Commercial Contractors: Here’s How I Saved My Company Thousands on a Painting Bid
Hey there, Greg here from Green Pro Painting, commercial painting contractor here in Greenville, South Carolina, and also a DYB coach.
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Today I want to share with you how we just saved our company thousands of dollars on a bid for an exposed ceiling structure.
What I am going to do is share with you an image from an onscreen tape of an estimating software that we use to measure our ceilings, and I am going to tell you exactly how we saved that money.
So, in the above video, you will see a digital measuring tool that we use to read plans and figure out exactly how many square feet we are working with for a particular job.
What you see in the video is a local grocery store that we repainted last year, it was a renovation, so it’s an existing building, and it was not new construction.
They removed the acoustical ceiling tile as well as all the structure with that, and then we painted the actual roof deck that was there.
One of the things that you actually want to look out for in this type of work is, what type of material that you are painting, and for this particular one, it is corrugated metal, and I am going to tell you why you need to know that.
Notice that the area was 12,337 square feet, but this is actually a non-accurate number because there is a note here that says ceiling.
So, this is something that you want to look out for when you are bidding a job, and we happen to catch that when we bid this number.
The 12,337 square feet actually gets multiplied by 1.5 to account for the corrugated metal and also the included structure, which includes your trustees, your purlins, and all the connecting ceiling structure, as well as H, B and C vents.
So, not only do we go into this drawing, but we also go into the H, B, and C to look at that, and also the fire sprinkler plan, to look at where you are fitting sprinkler pipes.
But when you are measuring the exposed structure, you do want to consider that anything that’s corrugated metal, you multiply it by 1.5
So, the 12,337 actually becomes 18,500.
12,337 x 1.5 =18,500.
So just for an example, if you are using a hundred gallons per square feet, spread rate on a paint product, which is somewhat standard, it is usually a little bit lower than that, just for the sake of numbers we are using that.
You are looking at 185 to 190 gallons per coat, versus 125, so that’s one area right there that we save some money for our company.
In the grand scheme of things, depending on how many coats you are going to be doing, that could add up to a couple thousand dollars right there, not to mention the fact that there were no colors issued.
Even though there’s one referenced in the drawing in this video, there were no colors issued for this particular job.
So when we bid it, we assume that we are using a specific product, which ended up being depicted in ultra-deep base color which required a completely different product that was a premium product.
So we ended up being able to sign a change order for the difference of product and get back all the profit from the purchase of that product.
Right there is one way that you guys can save yourself thousands of dollars, make sure that when you are bidding commercial exposed structures, that you know what type of products that you are looking at on the ceiling.
If it is corrugated metal, you want to make sure that you multiply that square footage number by 1.5
Thanks for reading!
Feel free to send me an email: greg@dybcoach.com
