Waiting on the Inspector Is Priced Into Nothing
Your crew is mobilized and can't legally cover the wall until MEP rough, blocking, sound batt, and head-of-wall firestopping pass, and the special inspector books elsewhere.
Most trades wait for access. Interiors waits for a legal release to conceal, which is a different animal. The AHJ and the special inspector own the clock, while the GC owns the call to proceed. Meanwhile the payroll in front of that open wall is yours alone, and because the same crew closes walls and drops tile, one late inspection on a floor stops both halves of your scope at once.
The size of it
Idle or shuffled crews post to job cost as a labor overrun with no scope attached to them. There's no change order for waiting, so it turns up months later as we lost money on that floor, with nothing in the file to show why.
Interiors owns the two moments in a building where everybody else's work gets covered. The second side of the wall can't go on until the in-wall inspection clears, and head-of-wall firestopping is frequently a special inspection by a third-party inspector on the GC's dime and the GC's calendar. The ceiling works the same way, since the grid stays open until the above-ceiling inspection passes. Your crew is on payroll the whole time and there's no scope line to charge the hours against.
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 interiors contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What interiors owners ask
Crew waiting on inspection before we can close the walls?
Your crew is mobilized and can't legally cover the wall until MEP rough, blocking, sound batt, and head-of-wall firestopping pass, and the special inspector books elsewhere.
What does it cost?
Idle or shuffled crews post to job cost as a labor overrun with no scope attached to them. There's no change order for waiting, so it turns up months later as we lost money on that floor, with nothing in the file to show why.
What do I do first?
Open a non-productive cost code for inspection hold and have the foreman code hours to it daily, by floor and by inspection type.
What are interiors contractors supposed to be making?
Interiors has 19% gross margin, 13% overhead and 6% net profit after taxes at $1M to $5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point below it. The CFOS target is 10%.
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 interiors 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.