HI,
I have been doing landscaping for apartment complexes and many residences for the last few years. I was wondering what to charge per foot for labor for french drain installation. I have a job that would require 300-500 feet worth of drain.
Thank you,
Gerald - Anonymous Landscaping Company
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Gerald,
If you know the time frame it will take, then do your math backwards. Simply calculate what you think it is going to cost you both in time materials and include a reasonable and fair profit and overhead figure. Double check your numbers. Then divide this final by the *actual footage* of drain you need to install. There is an enormous difference between 300 and 500! Go back and find out if it is 432 feet or 388 feet or 504 feet.
Also, start keeping an accurate journal for ALL jobs and do the math each time once you are finished. I want you to add up the exact hard and soft cost to you of what it took to complete each job and have an accurate measurement of how much you installed.
Once you have this, you can start to track the real cost the job should have been bid to you of different jobs. My guess is you will find the smaller jobs will routinely have a higher cost-per-linear-foot because of the fixed staging times to bid, administer, set up and clean up any given job. If you start to do this, you are going to find it is very simple to bid jobs and you will be able to see your actual costs rise by a given percentage every few months because of inflation.
Tim Carter
www.askthebuilder.com
W3ATB