You Bid Acres, the Tract Decides the Machine Hours
You walked it in November with the leaves down and got there in June to a different tract, and the difference between those two is yours to absorb.
A takeoff off a drawing doesn't change once the drawing is issued. A clearing bid estimates how much machine time the woods will take, and you make that estimate from the outside of the woods, on a tract that keeps growing between the walk and the mobilization. The unit you sell, the acre, has no fixed relationship to the unit you spend, the machine hour, and nothing in the contract ties them together.
The size of it
There's no escalation clause for the woods being thicker than they looked, so the entire variance is yours, and you find out after the fuel and the teeth are already spent.
Most trades take price risk on something they buy between bid and buyout: copper, steel, fuel, or whatever the mill quotes. Yours is quantity and difficulty risk on material you inherit, growing on the tract and buried under it: stems per acre, DBH, understory density, rock, slope, and moisture. Production runs one to two acres a day on saplings under four inches, and it drops to a quarter or a half acre a day once you're in eight inch and larger timber. Slope by itself can cut production by a third or well past half, and rock eats mulcher teeth. Every one of those gets priced off a walk through or a drone photo, and then the machine finds out what's really there.
Three moves, in order
Step 04: Estimating system
The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.
What else costs land clearing contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What land clearing owners ask
Why do my per acre clearing bids lose money in thick timber?
You walked it in November with the leaves down and got there in June to a different tract, and the difference between those two is yours to absorb.
What does it cost?
There's no escalation clause for the woods being thicker than they looked, so the entire variance is yours, and you find out after the fuel and the teeth are already spent.
What do I do first?
Bid in machine hours per acre first, then convert to a per acre price, so the assumption you're selling is written down somewhere.
What are land clearing contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates land clearing, 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 land clearing'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 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 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 land clearing 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.