SHORING AND SHIELDING · CIVIL AND EARTHWORK · FIXED BY STEP 03

Rain Adds Qualified Hours Your Pay App Never Bills

OSHA wants a competent person walking the excavation before anybody enters, daily, and again after every rainstorm. That's qualified labor on a schedule set by weather.

WHY IT'S A SHORING AND SHIELDING PROBLEM

Plenty of trades have safety overhead. Yours is a qualified-labor requirement tied to each crew entry and to the specific protective system you installed, with a weather trigger that appears on no schedule. Those hours end up in job labor cost, but they were priced as office overhead or never priced at all, and the difference widens in the weeks when rain is already hurting the job.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Daily supervisory hours and weather-driven re-inspections go into job labor cost, on a job whose schedule of values has no line that admits they exist.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

14%

Derived from Excavation, the nearest comparable trade. CFOS target 13%.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

21%

Derived from Excavation, the nearest comparable trade. CFOS target 23.5%.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

Derived from Excavation, the nearest comparable trade. CFOS target 10.5%.

OSHA requires competent-person inspection of the excavation and the protective system before any worker entry, daily, as conditions change, and again after every rainstorm or water intrusion. Trenches 5 ft and deeper require a protective system at all, so the inspection duty follows your system everywhere it goes. The frequency is set by weather, not by production, which means a wet week costs you more qualified hours on the same footage. A rain event can also force re-evaluation or re-design of a system that's already in the ground.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Give competent-person inspection its own labor code and log the hour to the job every day it happens, rain days included.

STEP 02

Keep rain events next to inspection hours by job, so after two seasons you can say what weather costs you per job type.

STEP 03

Decide before you bid whether that hour lives in the unit price or in a daily supervision line, and put it in the same place on every bid so the estimate and the job cost agree.

THE FIX

Step 03: Overhead calculation

What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using.

CFOS-03 · CHAPTER 3

The overhead rate your bid sheet should cover

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

BENCHMARKS

Shoring and shielding 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

You're bidding below your own overhead

If the overhead percentage in your estimating template is lower than what you actually run, every job you win loses money before a single hour is worked.

SAME TRADE

What else costs shoring and shielding contractors money

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-04

You pay for the stamp and wait on somebody else's data

The box can't go in the ground until a registered PE seals the design, and the engineer is waiting on borings the GC hasn't sent. Your crew and your iron are already on site.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-02

Footage Stops Earning and the Box Rental Never Stops

Trench safety pays by the linear foot of centerline. Shields and slide rail cost by the calendar day, and that clock runs whether or not the pipe crew is waiting on an inspector.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-04

Cut-off Piles Turn Your Salvage Credit Into Zero

You locked sheet pile pricing at bid and bid the same steel a second time as salvage. Then an obstruction forces cut-off, and the residual you counted on stays in the dirt.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-07

Your work ends in March; your retention ends next spring

Shoring starts on day one of excavation, so your install is done in the first quarter. The retention rides until the whole project is accepted.

SHORING AND SHIELDING · CFOS-08

You Leave Nothing Behind and Still Get a Claim Later

You leave no permanent installation behind, so there's no warranty item to cover. Settlement, voids after extraction, and a rental damage invoice come after the job 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 shoring and shielding owners ask

How to price daily competent person inspections on trench and excavation jobs?

OSHA wants a competent person walking the excavation before anybody enters, daily, and again after every rainstorm. That's qualified labor on a schedule set by weather.

What does it cost?

Daily supervisory hours and weather-driven re-inspections go into job labor cost, on a job whose schedule of values has no line that admits they exist.

What do I do first?

Give competent-person inspection its own labor code and log the hour to the job every day it happens, rain days included.

What are shoring and shielding contractors supposed to be making?

No survey separates shoring and shielding, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Excavation, which runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10.5% net. Those are derived figures, not shoring and shielding'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 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using. It comes from chapter 3 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 shoring and shielding contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.

What SPM The Construction CFO does, and what it costs

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

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

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