Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Business, Finance & Legal › What the heck am I missing????
What the heck am I missing????
Posted by jmh2884 on November 5, 2020 at 4:55 pmFirst off, this is not a price fixing discussion (before people get upset over that one).
What am I missing?
First off we’re all in the business to make money, right? If that is the case, then how does a (well established) professional business charge $700 to perform a 6 acre survey (wooded and hilly) and actually make enough money to keep the lights on? How can you afford to hire adequate help? Where is the profit? Just an fyi…I gave a discount (I only gave a quote because of a mutual friend) and came in around 4 times that amount.
Sorry, but this is really, really disappointing. Surveyors are in the best position ever to make money. Many surveyors are 4-8 weeks out right now. Why not start charging more for your PROFESSIONAL services so you can hire competent employees and grow your business and maybe, just maybe have an opportunity to retire at a decent age?
It’s a BUSINESS guys! You had to go to school and take difficult tests to get where your at. STOP GIVING IT AWAY!
jitterboogie replied 3 years, 6 months ago 21 Members · 30 Replies- 30 Replies
AMEN, BROTHER!!!!!!!!!!
Missing the numbers on a small job like that by a couple of hours of fieldwork is to be expected but what you have described is BS. That is someone doing nothing but helping cover some overhead expense and nothing else. That should not be an issue for anyone right now, though. Being multiple weeks out from being able to start on the job has been the norm throughout 2020. I keep tossing out bigger and bigger estimates without a problem.
Sometimes (rarely) I’ve been shot out of the saddle by another firm with what seems like a crazy low price…Only to find out they did a huge project in the same section six months ago. Simply put, they’ve already been all over everything out there and it’s still in the DC. When that’s the case I say more power to ’em.
But that doesn’t happen very often. It’s usually what I call the “dying quivers” of an organization that is poorly managed. Probably trying to get any cash they can to flow, usually just to keep the lights on or put some more gas in the truck. Don’t worry, they quit quivering after a short while.
Years ago I was the “young’n” partner with two other older surveyors. I had little say in their management style. The senior partner was retired with a pension and didn’t really need a paycheck like myself and the third guy. When work would get tight or slow, he would drop his estimated prices. What always happened is we would get backed up with ‘cheap’ work and then be too busy to get to other things when work picked back up.
The end of the road for that endeavor wasn’t far away by then. That was a good lesson to learn while I was still young.
It’s an amazing phenomenon. Surveyors are the only business owners I know that will boast about how cheap they can provide a service
to a client. I recently had another survey make this statement regarding a survey and recorded plat within a heavily regulated nearby City.
“You just can’t charge what it costs to get this done”.
It’s a free market. Prices are controlled by supply and demand. Our customers don’t understand what we do or how we do it. They have no appreciation. Rarely can they tell the difference between good and bad work. The lowest price gets he job. After 21 years in business and into what’s retirement for many, I think I am starting to get more for my work based on my reputation. Business is good, I’m slowing down, pushing demand higher, so prices go up.
recently I had a discussion about this topic with the realtor that I get along with better than any other. She’s concerned that survey costs are going up, no one new is coming along to replace us (me) and “what will the Real Estate Business do?” I emailed her the following:
You are looking at surveying from the perspective of the only business that can legally fix prices. And those prices are so high that there are many times more people working than are necessary to provide the services necessary, so there will never be a shortage of workers. In a free market (surveying) there are fluctuations in supply (me) and demand (you), especially in a very small market like St. John. When Al and I opened Best Winters in 1999, we drove up supply and drove down prices, angering other surveyors. We worked for peanuts. Since then the market has varied so that I have written proposals for 90 days out and had nothing to do for a week or more. And despite needing greater education, experience, equipment and physical labor, surveyors very rarely earn the pay of a plumber or electrician. The cost of a survey will never slow down real estate until it approaches brokers commissions, which will never happen. If the cost ever gets high enough that surveyors make good money, there will be more surveyors.
What’s even more fun is working for these clowns and having them pretend that you can somehow get the fieldwork done in the budget allotted.
We have the same problems here in the UK/ N. Ireland, most clients dont ask for proof of qualifications insurance etc and only look at the bottom line.
We as an industry need to educate the client base to the pitfalls of going for the lowest price, poor quality, low accuracy, lack of detail all adds up to increased cost down the line.
A short video to clients from surveyors globally showing the one pro vs all the cons would be a start to educating the masses is needed (like a dont drink and drive video)
Over here the legal profession just love it because of the endless court cases that arise from bad surveys , incorrect boundary registrations etc(No surveyor licencing systems in UK or Ireland unlike US/Germany/New Zealand /Us etc)
I would have to assume the firm is buying the Subdivision Civil work with a Free topo.
<<“……end dripping sarcasm……”>>
I still cannot figure out how y??all make ANY money on just a boundary survey unless it??s a recertification. ????
- Posted by: @larry-best
Our customers don’t understand what we do or how we do it. They have no appreciation. Rarely can they tell the difference between good and bad work.
That right there is it
Why pay more if the end result is the same, (in their eyes)?
My family was in the foundry business. As my uncle always said, he never saw a foundry go under not pouring metal like there’s no tomorrow.
When you figure out what you’re missing let me know because it seems to be the same around these parts.
We recently lost a job to another local surveyor that I’m on good terms with. We came in at 2k and he got the job for $600.
I flat out asked him how he could do it for so cheap and he said that he had done the job next door.
That’s all fine and dandy but why come in so low? Work up the price as if it was a brand new survey and knock a few hundred bucks off.
Don’t feel guilty about making money on a job that you don’t have to spend as much time on. It doesn’t do the profession any favors when your client goes and tells his buddy that’s looking to have a survey done that they only cost $600.
I know we have a responsibility to the public but that responsibility isn’t for their pocket book.
Nothing like a little neighborly chat over the back fence where the first client discovers the second client got the bargain basement price only because he (first client) was first in line and had to pay full price. You unknowingly now have someone ready to say negative things about your business practices, which may lead to lost opportunities down the road.
Ask your neurosurgeon what their basement price is if you keep bringing them more work in the future……
That’s my $0.02 on this, unlicensed and when i do get get licensed won’t be giving away and diluting the value of the professional skills this career requires and supports.
Pro bono is still tax deductible work. If you give it away at no value at least invoice for your taxes so you don’t keep screwing everyone else over nationwide…
@holy-cow And it happens. I value my office, its location, my equipment, I work with a partner, am insured, have close to 40 years of records and a solid client base. One can only imagine that Brand X doesn’t share these same values and I expect that they won’t to be in business very long because they “bid” jobs based on time and materials rather on value to the customer.
We charge $300 / hour for a survey crew with a 4 hour minimum per site visit.
Often the people that are lowballing, are not doing the work necessary to defend their boundary locations in this area. I’m glad that I do not have to compete with them, but I do frequently find their boundaries way off the original corners.
Value pricing has a lot to be said for it, but it can cause problems in customer relations. That’s what Big Pharma and Big Health Care does. You want to stay alive? How much $$ do you have? How much is your life worth to you? Big Data (Google) helps business figure how much they can charge. I expect they are responsible for airline ticket price craziness. Soon I expect them to offer me a service where I tell them who a potential customer is and they tell me the customer’s ability to pay and how anxious they are to get the survey and so what I can charge. Give them a percentage or go broke.
I try to keep a balance among different methods. It aint easy.
Every profession has some lowballers, but I think we all know that we have more systemic problems.
The increasing productivity/wage gap has been well documented since the 80s. I’ve never been able to find any hard data on surveyors alone, but it stands to reason that our productivity outpaced that of the overall average. The amount of education, knowledge, and training required to work with complex technology AND apply the professional analysis needed to properly utilize it have increased, not decreased, as well.
Employees cost more than gear. Straight economics says that businesses should have responded by investing in tech, and substantially increasing pay (and training) for a more skilled workforce that could easily be reduced by 30-40%, while increasing prices to account for both the decline in number of licenses over the last several decades, and the value added by the tech. Win-win for both employees and employers.
But an awful lot of firms never changed their business model and still employ a license, an LSIT, an office tech or two, and 2-3 field techs for a project, all of whom can only do a single task or two. More people, more handoffs, more time spent by everyone getting up to speed, more cost, more opportunities to screw it up. (They also resisted the tech and the additional data/products it could deliver.)
That same project could easily be handled by a license plus a technician from start to finish, with the technician being mentored every step of the way. Add a third member to train them up or to help out on a big job…
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil PostmanI’ve performed surveys that I would almost be willing to pay to work on because of the thrill of searching for and finding buried treasure.
The high number of lowballers is partly a reflection of how enjoyable surveying is compared to many other jobs.
Log in to reply.