A model nobody signs turns into shop burden nobody bid
The coil line isn't running, the plasma table is idle, the shop foreman is on payroll, and you're chasing the plumber and the sprinkler contractor for a signature.
A field crew that runs out of work goes to another job that afternoon. A sheet metal shop has nowhere to go, because its burden only gets absorbed through shop hours produced, and shop hours only exist when a model is signed. That makes your shop rate a function of other trades' modeling schedules, which is a dependency almost nobody else on the project carries.
The size of it
A shop bid at $38 an hour of burden runs at $60 for the quarter. The miss spreads across every job in the shop and never sits on the one that stalled, so no job report shows you what happened.
The fab shop can't cut a pound of duct until the MEP coordination model is signed by every trade in the ceiling. Duct is the largest geometry up there, so you lead coordination and everybody routes around you, but the sign-off is collective and you don't own the pen. Shop hours are gated by that signature and by engineer submittal returns, not by field progress. Meanwhile the coil line, the plasma table, the shop lease, the foreman, and the crew are all running whether or not there's released work. When two jobs stall coordination in the same month, the shop produces a fraction of the hours you spread the burden over.
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 carrying.
What else costs hvac contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What hvac owners ask
How to cost sheet metal shop hours when coordination is late?
The coil line isn't running, the plasma table is idle, the shop foreman is on payroll, and you're chasing the plumber and the sprinkler contractor for a signature.
What does it cost?
A shop bid at $38 an hour of burden runs at $60 for the quarter. The miss spreads across every job in the shop and never sits on the one that stalled, so no job report shows you what happened.
What do I do first?
Post released shop hours per week against available shop capacity, one line per week, and hang it where the shop foreman and the PM both see it.
What are hvac contractors supposed to be making?
HVAC runs 24% gross margin, 16% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 1 points above it. The CFOS target is 11%.
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 carrying. It comes from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.