production rate, Painting business, marketing

Hello everybody, Ron here, DYB coach, also a painting contractor for the last 17 years in Northern Massachusetts.

Thank you for your comments on all the other videos we have!

One of the requests we recently got was about production rates, “how do you bid with production rates?”

So, I wanted to go over some of my production rates and what I use.

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They may vary depending on what part of the country you are in, I know if you are in some of the other areas, maybe Florida, California might be higher.

In Boston, they are probably a lot higher than this, similar to Chicago, in some of the big cities, it all depends on where you are, but I will give you the base of how I actually come to some of my biddings.

Not all my bidding is done by production rates, depending on what kind of job we are looking at.

Anyways, in my video here I sketched out a rudimentary room, we are only going to bid one wall via my production rates and I can show you how I come to the total of my production rates.

This is including labor only, this isn’t including the paint or the material for the job.

Once again, any time you look at a job, you want to remember the prep, you know, take a really good look at the prep.

I know this has hurt me many times in the past, I walk in the room because I am so excited to actually be getting the job or having the opportunity to bid on the job, I really don’t take a good look around.

We are also going to remind you of a couple of things later on, such as, what to look after

This also gives you options of adding some money onto every bid.

Or let the homeowner feel like they are saving a little money because there may be some stuff we don’t want to do anyway, and we’ll come back to that.

We are going to walk through this production rate bid, there is a room, there is one wall in a room, so you are looking inside, you are looking out.

What we have is a 20 by 10-foot room, so it’s a pretty long wall, and remember that when we look at the total at the end.

So, we’ve got a 20-foot room with a 10-foot room wall, we have a 6-panel door with some very basic trim around it, nothing fancy, and we have a window sash that’s 3 by 5 with the trim around it, that’s a 1 over 1.

For production rates, my walls are 200 square feet which are 10 by 20, I’d do 50 cents a square foot for a wall, the way we get our production rates actually takes us a long time and we are always changing them.

It all depends on the crew size, we have the expertise of the crew and the speed of the crew.

We actually have the crew leaders time people on occasion, they will take out their phones with a stopwatch on it, someone will paint a wall and we will time them.

It does take a little time away from production but it also lets me know how I am doing on my bids.

Especially as we start job costing, we want to make sure we are actually putting in enough time for the job to happen.

I get excited sometimes bidding on the job and I don’t take everything into account, that’s why we use the production rates.

So, a wall at 200 square feet, at 50 cents a square, is $100.

We have a base also, it’s not running where the door is but we are going to count it anyways. It’s 20 linear feet of baseboard, we get 75 cents per linear foot to brush it and that equals out to $15, obviously not a lot of money.

The standard 6-panel door for one coat is $50, the window trim is a half hour, so I’m looking at a bid rate of $50 right here.

An hour for some of it will be low, some of it will be high, depending on where you are at.

I was talking to someone recently, they charged $40 and I also talked to someone else who charged $85 an hour.

Looking at the window trim, it takes a half hour to do it, so it’s the sash and the window trim around it, you would get $25 for that.

The door trim, we can’t forget that, so for the door and door trim, we get $35.

If I walk into the room and I know my numbers and there were three doors in the room and that’s for one side of the 6 panel, that’s $150, two windows are $70.

If the sashes have more windows, and it’s about a 2 over 1, or a 4 over 4, or 6 over 6, obviously that jacks up the amount of money.

Also, if we’re doing the crown, we get more for that than we do for the base, obviously because you’re on a 6-8 foot ladder, the higher you go up, the more money it is.

Anyways, we have 100 for the walls, the base is $15, another $50 is $165 and then we have the $25, so $225 dollars right here, $225 to paint the wall, that 20 by 10-foot wall one-bit window, one door, and base molding.

That’s how we do our production rates!

Some people, as I explained in some of the other videos, will have three different ways to do it.

They will look at a job and say, “okay, this is going to take me one or two days,” and they know how much.

We call it a “man-day” bidders, the man-day bid might be $400 a day, might be $300 a day, it might be $250 and then that’s how they’ll bid.

Then the other ones we explained on the other interior bid, they break it down by walls, which will be $300, the trim will be $75.

Production rate works very well when you are doing a lot, you get to know your numbers.

You can basically walk through, use your measurer, hopefully, a laser distance measurer, and have this all done in no time.

Anyways, that’s our production rate with the 20 by 10 room, one door, one window, Come to dybcoach.com if you want to join us and see what else we have, we’d love to have you take a look.

Also feel free to leave a comment on the video.

Again my name is Ron, you can reach me at ron@dybcoach, I’ll answer all of the comments.

I am a painting contractor for the last 17 years and I also help painters work on their business so they don’t have to work in their business!

Thanks for watching.

About the Author

Ron Ramsden is the owner of the successful Ramsden 1-800-PAINTING, who implemented the DYB SYSTEM, and crushed it in 2015, and now coaches other painting contractors around the nation to do the same.