- All righty y'all,
you've been following
the channel for a while.
You've probably heard me
talk about bid breakdowns.
Today we're gonna do a patriot peak.
Coming up I'm gonna show
you guys the big breakdown.
Something I normally
would just post on Patreon
for the patrons over there,
and it starts at five bucks a month.
If you want the bid breakdowns,
hopefully you guys can
get something out of it
for your business.
The biggest question I get from people
is how to bid jobs or how to find jobs,
and at least this is
covering half of that.
This project was just for my buddy.
So this isn't actually a customer project,
but this style of sign and this size,
this basic set up is
something I do all the time.
If you get something from it,
hopefully I'll see you
over there on Patreon.
If you don't like it, send me a message
before your next bill cycle
the next first of the month
and I'll refund you your contribution.
No harm, no foul, no hard feelings.
Let's go.
Hey, hey hey patrons.
Welcome back to another one
of these bid breakdowns.
This job is obviously gonna
be a little bit different
than a normal project
because this was something
done for a friend of mine
as opposed to a customer job.
But I do these sort of signs so often
that I feel like this is something
that I can show you guys about.
It's kinda bread and
butter, easy side money.
If you're already doing this,
if you're in the shop every day,
if you get a reputation
for this sort of stuff
and you can do four or five
of them at the same time
or even better, have one
customer order four or five,
these are great makers.
They're good money makers
anyway, but they can be great.
Material-Wise let's just jump
right through our course pretty quick.
You can see we're using you know,
barely more than a quarter of a sheet
of a 14 gauge hot rolled in this case,
the signs 23 and a half on a side square.
So we have the face and
then the stencil piece,
which is always worth it to me to,
you know, use the extra metal
up to make that Stencil.
Then we've got the background of course,
which is just our square cutout
and our wrench and hammer, we had to cut.
So we use less than a third of a sheet.
But you know, sometimes you
gonna go a little higher.
Sometimes you might have
a cut go bad, whatever.
It's a good idea to
kinda just build this in
at a half of a sheet worth of costs.
So that's what we'll do.
A sheet of 14 gauge, hot rolled
right now is running me $54,
so that's a half of that's 27 bucks.
Now we've got our studs.
These you know, weld
studs are not super cheap
compared to a piece of
threaded rod or even a bolt,
but they're worth it to
me in the time-saving.
So is the machine,
but like I said in the video,
it's a choice you gotta make for yourself.
So 15 number 10 half inch long studs.
I buy all my studs in stainless
just 'cause then I don't have to worry
about what application I'm using them in.
And the stainless studs are
like 5% more than copper plated
mild steel ones so why not?
So we've got 15 of them they
run anywhere from like 25 cents
to 40 cents a piece.
So we'll just call it three for a buck
that makes it five bucks for 15 of them.
The machine screws, same sort of setup.
I was actually out of the size we needed.
So we ran over to Lowe's
and just picked up two of
the little 10 pack baggies
that come with a nut.
You know what I'm talking about?
Those are like a buck
39 or something each.
So we'll call it three
bucks for two bags of those.
And then the coupler nuts.
Coupler nuts are stupid expensive
if you go to Lowe's,
you're gonna pay like three
bucks for two of them.
And at home Depot and at
Fastenal and everywhere,
I'm not dogging on anybody in particular.
The way to get these is go on eBay.
I buy them in both packs of 500
and I think it's like 130, $140
or something like that
for like 500 of them.
It's totally worth it to me. I use them up
fast enough that I have to order
a bag of 500 multiple times a year.
So you know, it's not like
I'm not going through them
and it brings the per unit price way down.
You know, it's under 50 cents a piece
probably closer to 25
but for the sake argument
we'll call it a three for a buck again.
So that's gonna make us five bucks
worth of coupler nuts here.
Now the thing to point out here
before we go further is
coupler nuts in number 10
and core 20 are both
generally seven eights,
seven inch long.
And that's important
because when you account
for the welded area of the stud,
which is gonna make the
stud a little bit shorter
than what it's rated length is
and then the piece of material
that you've gotta go through,
you've gotta make sure
that your machine screw
and your stud are gonna be
basically less than an inch.
It's ideal if you can get them
less than seven eight of an inch.
So when we get machine screws,
what you wanna do is if
you've got half inch studs,
you wanna go get three
eights machine screws
or 7/16th if you can get them.
I had some seven 7/16th
studs and those were perfect
but can't always find them
at a reasonable price.
So just keep that in mind
if you're gonna approach
this sort of idea.
Same thing if you're gonna weld bolts on,
like I show in the video,
use a half inch long bolt
and you might even have to
grind them down a little bit
if you can't find like
a three eights bolt.
So just be aware that
that might be something
that comes up for you
or you can always stand them off
like we did with the
nuts here on the hammer.
So the rest of the costs
really, we got paint.
In this case we used
stuff I haven't stocked
those leftovers from other jobs.
Generally when I go buy, paying for a job,
I just buy like three or four cans
and then have it around it.
Probably got 250 cans of paint
at the shop and we try
to take good care to,
you know, not open a new one
to abuse the last one up or it's gone bad
so that they stay fresh.
So I really didn't have a cost here,
but realistically you're gonna
buy three, four cans of paint
or you know, maybe if
this is going outside,
you're gonna be sending
this off for powder coat
and powder coat,
you might be looking
at probably 40, $45 for
something like this.
As long as you're willing
to wait a little while
for your powder coat or to
be able to change colors out.
So there is some costs there.
We're gonna call it 20 bucks.
In this case we used five colors.
They're generally running,
sorry, we use four colors
and they're generally running,
you know, five bucks a can.
So there you go.
And a little bit of primer in there
and then a little bit
of miscellaneous, right?
We use the splash acetone,
we use some paper towels.
We used, you know, a
20th of a grinder disc,
something like that.
So we're just gonna throw
five bucks on there,
on top for miscellaneous.
Now we're gonna jump to
time and little jobs.
Time becomes really
important on the design side
because you know, you can't sell a sign.
I don't know that I can
get anybody to buy the sign
for $1,000, but if they gave me files
that took me six hours of design time,
that's what this, you know,
we'd need to be up in that range
for this to make sense.
So you just gotta watch it
and you gotta be real
clear with your customers.
I'm blunt with people.
I'm like, look, here's your price.
This is assuming an hour of design time.
Design time after that is at shop rate.
You're going to be
paying 100 bucks an hour.
So you know, hopefully
you have your logos.
Hopefully you're a little bit flexible.
If you don't, and you know,
if I've got a trace something
or app, I've got to find
a font that you don't know
and it's not the exact perfect font.
Don't stress.
If you've got customers that get that
or especially ones that
bringing their logo
in vector format, keep them happy,
they're good customers to have.
In this case, Jim didn't
have vector files,
but he had a pretty good quality image
and his logo is pretty simple,
I was just able to trace
it with an auto trace
and then found a font
that was pretty close
and he was good with it.
So it might've been,
we're gonna call it an hour.
It might've been 45
minutes, but either way,
I was sitting there drinking
a beer at my computer
at the end of the day,
so I really didn't care.
It wasn't that much work.
Build time.
You know, we're messing around.
We were at the shopper
about five or six hours,
but we're messing around
and talking about making videos
and all sorts of stuff
and we went out to lunch.
So I'm not gonna count that.
Realistically, this is a job
that's made up of a bunch of half hours
and 15 minutes right?
So we're half hour to
load a sheet of metal up,
cut the piece, get it ground,
set it off to the side,
you know, a half hour to put studs on it,
make sure everything lines up right.
The holes are in the right spot,
fix anything that needs fixing.
Put it off to the side,
put some primer on it that
takes five minutes, 15 minutes,
whatever it is.
You come an hour later, flip it over,
put some more primer on.
I like to do two coats of primer
and a bunch of coats of paint.
So it's not a lot of hourly time,
but if you're sitting at the shop
with this being the
only thing you're doing,
it is a lot of time.
So ideally this is something
that's happening off on the
side, on an assembly table
while you're doing, you know, other jobs.
And if that's the case, you know,
three hours for your build time
is probably an overestimate,
but I think that's a
fair way to look at it.
Then we've got waiting time in there
and I'm just, you know,
we're not billing for this,
but I'm just saying you've got,
you know, if you're doing
this right, the normal way,
you've got quite a bit of time in there
waiting for paint to dry.
And you know, you're
not gonna bill for that,
but you do need to be aware of it
and kinda factor it into
your schedule and whatnot.
So just keep it in mind.
Now we'll jump down to the bid.
All right, that's all you get.
No, I'm just kidding.
I wouldn't do that, but do me a favor,
hit that like button, tell YouTube
to show this to some other people.
Help me out.
The bid Is, that the way
I look at these signs,
I do so many of these that
it's such a common thing
that I've kindA just settled
on my price for these at 500 bucks.
And you know, sometimes I win on these,
sometimes it's not a huge win.
I would call this sorta job
if this was actually a
customer job, a big win
because I've been conservative
with all these time estimates
and the materials you know,
I'm probably overestimating
how much time went into it
and material.
So everything probably would
have looked a little bit better
than the numbers that
are about to show up.
If a customer came to me with this
and they balked at 500 bucks,
I'd probably let him talk me down to 450
without even complaining,
maybe 400 if we were slow
if they wanted multiples,
I'd be happy to start talking discounts.
And multiples, If somebody
wants a double sided version
of this sorta sign,
you need to consider that multiples
because you're building
two separate signs.
You can't have the bolt
heads from one sticking out
the face of the other.
So you're building two signs
and then making some sort of frame form.
And the frame is what they get
as their multiples discount there.
So yeah, 500 bucks.
If somebody has a crazy logo
or a lot of text or something
or they want all the letters
mattered individually,
this might go six 700 but
500 is a pretty common thing.
And then the other side of it is
you just have to think
of the mentality of it.
You know, it's hard for somebody
to look at a two foot
sign and go, Oh yeah,
it should be $800 or whatever.
It's, you know, when you make a big sign
it's easier to charge
a big amount of money
even though you know the
labor between identical signs
that are different sizes
isn't that much different.
And the material costs really
isn't that much different either.
Which is why doing big projects is nice.
It's easier for a customer to
swallow a healthy shop rate
and healthy bid.
So we've got our costs,
we'll add all this up.
$65 is what we're calling it for this one,
which leaves my gross profit at 435
and gross profit is just, you know,
your bid minus your costs on the job.
It's not accounting
for insurance and taxes
and rent and car
maintenance and new tools.
None of that.
So this is just for the job
and that's why you need
a good hourly rate.
You guys hopefully have seen mine,
how to not suck at setting
your hourly rate video.
Your hourly rate is going
to be the thing that,
you know, a portion of that,
in my case it's 40% ish,
is maybe 50% depending on how busy I am,
is going to, you know, your
overhead in your upkeep
and your upgrades and your future proofing
of your business and taxes and insurance.
So gross profit 435 are
going to divide that by
we called it four hours.
Again, being conservative,
that's gonna make our hourly rate 108.75,
we're going to call that 109.
That's great, my shop rates $100 an hour,
so we overshot it a little bit here
and a I'd much rather overshoot
than undershoot as long
as the customer is happy.
So again, if I was
gonna do this job today,
what would I bid 500 bucks.
This is a cookie cutter job.
It's the same process.
It's just different logos every time.
If you wanted to save a
little bit of money on this,
you could do the whole
thing at a 16 gauge,
but you're gonna save like
three bucks, four bucks.
If you wanna tell the
customer how stout it is,
you knew the whole thing had a 10 gauge
and it's gonna cost you an extra $10
or something to build it.
You just gotta, you know, get the feel
for how to sell something
to your customer,
how to make them happy and yeah,
I'm happy at this 500 bucks for these.
Like I said is my standard,
which is why I thought
this one was a good one
to just put out there for
anybody that wanted to watch it.
Until next time, guys, I
appreciate your support.
I'll see you around
and on catch you off for the
monthly Google hangout in about a week,
week and a half, two weeks.
I don't know, whatever
first Thursday later.
All right guys.
I hope you got something from that.
If you did the link to Patreon right here,
subscribe is gonna be done there.
We'll have some videos going on over here,
the people over on Patreon
support and helping out.
Give me a little bit of a buffer,
make it make more sense for me
to take days off from the shop
to stay home and edit videos.
I'd love to have your support over there,
even if it isn't your thing
or it's not in your budget right now.
Hit subscribe and stick
around for the next one.
Thanks for stopping by.
