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Terry:

 

thanks

 

for the most part I was "winging it" while researching ways to make it "standard"

 

I pulled a "zillion" articles and ideas and was slowly cobbling them in to a system

 

I would share some of that research and forms etc but since I am retired all my Chief

stuff is packed away - probably never to be seen again

 

good luck

 

Lew

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I've had some projects done in less than 20hrs and some more than than 300 hrs easy...but never over 1,000...at least not yet. I'm bidding on a project with 10k sf. so only time will tell. Up to 10k sf I charge by the sf with limitations on revisions, after revision limits are used up, I start charging by the hour. On commercial jobs, either sf or a percentage of total construction cost. This helps offset any professional engineering work that has to be done.

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That's nuts! So if I can make $150/hr with CA that's ~ 300,000/yr....Is that the average salary of a designer? That is higher than a degree engineer. Lew like your system, thanks! 

You clearly have not been in business for yourself before, and is the way some clients think. Most sole practitioners I know are pretty happy when they can get 50% of their time to be billable. Of that billable time, 50% going to overhead costs is pretty normal. So you might actually be averaging the equivalent of $37.50/hr. with a $150/hr. billing rate. So, with a gross personal income of $75,000, less taxes, you might actually be netting $45K disposable income. That's not a terribly high standard of living in this part of California. Of course, if you can keep your butt in the chair for more hours, or reduce overhead to the bone, you can do better. 

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I am working on a 4000 sqft spec. Pretty detailed, with full MEP, Framing, etc....I am at 42 hours right now, and have at least 20 hours of details and sections to produce....if I can keep it below 70 hours I would feel pretty good about it. Keep in mind though that, there have been minimal revisions using Chief. I sketched most of the prelim, so that is about 10 hours I would guess. 

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I guess the variations break down like this:

First design from what client describes - Goes pretty quick.  Bigger takes longer.

Changes to design. - Totally client driven and accounts for most of the variation of time.

Construction documents - Goes a little longer if you are doing the cad work for the engineer or not as long if the engineer does their own drawings.

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I heard this breakdown at one time.....

40% prelim

40% construction docs

19% Plan check and wrapping things up

1% on phone with wife.

Hmmm... I'm going to go ahead and call BS on that list. It's missing

25% screwing around on Chieftalk

25% time spent figuring out how to do that one thing you've never done before (it seems like every job has at least one of these items)

25% time spent searching all over the place for those special symbols you don't have in your library

5% time it takes to just model those symbols yourself because you can't find them anywhere

10% getting sidetracked and surfing the web for totally unrelated reasons.

That leaves 10% for time we spend actually getting work done. That means we only probably spent 1/10 of 1% dealing with the most important things in life (talking with our wives on the phone).

I think I'm going to have to revisit my priorities.

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Michael - Look at the bright sdie of this, you make a ton of money per hour when you calculate your hourly rate based upon (gross revenue/actual working hours).

 

Reminds me of a study done about a year ago on worker productivity in the UK. The average employee actual worked less than 3 hrs per day, many were as low as 1 1/2hrs.

 

Graham

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There are no apples to oranges here in this comparison game. Edwards 2000 s.f. project will get him $6500. I just did a nothing project (attached) where someone needed a quick permit to repair their roof. 5k. We ended up adding some work to the project and submitting a revision which bumped this one up to about 6.5k. This is probably the smallest project I have done in 5 years and it is only 7 sheets with 2 of those being a paste up of the energy calcs (Title 24). I figured I would have about 5 hours into this project and I am pretty close to that at this point.

 

And then there is the project I am about to do a major revision for (4th major revision in 2 years and we have not touched the house yet). If I would have saved all the checks from that client I could buy a new truck (a really nice truck).

Stallings Roof Repair CD Rev 1C.pdf

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There are no apples to oranges here in this comparison game. Edwards 2000 s.f. project will get him $6500. I just did a nothing project (attached) where someone needed a quick permit to repair their roof. 5k. We ended up adding some work to the project and submitting a revision which bumped this one up to about 6.5k. This is probably the smallest project I have done in 5 years and it is only 7 sheets with 2 of those being a paste up of the energy calcs (Title 24). I figured I would have about 5 hours into this project and I am pretty close to that at this point.

 

And then there is the project I am about to do a major revision for (4th major revision in 2 years and we have not touched the house yet). If I would have saved all the checks from that client I could buy a new truck (a really nice truck).

If my math is close at all that's about $1000/hour? Good for you Alan.

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Posted Today, 04:30 AM

There are no apples to oranges here in this comparison game. Edwards 2000 s.f. project will get him $6500. I just did a nothing project (attached) where someone needed a quick permit to repair their roof. 5k. We ended up adding some work to the project and submitting a revision which bumped this one up to about 6.5k. This is probably the smallest project I have done in 5 years and it is only 7 sheets with 2 of those being a paste up of the energy calcs (Title 24). I figured I would have about 5 hours into this project and I am pretty close to that at this point.

 

And then there is the project I am about to do a major revision for (4th major revision in 2 years and we have not touched the house yet). If I would have saved all the checks from that client I could buy a new truck (a really nice truck).

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Smart guy congrats 

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