By tracking the actual and budgeted costs of individual line items for each job, Creative Contracting is able to easily pinpoint slippage. More
When John Gemmi of Gemmi Construction, in Doylestown, Pa., started sharing each project's financial information with his four lead carpenters and helping them to understand their contribution to the bottom line, the leads began to actively participate in controlling costs and decreasing slippage. More
Any amount of slippage, if consistent, will quietly and effectively kill your year. Some slippage is just bad luck, but here are eight causes that you can control. More
Soon after transitioning from cost-plus pricing to a fixed-price system, Art Stinson's Trace Ventures ran into trouble with slippage. Stinson says the Nashville, Tenn., company was mired in a cost-plus mentality that allowed for imprecise estimates, and unforeseen costs (if they weren't due to a Trace mistake) were being passed on to the homeowner. More
All remodelers are robbery victims. The thief is slippage, which is the amount your profit falls short of plan. The root causes of slippage are often simple ó but that doesn't mean they're easy to find. And while some sources, like inconsistent labor productivity or poor change order management, can take big bites out of profits, smaller losses tied to less obvious sources can add up. More
One factor affecting the numbers reported in the May issue was incomplete results. Since press time for the May issue, we've received additional data that change the slippage picture somewhat.The good news is that the median for all companies is -2.9%, meaning about half the companies performed better than Hanbury's "witch-hunt" standard. More
Slippage occurs when something on the job causes unrecoverable costs to extend beyond the limits of the estimate. King has since refined and implemented several processes to help her company reduce slippage, most notably instituting a "post-mortem" review of costs at the completion of every job. More
Although this year's class of Big50 remodelers displays great variety in size, business structure, target market, project focus, and geographic location, the averages tell a fairly consistent story. By this measure, small- and large-volume companies in this year's Big50 class performed about the same, with most averaging net profit of between 8% and 9%. More
Typical profit slippage -- the difference between estimated and produced gross profit--is 5% or more according to our survey. More
If you only have one part of bookkeeping done right, it better be your progress job costs," says Mike Weiss of Weiss & Co. in Carmel, Ind. Because variances in labor costs are a major source of slippage, tracking payroll is key to accurate job costs. More
