You Bid In Feet And Spend In Days
Your bid is in linear feet, stalls, and legends, but your money goes out in crew-days. Until those two meet on the same job, a good day and a bad day look identical.
Most trades bid and spend in roughly the same units: hours against square feet, or material against assembly count. Striping quotes in four different units at once and pays in a fifth. A mobilization charge stays flat while the bid unit scales, so two jobs priced at the same rate per foot can finish on opposite sides of breakeven purely on how much of the day got painted.
The size of it
Without cost per crew-day beside footage produced, you can't tell which customers, which lots, or which crews are paying for the company. The small lots absorbing a $150 to $350 mobilization are usually the ones doing the damage, and they keep getting rebid the same way.
Striping gets priced in units you never spend money in. You quote linear feet, stations, stalls, and each legend or symbol, then you pay for a truck, two to four workers, traffic control, and windshield time by the day. On a small parking lot the mobilization alone runs roughly $150 to $350 per job no matter how big the lot is, so the largest single charge on the ticket is fixed and has nothing to do with footage. Nothing in a per-foot price tells you whether the crew filled the day or spent half of it staged behind a closed lane. That distance closes only when cost is captured per crew-day and set against the footage that crew produced.
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 striping contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What striping owners ask
Striping job costing per crew day when you bid by the linear foot?
Your bid is in linear feet, stalls, and legends, but your money goes out in crew-days. Until those two meet on the same job, a good day and a bad day look identical.
What does it cost?
Without cost per crew-day beside footage produced, you can't tell which customers, which lots, or which crews are paying for the company. The small lots absorbing a $150 to $350 mobilization are usually the ones doing the damage, and they keep getting rebid the same way.
What do I do first?
Log every job with two numbers on the same line: units produced (feet, stalls, and legends) and crew-days burned, including drive time and traffic control setup.
What are striping contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates striping, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Paving, which runs 20% gross margin, 14% overhead and 6% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not striping'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 striping 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.