SCAFFOLDING · SPECIALTY · FIXED BY STEP 04

You sell deck square feet and spend erector hours per lift

Ten thousand square feet at eight feet in an open garage and ten thousand square feet at ninety feet inside an occupied atrium bid identically. One of them costs double.

WHY IT'S A SCAFFOLDING PROBLEM

Scaffold is one of the few trades where the customer's measurable quantity and the contractor's real cost driver diverge on nearly every job, because you're building a temporary vertical structure inside somebody else's constraints. Height, occupancy and access don't change the deck area by a single square foot, but they change the man-hours per lift by a factor of two or more. Until cost history is coded by height band and access condition, every bid is an average of jobs that have nothing in common.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

You systematically underbid tall, tight, occupied and interior work and systematically overbid open low work, which means the jobs you win are disproportionately the ones that lose money.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

18%

CFOS target 17% for scaffolding.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

26%

CFOS target 28.5% for scaffolding.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

CFOS target 11.5% for scaffolding.

Deck area and shed length scale with the building. Erector hours scale with something else: the number of lifts, height above grade, congestion, obstructions, hoist distance, and how many times a single plank gets handled before it is set. A mechanical room and an open wall can measure the same and consume completely different labor, because in one of them a man hauls a frame up six lifts through a ceiling grid at night and in the other he unloads it off the truck. The unit you sell in and the unit you spend in are two different units, and nothing in the cost history reconciles them. So the estimator keeps pricing per square foot and keeps being surprised.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Code erect labor by lift and height band on every job going forward, so hours per lift at 0 to 30 feet, 30 to 60, 60 to 100 and above are separate history, not one blended number.

STEP 02

Add three condition flags to the estimate: occupied or unoccupied, interior or exterior, hoist distance over or under one hundred feet. Apply an hours multiplier on each and calibrate it every quarter against actuals.

STEP 03

Re-run last year's five worst jobs against the new factors. If the model would have priced them correctly, roll it into the estimating template this month.

THE FIX

Step 04: Estimating system

The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.

CFOS-04 · CHAPTER 4

Make the estimate and the job cost report match

What this step changes, what it depends on, and how to tell it's installed.

BENCHMARKS

Scaffolding by revenue band

All 7 bands are published. The CFOS target is beside the figure up to $10M to $25M, and the 4 bands above that are labelled modeled.

ACROSS EVERY TRADE

The estimate and the actual never match

You can compare the estimate to the job cost report, but the two use different words, so the comparison means nothing.

SAME TRADE

What else costs scaffolding contractors money

SCAFFOLDING · CFOS-01

Your rental line is funding the GC's cash for two years

The GC holds ten percent of your monthly rental invoice the way they hold it on installed work, and keeps holding it until the building is done. Nothing on rent waits to be completed.

SCAFFOLDING · CFOS-02

Owned steel parked on a job costs that job nothing

A tower that ties up forty percent of your yard for fourteen months prices out identically to a three-month job using the same frames. Utilization lives nowhere in the accounting.

SCAFFOLDING · CFOS-06

Forty verbal adds a job never become change orders

Masons want a lift raised and painters want a deck moved. Two men go out for three hours, no ticket gets signed, and the same call comes forty more times.

SCAFFOLDING · CFOS-06

Your erect date belongs to people who don't work for you

Crew is booked for the fifteenth and the drawings are still on the owner's engineer's desk. You don't control any of the three clocks that release the erect.

SCAFFOLDING · CFOS-01

The clamps that never came back are hiding in your overhead

Eleven hundred clamps shipped and nine hundred came home. By the time you know that, the final pay app is cut and the GC's job budget is closed.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

DRYWALL

Level 5 gets discovered after the primer goes on

The spec said Level 4, the owner walked it at night with the wall washers on, and now there's a skim coat between you and your retention.

DRYWALL

Piece rate and square-foot bids agree on flat walls only

Your hangers make the same on a clean corridor as on a bathroom full of soffits, so guess which walls are done Friday and which ones aren't.

ELECTRICAL

You hit the hours and still lost money on the rate

You bid labor in unit hours and the field hit the unit hours. The loss lives in the dollars per hour you converted them at, and it moves the same direction on every job you take.

QUESTIONS

What scaffolding owners ask

Why do two scaffold jobs with the same square footage cost different amounts?

Ten thousand square feet at eight feet in an open garage and ten thousand square feet at ninety feet inside an occupied atrium bid identically. One of them costs double.

What does it cost?

You systematically underbid tall, tight, occupied and interior work and systematically overbid open low work, which means the jobs you win are disproportionately the ones that lose money.

What do I do first?

Code erect labor by lift and height band on every job going forward, so hours per lift at 0 to 30 feet, 30 to 60, 60 to 100 and above are separate history, not one blended number.

What are scaffolding contractors supposed to be making?

Scaffolding runs 26% gross margin, 18% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point above it. The CFOS target is 11.5%.

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.

OR HAVE IT HANDLED

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 scaffolding contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.

What a fractional CFO does for scaffolding contractors

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

MASTER ELECTRICIAN · 150+ PROJECTS · $2.1B+ MANAGED

Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.