access, pump, mixer, hopper, and crew, and cold or rain resets the sequence rather than pausing it. Cement plaster has a hard low temperature floor, roughly 40 degrees F and rising with protection required after placement, so in a northern market the whole trade switches off for months while the crew you spent five years building stays on the payroll. You're also the last wet trade on the exterior, applying over somebody else's WRB and window flashing, so their defect turns up as a crack or a stain in your finish. The GC prices the whole thing like one trip.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using.
What else costs EIFS and stucco contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What EIFS and stucco owners ask
How do I cover overhead during the winter stucco shutdown?
Lath, scratch, cure, brown, cure, and finish adds up to five or six trips to the same building, and the bid priced one.
What does it cost?
Mobilization gets bid once and incurred five times, and overhead absorbed over eight or nine productive months means the business that looks healthy in July is underwater in January with no warning.
What do I do first?
Price mobilization per pass on the bid sheet, with lath, scratch, brown, and finish each given their own setup cost plus a line for weather resets.
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 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using. It comes from chapter 3 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.