The Locate Ticket Belongs To No One, So You Eat the Stand-Down
Crew's loaded, trailer's hooked, and you're waiting in the yard on a locate that hasn't come back.
A fence sub puts dozens of separate holes along a property line, which means you're exposed to the whole yard, not one trench route somebody already cleared. Trades working inside a building never touch the 811 clock, and trades digging one line pull one ticket for one path. You pull tickets with expiry dates against a schedule other people keep moving, and every private line the utility never mapped is on your ticket anyway.
The size of it
Crews get staged and stood down, the mobilization gets spent with zero linear feet installed, and that labor goes into an overhead bucket rather than on the job that burned it. A single strike on an unmarked private line runs from a few thousand dollars on fiber to well into six figures on gas.
Three clocks have to close before one post hole gets dug, and you control none of them. 811 marks are a 2 to 3 business day statutory wait, and those tickets expire, so a crew that gets pushed a week means re-marking before anybody augers anything. 811 also only covers public utilities: private irrigation, pet fence loops, landscape lighting and the gas run from the meter to the house aren't in the system and are still your problem when the auger finds them. On manufactured gate packages, the engineering and CAD approval step alone eats 1 to 2 weeks inside the fab window before material is even procured.
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 fencing contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What fencing owners ask
Fence crew stood down waiting on 811 locates?
Crew's loaded, trailer's hooked, and you're waiting in the yard on a locate that hasn't come back.
What does it cost?
Crews get staged and stood down, the mobilization gets spent with zero linear feet installed, and that labor goes into an overhead bucket rather than on the job that burned it. A single strike on an unmarked private line runs from a few thousand dollars on fiber to well into six figures on gas.
What do I do first?
Don't load the trailer until three things are checked against paperwork: locate ticket back and unexpired, permit or survey in hand, gate shop drawings approved.
What are fencing contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates fencing, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Sitework, which runs 18% gross margin, 15% overhead and 3% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not fencing'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 fencing 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.