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.
Other trades get held up by predecessors on the same schedule; you get held up by parties outside the construction contract entirely, one of whom is paid by the owner and one of whom is a city agency. The engineer of record reviews your tie-ins as a favor to their own liability, at their own pace. Meanwhile the mason's start date doesn't move, so the compression falls entirely on your crew.
The size of it
Three review cycles push the erect four weeks, you compress it into overtime to protect the mason's start, and the delay reads in the books as a plain labor overrun with no change order behind it.
Nothing goes up until the stamped engineering, the building engineer's acceptance of your tie-in layout, and the municipal permits all come through. You booked the crew and the trucks at award, weeks before any of those reviews even opened. OSHA 1926.452 requires a registered professional engineer's design for pole scaffolds over 60 feet, for tube-and-coupler and fabricated frame scaffolds over 125 feet above the base plates, and for every outrigger scaffold at any height; anything cantilevered, bridged, or built outside manufacturer's spec needs a stamp too. Your anchors load somebody else's building, so the structural engineer of record has to accept that layout, and that engineer has no contract with you and no obligation to your schedule. Add a sidewalk shed or street-adjacent frame and you're now also waiting on a building department permit and a street occupancy permit.
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 scaffolding contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What scaffolding owners ask
Why does scaffold engineering and permitting delay the erect date?
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.
What does it cost?
Three review cycles push the erect four weeks, you compress it into overtime to protect the mason's start, and the delay reads in the books as a plain labor overrun with no change order behind it.
What do I do first?
Put three dated milestones on the schedule at award: stamp issued, EOR tie-in acceptance, and permits received. Send them to the GC in writing and ask for them to be added to the project schedule.
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 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 scaffolding 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.