Could even have them do snow removal and such depending on your climate. I"m not sure if you ever mentioned that or not.
Adventures with lyrical - buying a business
- Thread starter Shonuff
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Weird, I got the impression his business was in the "burbs around some major Texas city. Must have just assumed that by the fact that he went to UT. Regardless, he ain"t living where there"s much snow!
Shonuff
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Haven"t lived in Texas since 2005. Anyway, I won"t be participating on these boards for a bit. We do emergency tree work, and on Wednesday a.m., woke up to a full v/me box with customers. We got a call every 30 secs yesterday for bids, and 100 requests for estimates. Funny, all the new advertising is working, now that they need me, we are slammed. 50k in work right now, with about 70 estimates to run that will be worth maybe another 50k. I"m bound by contract on my advertising, so all the new yellow pages, billboard and the radio campaign are going to stay there. Radio is giving good response already.Gauss said:
I"m out for a few days, trying to manage the chaos. Everyone gets stressed out when we get slammed, and they get tired from working 7-7 six days a week, but I tell them the work may not always be there, so we need to get after it.
ToeMissile
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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I think of Lyrical every time I see this commercial.
<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8MdfNWDSpcM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8MdfNWDSpcM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Shonuff
Mr. Poopybutthole
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We"ve been doing alot of work like that lately, but no tablets (the guys can barely keep their GPS" in working condition) and no helicopters LOL. The last part of the commercial was the more difficult part, planting a tree in the same place as one that came out is very labor intensive.ToeMissile said:
As an update, we are now running a full two crews (three men per crew), a Foreman and secretary. Haven"t been able to get caught up with the work coming in. So we are now billing at $500 an hour. Everything is fine, other than the rate of accounts receivable delinquency has gone up (from .25% to 1% of sales).
I"m not sure if its all the new advertising, but alot of it is. We"ve gone from spending $600 a month to 3,200 a month (and I still might add a billboard). Radio is generating at least one call a day, and our other billboard has started to generate cash. We"ve branched out to having the biggest yellow page ad in all of the directories except one, so we"ll have #1 placement in most of them. My new secretary has experience in sales, and has been raising 2k a week in sales that other one didn"t.
We"ll net $30k (less some new equipment and prepaid expenses) this month, on sales of 75-80k. Given that we have alot of fixed costs, once we get past 40k in sales, profits start ramping up.
July should be good, secretary tells me we have 50k booked. We only did 50k in sales for the entire month of July!
Most epic troll ever. All you dumb American Inventors are falling all over yourselves licking his asshole clean.
Go ahead an rim him out, assholes.
$500 an hour, what a fucking joke.
Lyrical is just some dumb American Inventor with a pipe dream, a rake and two cracked out brothas and somehow he"s Bill fucking Gates of the landscape word. $500 an hour MY ASS.
Go ahead an rim him out, assholes.
$500 an hour, what a fucking joke.
Lyrical is just some dumb American Inventor with a pipe dream, a rake and two cracked out brothas and somehow he"s Bill fucking Gates of the landscape word. $500 an hour MY ASS.
Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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A couple months back the guy we had been training as an estimator for the past year and a half quit to go back on the tools and get more experience as a plumber. At the time we were fairly disappointed, as he seemed to be catching on fairly well, and we"d invested a lot of time and money getting him up to speed. He was smart, fairly hard working, and technically competent. Unfortunately he had a tendency to fuck up. A lot. We repeatedly hammered it into him that everything he does must be double or triple checked, because once we submit a bid and/or pickup the project, that"s it, there"s no second chance.
When we "take-off" a project, we literally count every length of pipe, every fitting, every valve, every pump, boiler and so on. It"s the only way to legitimately come up with a decent mechanical estimate. Some contractors square foot things and use adjustment factors based upon how expensive they think the systems might be, but that"s barely a step past flat out guessing.
I just came across a real nice one. He properly took off the footages of pipe for a fancoil system in a warehouse on the take-off sheets. When he inputs the take-off in to the estimating software, he"s supposed to go through and input all the systems and then when complete, go back and check every single line for accuracy and to ensure he didn"t miss anything. It"s very easy to make a key punch error, whether inputting something way high (you don"t get the job) or way low (you get the job and lose your ass).
So on the fancoil system we were figuring out the water content to calculate how much glycol we"d need the other day. I was going to just summarize that system within the software and it automatically figures out the water content itself. The number it gave back didn"t seem to make sense. Upon digging further, I discovered that he never input about 1200" of 4" sch 40 steel pipe. There"s a little tick mark beside it on the take-off sheet, which should have meant he"d double checked the punch-in. How he fucked it up, I don"t know.
List price at standard discount, that"s about $20,000 that we"re out, right there, not to mention labor, welding, hangers and so on that would all have been missed because of it. Probably a 30-40k hit.
I don"t even want to contemplate how many of these fuckups he made during his 18 months estimating. For the first few months I was reviewing every nook and cranny of his take-off and punch-in, but I figured after 6 months I could at least trust him on the punch-in while still reviewing the take-off in detail. I mean a fucking moron with no trade experience could be trained to be 100% accurate on the punch-in within a couple weeks, it"s not hard. It"s just monotonous and boring.
No wonder we haven"t made a cent the past year, there"s probably doozies like this all over the place in our bids.
When we "take-off" a project, we literally count every length of pipe, every fitting, every valve, every pump, boiler and so on. It"s the only way to legitimately come up with a decent mechanical estimate. Some contractors square foot things and use adjustment factors based upon how expensive they think the systems might be, but that"s barely a step past flat out guessing.
I just came across a real nice one. He properly took off the footages of pipe for a fancoil system in a warehouse on the take-off sheets. When he inputs the take-off in to the estimating software, he"s supposed to go through and input all the systems and then when complete, go back and check every single line for accuracy and to ensure he didn"t miss anything. It"s very easy to make a key punch error, whether inputting something way high (you don"t get the job) or way low (you get the job and lose your ass).
So on the fancoil system we were figuring out the water content to calculate how much glycol we"d need the other day. I was going to just summarize that system within the software and it automatically figures out the water content itself. The number it gave back didn"t seem to make sense. Upon digging further, I discovered that he never input about 1200" of 4" sch 40 steel pipe. There"s a little tick mark beside it on the take-off sheet, which should have meant he"d double checked the punch-in. How he fucked it up, I don"t know.
List price at standard discount, that"s about $20,000 that we"re out, right there, not to mention labor, welding, hangers and so on that would all have been missed because of it. Probably a 30-40k hit.
I don"t even want to contemplate how many of these fuckups he made during his 18 months estimating. For the first few months I was reviewing every nook and cranny of his take-off and punch-in, but I figured after 6 months I could at least trust him on the punch-in while still reviewing the take-off in detail. I mean a fucking moron with no trade experience could be trained to be 100% accurate on the punch-in within a couple weeks, it"s not hard. It"s just monotonous and boring.
No wonder we haven"t made a cent the past year, there"s probably doozies like this all over the place in our bids.
Shonuff
Mr. Poopybutthole
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I feel your pain. My secretary went to go to work for our biggest customer, and we found so many errors, it wasn"t funny. We"ve found about $12k in work, from jobs that were misbilled, customers not followed up, lost estimates, etc. It amazes me, as tough as the economy is, that people aren"t diligent. I just find it amazing that since she"s gone, we"ve had our best month in two years, and the last time we had a month this good was when she first started. How much did I lose with her?Eomer said:
A wealthy businessman once told me that you should "inspect what you expect." Everyone else was monitored because they were a part of a crew, but she sat in the office by herself. You can bet I go through the office with a fine toothed comb once a week now.
Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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Yeah, the problem is, if I"m going to catch errors like the one I caught, I may as well not even have an estimator working for me, because the in-depth review required of every take-off and punch-in would more or less be 80% of the work of just doing the whole thing myself.
Along with my fiance, I have started a casino night business. In a nutshell, we come to your place of business, charity event/fund raiser and tavern/bar/club and deal a variety of table games in a "high-end" environment. Our ultimate goal is to be akin to something like Dealer Dolls. You can google that and see that they have their shit together and we are only in the meet and greet stage with our dealers, but all businesses need goals. We"d also like to partner with or create our own league similar to WTP.
What sets us apart from the competition are three things...
1) We have extraordinary looking dealers who are more than robots dealing games as they all have a signature style. The ladies coming in to audition have exceeded my expectations and could easily model in some cases. We"re offering them once they come to the meet and greets a profit sharing incentive as well as a cruise for most requested girl.
2) Our tables are high quality custom made wood pieces that can be broken down and delivered by one person (me for now although this will be our first job recruitment).
3) There is no competition in our market.
The single most difficult thing so far was the run around to get funded. This all start from a project in a business class that my fiance was taking that was recommended to a small business loan group. They gave us the run around literally for 3 months all the while saying things like "this is a sure deal", " we shouldn"t have any problem making this loan" etc... We needed $50k for initial startup costs plus working capital for marketing and misc. I ended up funding the $25k and getting a loan on the house for another $25k after getting rejected twice. The problem was everything was based off the equity in my house and after each phone call the value would seem to drop. Equity in my house in the boom bust went from about 150k to 70k. I was a little surprised that they do not take into consideration any other accounts that we had with the bank which were quite a few and each with a sizeable amount. Other than my house and two cars I have zero debt so go figure.
The red tape to open our showroom (another thing no one else has) was rediculous but ultimately overcome. We"re only going to be there for 6 months, but for training purposes its a little sketchy to be going to someone"s house and this works really well as a showroom also. We"re in a outdoor mall store that used to be a Quiznos that has great road exposure. Im ebaying the neon signs and cooking hoods the previous owners left behind. The abandoned security cameras and stereo equipment has also been put back to work.
The amount of regulations and licenses that need to be gotten are a little daunting, fortunately, my fiance has a ton of casino management experience and contacts. Dealers, even for fake money charity events, have to be licensed because fleas will literally go around to these events and try to take advantage of weak dealers in the hopes of winning the night"s grand prize. Slot machines have to be free to play "skill stop" only machines. Now if we wanted to be risky we could always toss regular slot machines into an event, but I certainly don"t want to risk the company to some insane fine.
Events have already been prebooked through word of mouth. Facebook and radio ads have been big helps as well.
Well, been a long time reader of this thread and could finally contribute something. Hopefully as things progress I"ll be able to add more and maybe some pictures.
What sets us apart from the competition are three things...
1) We have extraordinary looking dealers who are more than robots dealing games as they all have a signature style. The ladies coming in to audition have exceeded my expectations and could easily model in some cases. We"re offering them once they come to the meet and greets a profit sharing incentive as well as a cruise for most requested girl.
2) Our tables are high quality custom made wood pieces that can be broken down and delivered by one person (me for now although this will be our first job recruitment).
3) There is no competition in our market.
The single most difficult thing so far was the run around to get funded. This all start from a project in a business class that my fiance was taking that was recommended to a small business loan group. They gave us the run around literally for 3 months all the while saying things like "this is a sure deal", " we shouldn"t have any problem making this loan" etc... We needed $50k for initial startup costs plus working capital for marketing and misc. I ended up funding the $25k and getting a loan on the house for another $25k after getting rejected twice. The problem was everything was based off the equity in my house and after each phone call the value would seem to drop. Equity in my house in the boom bust went from about 150k to 70k. I was a little surprised that they do not take into consideration any other accounts that we had with the bank which were quite a few and each with a sizeable amount. Other than my house and two cars I have zero debt so go figure.
The red tape to open our showroom (another thing no one else has) was rediculous but ultimately overcome. We"re only going to be there for 6 months, but for training purposes its a little sketchy to be going to someone"s house and this works really well as a showroom also. We"re in a outdoor mall store that used to be a Quiznos that has great road exposure. Im ebaying the neon signs and cooking hoods the previous owners left behind. The abandoned security cameras and stereo equipment has also been put back to work.
The amount of regulations and licenses that need to be gotten are a little daunting, fortunately, my fiance has a ton of casino management experience and contacts. Dealers, even for fake money charity events, have to be licensed because fleas will literally go around to these events and try to take advantage of weak dealers in the hopes of winning the night"s grand prize. Slot machines have to be free to play "skill stop" only machines. Now if we wanted to be risky we could always toss regular slot machines into an event, but I certainly don"t want to risk the company to some insane fine.
Events have already been prebooked through word of mouth. Facebook and radio ads have been big helps as well.
Well, been a long time reader of this thread and could finally contribute something. Hopefully as things progress I"ll be able to add more and maybe some pictures.