Your Detailer Gets Paid Before the Stamp Comes Back
The GC's schedule shows footings starting next week, your bar list is still with the structural engineer, and you've already written the check to the detailer.
Almost every other sub on that job buys a product that already exists. Sheetrock, pipe, wire, and block wait on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere, while a rebar package exists as shape codes and mark numbers waiting on one engineer's stamp. That gate is what sends your cash out first and brings it back last. The party controlling the gate isn't you, and it isn't the GC asking where the mats are.
The size of it
Detailing money leaves the business weeks before a pay application can cover it, and when review runs long you eat field cutting and bending labor that was never in the bid. The alternative is a schedule hit you didn't cause and can't bill for.
Rebar is manufactured from a bar list, so nothing exists until somebody draws it and somebody else approves it. The placing drawings and bar list go in as a submittal, and the fab shop won't release a single mark number until the engineer of record stamps them. You pay the detailer, in-house or outsourced, weeks before that submittal even goes in, and none of that money is billable while it waits in review. The review clock belongs to the design team, and your contract date doesn't move while they hold it. So you either buy stock lengths and field-cut to hold the pour, or you hold the pour and end up in the delay email.
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 reinforcing steel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What reinforcing steel owners ask
Rebar detailing costs paid before placing drawings are approved?
The GC's schedule shows footings starting next week, your bar list is still with the structural engineer, and you've already written the check to the detailer.
What does it cost?
Detailing money leaves the business weeks before a pay application can cover it, and when review runs long you eat field cutting and bending labor that was never in the bid. The alternative is a schedule hit you didn't cause and can't bill for.
What do I do first?
Open a detailing cost code on every job and log the date you engage the detailer, the date the submittal went out, and the date the stamp came back. Three jobs in, you'll have a real review window to bid against.
What are reinforcing steel contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates reinforcing steel, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Structural steel, which runs 23% gross margin, 15% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 11.5% net. Those are derived figures, not reinforcing steel'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 reinforcing steel 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.