Standby Days Cost What Bore Days Cost
You get paid per foot. The bore rig, vac truck, and four-man crew cost the same whether you shoot 1,200 feet or sit all morning on a locate that never got marked.
Trades that bid by the square foot buy labor by the hour and can send people home. You buy a rig, a vac truck, and a four-man crew as one indivisible daily unit that produces zero feet on a standby day at full cost. That makes your equipment cost basis the number that decides whether the job worked, and the unit price only tells you what you were allowed to charge.
The size of it
One standby week on a single spread can wipe out the estimated margin on a footage package, and with no daily cost against daily feet you'll write it off as a bad bid and price the next job the same way.
The unit you bid in and the unit your cost lives in are two different things, and the distance between them is where OSP margin disappears. A bore spread runs $3,000 to $5,000 a day once it's mobilized, and that figure doesn't move when rock, wet clay, an unlocatable service, or a homeowner who won't open a gate cuts production in half. In Texas the utility gets 48 hours to answer an 811 ticket, and you stay responsible for knowing whether the marks are still valid, so a mismarked or wiped-out locate parks a mobilized crew with nothing billable to show for the day. Estimated margin was built on a footage-per-day the field rarely hits, and since your biggest cost line isn't priced in the unit you bid, you can't separate a bad bid from a bad week until the job is closed.
Three moves, in order
Step 02: Equipment cost basis
A true internal rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport, charged to the projects that used it.
What else costs telecom contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What telecom owners ask
How do I account for bore crew standby time on unit price footage work?
You get paid per foot. The bore rig, vac truck, and four-man crew cost the same whether you shoot 1,200 feet or sit all morning on a locate that never got marked.
What does it cost?
One standby week on a single spread can wipe out the estimated margin on a footage package, and with no daily cost against daily feet you'll write it off as a bad bid and price the next job the same way.
What do I do first?
Charge the bore spread to jobs at a daily rate covering ownership, fuel, and the crew that runs it, and post it every day the spread is assigned, standby included.
What are telecom contractors supposed to be making?
Telecom runs 22% gross margin, 15% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits right on it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 02, equipment cost basis. A true internal rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport, charged to the projects that used it. It comes from chapter 2 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.