TILT-UP · CONCRETE AND MASONRY · FIXED BY STEP 05

Nothing you buy for a panel comes in square feet

You know your price per square foot of panel cold. Ask for your cost per square foot and there's no answer, because every line you buy is measured in something else.

WHY IT'S A TILT-UP PROBLEM

A trade that buys and sells in the same unit closes its own loop by accident, because the hours that go in are the hours that come back out. Tilt-up sells in one unit and buys in seven, so the loop only closes if the job setup records panel count and panel square feet as quantities every code can divide by. Skip that and your history is a pile of invoices in mismatched units.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

Every bid gets priced off feel and last year's number, so the same estimating error repeats job after job with no way to point at where the money went.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

14%

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

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

21%

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

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

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

The bid unit is square feet of panel or dollars per panel. Ready-mix comes by the cubic yard, reinforcing by the pound or ton, lifting and brace inserts each, rigging and hardware by the set, crane by the day, bracing by the brace-month, and the tilt crew by the hour. None of that converts back to panel square feet unless somebody built the cost codes to do it on purpose. Without the conversion, a finished job can never tell you what the next one should be bid at.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Put panel count and total panel square feet on the job setup record as quantities, so every cost code has something to divide by.

STEP 02

Break the cost codes to match how you buy: concrete yards, reinforcing tons, inserts and hardware sets, crane days, brace-months, and crew hours.

STEP 03

Close every job with a one page sheet showing cost per panel square foot by code, and give it to whoever writes the next bid.

THE FIX

Step 05: Software and bookkeeping alignment

Live job costs inside thirty seconds, with the bookkeeping cadence that keeps them current.

CFOS-05 · CHAPTER 5

Live job costs in 30 seconds, not 6 weeks

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

BENCHMARKS

Tilt-up 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

Your job costs are six weeks old

By the time the report is right, the job is closed and the only thing left to do is feel bad about it.

SAME TRADE

What else costs tilt-up contractors money

TILT-UP · CFOS-01

You bid the floor slab once and build on it twice

You pour the building's floor slab and then beat it up for weeks as a casting bed. The repair pass was never in the number, so you fix it on your own dime.

TILT-UP · CFOS-02

The longest lead item is a date on a crane calendar

The crane is booked for the 14th and the cylinder results decide whether you can use it. Standby costs are yours either way.

TILT-UP · CFOS-08

Panel joints leak years after you booked the profit

The building is three years old and water is coming through a joint. Yours is the first phone number they dial.

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 tilt-up owners ask

How do I calculate my cost per square foot of tilt-up panel?

You know your price per square foot of panel cold. Ask for your cost per square foot and there's no answer, because every line you buy is measured in something else.

What does it cost?

Every bid gets priced off feel and last year's number, so the same estimating error repeats job after job with no way to point at where the money went.

What do I do first?

Put panel count and total panel square feet on the job setup record as quantities, so every cost code has something to divide by.

What are tilt-up contractors supposed to be making?

No survey separates tilt-up, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Concrete, 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 tilt-up'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 05, software and bookkeeping alignment. Live job costs inside thirty seconds, with the bookkeeping cadence that keeps them current. It comes from chapter 5 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 tilt-up 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.