The Bible of Job bidding

morning good evening good afternoon you guys I'm here with Tim and Alex and today we're going to break down a very complicated job into very easy to understand steps so that if you guys are out there trying to tackle projects that may be a little bit out of your comfort zone you can see exactly how we did it we're going to give you all of the information right down to the contracts and proposals that we give to the customers so if you want that information just head over to the dirt monkey shop.com download those contracts and proposals and you can use that to follow along in this video but before we get too deep into this one let's show you what we started with before we got into all right guys before we Dive Right into today's video we got something super special cooking over at the dirt monkey shop we're doing a massive giveaway with Milwaukee tools but not just one giveaway and not just one tool we're talking about entire packages we've got an outdoor package for you landscape Pros 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use this as an example of how we bid this job to bid other projects let's go all right you guys before this was a Domino's Pizza this was a strip mall without a retaining wall so the very first thing we had to do was take the strip mall and remove it and the strip mall was where the Domino's Pizza was and it came out to about where I'm at right now behind me there was no retaining wall this was just a hill that sloped up to an Alleyway so we had to break this project down into its most simplest components we knew that we were going to be demolishing a strip mall we knew that we were going to be Excavating all of this soil for the new retaining wall and we also knew that the retaining wall was going to be a big part of this job plus we did all of the underground utilities underneath here and we had to we did all of the site work we basically did everything from stem to ser besides actually physically building the building so we had to take into cons all those factors into consideration plus coordinating all of this all right so Alex when we first came out here we had a small uh strip mall that was here and then behind it there was just this hill of soil that came straight down and the general contractor wanted me to remove the strip mall wanted me to remove the existing parking lot wanted me excavate for that retaining wall before I did anything else how would you approach that I would first come in here by looking at what it's going to take to prep this site to begin building a retaining wall coming in here how much dirt I'm going to have to pull out how much work it's going to get to actually remove the building remove the actual existing parking lot get everything prepped so we can get in here and start building the wall so when we were doing the the first calculations the way I did it was I took the building and I actually calculated how many dumpsters it was going to take to remove the building is that how you would go about doing it I would have a price per dumpster I would figure out how much time it takes to take down the building crunch up the material loaded into the dumpster and then the actual disposal cost of the dump the dumpster so I'd figure it out by a per dumpster price so by the time I was done bidding it I would have X amount of dumpsters in there at a set price how do you eat an elephant it's one bite at a time okay so if you ever hear that saying how to eat an elephant one bite at a time means you're going to start breaking the the job down into smaller chunks that make it easy for you to understand so in a project like this I would take the excavation and calculate how many cubic yards is that building going to fill up where am I going to be hauling that building to and how much is it going to cost me to dump that material do you do anything different when you're calculating your demolitions so usually like the dumpster cost includes the trip and the disposal fee depends depends on who you work with depends on who you're working with and if you're doing the hauling yourself right yeah so like we're not set up to have rolloffs which are going to be the better uh tool to use for a demo I would think so usually when you hire a dumpster there they give you there hey I'm 500 bucks a dumpster out or 600 bucks a dumpster out so you know that includes their hauling their disposal fee that's everything to do with the dumpster off the site so I know that that's included in my price per dumpster fee not including the time for me to fill it for me to Crunch the building up and actually put it in there and then one of the things too that needs to be taken into consideration is you must calculate your overhead cuz if you said you're going to calculate how long it's going to take you to to tear that building down it's not just tear the building down it's to load those trucks how long of a round trip are those trucks making because if you're sitting and waiting for trucks then you've got an operator chewing up overhead that isn't being productive so you've got to be able to coordinate I need to have enough trucks on site so that the operator doesn't get overwhelmed but you also don't want him sitting there twiddling his thumbs in between loads not doing anything you want him to be able to continually operate at a smooth pace so you've got to actually time it where I've gone to the site I've gone on a job site like this and I physically drone drove the site from here to the dump back here to the dump and back so I knew exactly how long a round trip was going to take because when you have enough trips it adds up fast so when we were originally looking at it the soil for this came down to right about here so this from this point here up to there was just a hill so what would you do if you're looking at this going I got to cut all this out I got to get rid of all of this what would you do so what I would do is I'd find the depth how far back I'm going how long of a run I'm doing and how wide it is so or how high it is so I'm getting those two three things in there I'm adding those up and I'm dividing it by two because it's a hill it's a slope so it's almost like a triangle and then I would do that by how many cubic yards I had and then I would multiply it by 1.25 for the fluff because it's going to take up a little bit more room in the truck once you unpack everything and pull it all out and then I would figure out how many truckloads it would take like you said how long it takes to go to this to The Dumping back here I know it probably takes 25 minutes one way to the dump I figure in hey it's going to take him sometimes 15 20 minutes to dump you don't always dump right away so I add a little bit bit of fluff in the running time as well too so we never lose out on that so the actual calculation is length time width time depth divide by 27 * 1.25 automatically converts space to cubic yards to fluffy cubic yards so length time width time depth creates the cubic yard Vol or it creates the volume and that's in cubic feet you divide by 27 to convert that to cubic yards and then you mul multiply by 1.25 because that just is this is hard compacted dirt and when you dig it it adds about 25% of course it depends on the material you're working in so that is a generalization that you've got to start to dial in on your own depending on what the soil conditions are like where you're where you're at now one of the things too that you can take into consideration when you're bidding a project like this is the time it takes to load the trucks and and of course like you said find your spot to dump Y and that's how that's how you really can dial this job in that's where a bid is won or lost is by getting really tight with these numbers here CU this is where a lot of guys lose their shirt they they don't do good on stuff like this they don't break it down and uh itemize things for them to know exactly what it's going to cost them to do it they might just come in and look at like a generalized overview of the project and that's where they're going to lose out but when you actually break it down you can be more competitive with your bid and and you can have it dialed in where you know you're making money all right now I got to ask both of you guys something so Tim and Alex have taken over the bids for me since I've now taken on other responsibilities are you still in your proposals and contracts going excavation demolition retaining walls are you doing are you creating the uh the contract that shows all of those numbers broke out or are you doing one lump sum bid to take over a project like this and you've done the calculation on the back end but not shown the it depends on what looks most simplistic for the customer so depends on the relationship and what what the project is we're doing and then sometimes they'll ask for stuff to be specifically broke down otherwise we'll throw the excavation demolition mixed in with the retaining wall most of the time retaining walls by itself but yeah it depends on one how big the project is if it's a $50,000 project we're going to break that down more in depth just because like you said you can't bite an elephant in one bite you know you don't want them to see holy crap 5050 G's well when you break it down here's demolition here's the actual wall here's the additional work but then there's somewhere it's just a one or a two-day job it's easy enough to include what we're doing and just a nice one set price on there just to keep it easy for the customer if they want more details we can put more details in there one of the things that I'm going to um warn you to do is put limits on your numbers for the excavation and demolition up to up to so we will excavate up to to 500 cubic yards we will demolish up to 150 cubic yards of uh material up to limits your liability it's a way to protect you as a contractor cuz if you say we will excavate for this retaining wall if it's 650 cubic yards cuz the fluff Factor isn't right you're eating the other 100 plus cubic yards and it's just a very simple up the word up to is a very simple addition which protects you in your proposal but it's not something that you know right out of the gate it's a hard lesson to learn but it's a such a a a a grand unveiling when you just go wait a minute all I got to do is put up and two in my proposal and now I'm safe you want to be as close as you can because then if you're way off and you you come with them with a number and you're now you're adding $155,000 to the project because of something you missed well that's not going to go so well either so it's going to scare him away it's going to you're going to want to be close all right Tim now as we look at this retaining wall Tim was actually here when I was building building it now Tim was running a different site for the most of the time but as we were building this retaining wall I actually had a crane so when I was doing the original numbers on this job you see that power pole right there I had an actual crane come out and hold that power pole in place hover it above ground because as we were digging we had to dig back for geogrid to install this retaining well we had to actually dig back right up to the alleyway we actually had to get a permit to use the the easement of the alleyway and we had to hold that that thing up with the crane now as you look at this retaining wall to what are the factors you take into consideration when you bid something like this when you bidden you got to first get your figure out okay is it over 4T yes well that's going to require engineering so now everything we've talked about with the soils and stuff here you're going to want to there's going to be a site plan most of the time for for for a project like this this is already and it's going to have your proposed grades um next to your existing sometimes they're overlaid on the plan so then you can take do a takeoff of that too and figure out how much soil is coming out based off of the plan so it gets you even closer so now if this is residential you don't always have a survey you don't always have a situation so now you got to take do your measurements and and figure out you know the the the divided by 27 get your get your numbers that way so so and in a retaining wall like this though we've got to calculate the actual square footage cuz they don't give us the square footage on the plan this had a blueprint and it had just bottom of wall elevations and top of wall elevations and we have to actually go through and hope and pray that the surveyor got all of their elevations you want to double checks you get your wheel out and you get your height of the you know you know the height of the wall some cuz with when you're coming here to measure this initially you you have a hill here so how you going to tell where that wall you know height of the wall is that's when you go off from the blueprints if they're calling out a bottom of wall at 890 and the top of wall at a 9005 that's telling me that I got a 15t tall wall right there in that corner and if the wall is 50 ft long at 15t tall I'm going to calculate that as part of that square footage and I'm going to break the wall down into its segments because I've got to get really close with those excavation or with those retaining wall numbers the actual square foot now this is the time when we rely especially with retaining walls we rely on square foot numbers with dirt it's a cubic volume how many cubic yards of material are we going to be hauling out with demolition it's a matter of cubic volume plus the time it takes to do the Demolition and that's the same thing with excavation it's a matter of time and quantity of material intermixed with the the overhead and the overhead is is in conjunction with the amount of time that we plan on spending on this job site but you said something that I'd like to dive into more because there is a huge difference between bidding a retaining wall that has geogrid and bidding and retaining wall that is a freestanding non- geogrid why is that what are you taking into consideration for that and let's walk this way so can see this well labor involves going to be more for one uh time equipment equipment time but but initially let's start with excavation so on a regular freestanding wall you're probably 2 ft back to give yourself some room you got a foot of rock going behind it and you got well depending on what material you're using the the blocks are a foot thick now when you get into geogrid a wall like this you're probably 12 14 ft of geogrid behind it right so you have to excavate you have to account for Excavating 14 ft of soil behind your wall all the way down yeah more cuz it's you're going to have to make it safe for yourself and OV excavate uh a slope yeah cut it out cuz you've got if you got 14t of geogrid here you can't dig 14t down cuz you got 14t actually the the geogrid is longer on the bottom so the bottom has to be 14 putting the the top toe of that slope about 18 20t it depends on how big that is and then that material that you excavate out that excess material that doesn't get hauled out because that all has to get put back into place and you have to figure out where are you going to store the material while I'm digging it and that's where you look at your site and you're like do I have the room for that okay well now I'm going to want to start in the corner on this one and work my way out but you might have to do it in sections also what's going on up top you got to think now if I excavate all this soil and leave it open to the elements are we going to have a bunch of claps and and issues so now you might have to do calculate yourself for taking 20 40 feet at a time absolutely that is exactly how we did this project was we had to do the dig in stages cuz we didn't have enough room on site cuz it's a tight site because they weren't going to wait for us the general contractor was that built this was terrible let let's just put it this way just so you guys know and you're going to find this you have the best laid plans can get screwed up by the worst General Contractors and you remember this guy right he actually fired the water department the city he fired the city he said you're not allowed on my project kick them kick the city off from his job which gave me this big red alert because that told me this guy you don't that's something you can't do and now we've got this wild card thrown into the mix and though we have this plan laid out that we're going to excavate this we're going to rebuild the wall then we're going to excavate the the dirt that we excavate from the second section is going to go behind the first section and we're going to Hopscotch it but now that adds more time to a job doesn't it definitely yeah and so then you've got to communicate with the GC how you plan on doing this and if it's possible to communicate beforehand but like I said a lot of times the gc's you can have phenomenal gc's amazing and then you can have guys that probably should be serving the pizza not building the pizza place because the guy that we worked for here's a great example we were doing we we got the retaining well done everything's ready to go here and we get into the point where we're starting to do the underground utilities and he tells me he's got the asphalt scheduled to go in we don't have the underground Utilities in I can't make this up do you remember that yeah I do remember that yeah so he's going he's ready to pour the asphalt you tell us yeah you want to lay asphalt before digging in the utilities so um what's that going to do to your asphalt when you go to digg in your utilities later so oh just I got kicked off the job because I asked them that simple question but maybe with a little bit more of a snarky attitude like are you an idiot you know what I mean I mean sometimes you got to call a spade a spade I'm saying it like I'm saying it you know we've been doing this our whole lives this is all we did Tim and I this is all him and I have done and Alex grew up doing the same damn thing now with a project like this there's a lot that goes into bidding the retaining wall itself there is the price of the block there is the price of the Rock and this is something that I've always calculated separately on a big commercial site I calculate the price of the block delivered with tax take that into consideration the price of the Rock and then there's the price of the geogrid that's part of the material cost but then there's the price of the pins price of the Caps price of the glute these are all things now you can work like I work directly with versalock so I gave them the takeoff and I said I need the price for all of the materials for this retaining wall and they include the price of the engineered as well because the engineering can cost anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar per square foot it's not cheap to get engineering now permits I've always…