ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CIVIL AND EARTHWORK · FIXED BY STEP 06

Your disposal outlet is booked before the dig starts

You mobilized, the excavation is open, and the only permitted facility that will take the material is 400 miles away and booked three weeks out.

WHY IT'S AN ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION PROBLEM

A framer waiting on material has a stack of lumber doing nothing. A remediation contractor waiting on an outlet has an open excavation with shoring, plates, dewatering, and an air monitoring plan in use every single day, and a permitted facility that answers to its own compliance calendar before it answers to yours. The supply chain here is licensed and short: there's no next yard down the road to call.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Haul cost per ton doubles or triples against the local outlet you aren't allowed to use, and every week the facility can't take you is a week of rented shoring, plates, dewatering, and idle iron parked on a hole with nothing billed against it.

OVERHEAD AT $1M to $5M

16%

CFOS target 15% for environmental remediation.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M to $5M

23%

CFOS target 25.5% for environmental remediation.

NET PROFIT AT $1M to $5M

CFOS target 10.5% for environmental remediation.

On a remediation job the receiving facility sets the schedule and the crew works around it. Hazardous soil can't go to the Subtitle D landfill down the road; it goes to a permitted Subtitle C site, and for most of the country that means one of a few facilities, long haul trucking or rail, and a scheduled tonnage allocation somebody has to reserve. In situ work has the same problem in a different form. Skid mounted SVE, air sparge, and pump and treat systems are built to order on lead times measured in months, and injection reagents like ZVI, persulfate, and EHC get batched per job. None of it waits on a shelf, and the hole is already open while you wait.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Before you price the job, call the two nearest permitted Subtitle C facilities and get their current tonnage allocation and next open window in writing, then put that date in the schedule as a hard constraint.

STEP 02

Price haul distance and tipping at the outlet that will take the material as its own unit price, with language that the price moves if the receiving facility changes.

STEP 03

Put the treatment skid, the reagent batch, and the outlet window on one release schedule with deposit milestones, and don't open the excavation until the ship date and the disposal window line up.

THE FIX

Step 06: Project management

Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them.

CFOS-06 · CHAPTER 6

Billing and change orders that hold without follow up

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

BENCHMARKS

Environmental remediation 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 change orders you did and never billed

The field did the work. The paperwork never caught up. Ninety days later there is no record that proves it happened.

SAME TRADE

What else costs environmental remediation contractors money

ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CFOS-02

An open hole is rented equipment with no production

The cut is finished, the sidewalls are trimmed, and your crew and your machines wait there while a lab decides whether you're allowed to backfill.

ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CFOS-04

One TCLP result can multiply your biggest cost line

You priced the dirt as non-hazardous off borings somebody else drilled, and the TCLP came back failing for lead.

ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CFOS-01

Closure letters come quarters after your crew leaves

The soil left in the spring, the crew has been on three other jobs since, and your final draw is stuck behind a state agency's review.

ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CFOS-07

The landfill gets paid in 15 days, you get paid in 90

You wrote checks to the landfill, the hauler, and the lab inside three weeks, and the pay app covering all of it is still with the consultant.

ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION · CFOS-01

Task caps on fund work turn good hours into bad debt

The fund approved a set number of hours and tons, the site turned out to have more, and you kept going because the excavation was already open.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

CONCRETE

Eight Tons of Rebar Tagged to a Drawing That Changed

The EOR approved the placing drawings, the fab shop cut and bent to the bar list, and then somebody moved a footing. Now you own bundles tagged to grid lines that no longer exist.

DEMOLITION

Your Breaker Uses Up Tool Steel That Overhead Pays For

A hammer chews $9,000 of tool steel on one teardown and the job that used it never sees a dollar of the cost. The margin looks fine and the bank account disagrees.

DRYWALL

Lead-lined board is eight weeks and non-returnable

The imaging room's board is eight weeks out, cut to the shielding drawings, and the deposit is gone the day you release the order.

QUESTIONS

What environmental remediation owners ask

Subtitle c landfill booked out how do I bid disposal?

You mobilized, the excavation is open, and the only permitted facility that will take the material is 400 miles away and booked three weeks out.

What does it cost?

What do I do first?

What are environmental remediation contractors supposed to be making?

Environmental remediation has 23% gross margin, 16% overhead and 7% net profit after taxes at $1M to $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 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.

OR HAVE IT HANDLED

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 environmental remediation contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, led by the same author.

What a fractional CFO does for environmental remediation contractors

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

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

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