I,m bidding on a job and the contractor wants a price to remove excess fill off-site. There is aprox. 32,000 cyds. I told him that I couldnt give him a price for removal, only for loading out of material which would include machine and an operator. I didnt want to give him a price on trucking because I dont know exactly when the job is starting and also location of a dump site, distance, cost to dump if any or the possibilty that someone will take the fill and pay for trucking. This is on the larger end of jobs that I have bid on and dont want to take a bath but I also dont want to lose the job. I told the contractor the reasons for not including the actual removal of material off site and he seemed to understand. Is there a better way of bidding on something like this? Any advice would be great
unless he gives you answers to all the variables, how do you give the guy a price? that would be like him asking, how much to dig a hole? you ask, how big of a hole, he goes, oh i don't know...just a hole, how much? only way i'd bid the trucking with what he's given you is by the hour on the trucking end. make sure you have an adaquate # of trucks so you don't slow down your end of the job waiting for trucks.
T&M You tell him it is this much for this equipment per hour. Dont give a total amount, just an hourly amount. Keep track of your loads, and hours, and have the superintendent sign tickets at the end of every day.
why not give a price on teh trucking also? If you only give a price to load the trucks then you don't have control as to how many trucks are used. If your clients wants the material moved, get the information you need as to how much, how far, and when, then you can take care of it. I'm sure there are numberous trucking companies around your area (there are here) get in contact with them and tell them that you want to move x amount of material in so man days. You need to estimate how fast you can load the trucks with whatever equipment you have or rent. You load their their trucks and charge the customer for both. Either way you have more control over the project. If the customer wants to get the truck you don't know how many he will get and for how long. Will he get 2 truck and it is an hour round trip for the trucks. If that is the case what is your operator going to do for 45 mins while he isn't loading a truck?
Find a local broker. They will give you a rater per hour, depending on the yardage and weight a truck can haul. The hard part is going to be finding someone to take the material. A lot of that is going to depend on what it is. Around here topsoil is like gold. Other areas i have worked at, there is 4ft+ of topsoil, you cant get rid of it. The thing to do is find if someone in the area is looking for the material. We usually found someone who had a low area and didnt care what kind of dirt it was. We would usually haul it to them at cost. If we had a lot, and had a hard time getting rid of it, we would haul for free, and doze the piles off. If it is good compactible fill, check with other contractors. Someone is bound to have a project that needs fill, and they will usually take the dirt with the trucks they own/use. They wont charge you for the trucks. You may even be able to sell some of the dirt to them. But once they have all the dirt they need, they will pull their trucks and you back at square one. One company I worked for started a division for importing and exporting dirt. They found places, and companys that would trade dirt, or take dirt. 32,000 cyds is a lot of dirt to get rid of, and im sure you wont find any one place to take it all. This is a good one to pull off, if you can provide this to a customer, they know you can do pretty much anything they will need done.
In theses times nobody does anything for free anymore !! fuel is way to much to be trucking for free.
Around here concrete companies are buying ledge. I did a ledge job that had 120,000 yards of ledge. I sold it all for $2 a yard. When I bid it I had bid it to have concrete companies take it for free. Gravel and sand are another material around here companies will send you trucks for free if they can have the material. Clay is the only thing that is a PITA to get rid of. What type of machines are you going to use to load out the material?
This all depends on location. I was on a project where we had 8000 cubic yards of clay to export. A competitor of ours was working 10 miles down the road. They needed compactiable fill for their project. The clay was stockpiled at optimum moisture. We charged the client to remove the material. The other contractor supplied theyre trucks, and broker trucks to haul the material out. Didnt cost us a thing. Its all about what you have and who wants or needs it.
I just bid a job exporting 17K CY of topsoil and importing 24K CY of engineered fill. Around here there a several places that take dirt for free or inert fill sites that charge by the load. These kind of jobs with a hard bid is a tough row to hoe. You can either do real well, break even or loose your shirt. I have a piece of property we use as an inert dump (non-regulated site work waste) about an hour away from the project round trip during non-rush hour times. When I bid a trucking job such as this I really pay attention to the peak traffic times to and from the job. It may mean that we start at 8AM and stop at 3PM and work saturdays to pick up production. As a fall back, I priced the job going to our dump. Now I need to find a place closer to dump and see if I can squeeze a few more pennies out of the job. The borrow site is 2 miles away from the site so that was easy to estimate. My client wanted a lump sum bid instead of T&M. I tried to explain that T&M would be cheaper in the long run but they wanted to know their costs. I have to estimate some hefty contigency $$$ in the bid to cover my rear end in case the plan doesn't work out.
The type of sites I bid require a hard bid on everything. Mostly 1-3 acre commercial sites for fast food, banks and strip centers. The restaurants typically start within a couple of weeks of bid, so it's not too bad. Some of the developer work is months off into the permitting abyss(I'm in Metro Atlanta). I always qualify my proposals with a "Good for thirty days" note to give me some leverage if there isn't a dump site close by. I too have to deal with the traffic issues, but figure I can find a taker close enough to make two loads an hour per truck and figure that into my per yard export price. Once i get the job and it's ready to start, I'll load the kids up on a Saturday and go for a ride to "see what I can see" and find a home if it's an export, or suitable fill if it's an import site. It's risk I assume on every bid.(that's why you won't see me gamble in Vegas, because I do it everyday in real life!)
Your last line sounds like something my father would say.
Actually, I think I remember my father saying that line as he chewed a couple of dozen TUMS each day!
I plan on using a 322 to load out the material. I talked to a couple of trucking co. they gave me a couple of options for dump sites doesnt sound like it will be aproblem to get rid of. My only concern is my exposure dont want to lose my ass. There is other work to do on this site; foundations,sewer,water, grading but the soil removal is whats worrying me. I realize that timing is going to be key on this project.
I just went thru the same thing this week but the amount is about 15,000 yrds so I found a dump site and have to have a dozer on site to push back piles. I plan on 3 trucks per hour so 30 loads in a 10 hour day using 3 trucks. I had to put in a firm number. The site will have to take close to 1000 truck loads. Do not forget about the road, going to be a mess after all that mud on it, had to charge for road clean up everyday. I am crossing my fingers on this one, could of been better off to put it all on red at the casino. Where is your job located?
Bidding a job Very good info about this, I really know what you mean about being nervous on bidding the job. Its so many unknowns, that you have to be prepared for, and even my 10 years of experience makes me nervous everytime on this big jobs. I have a lot of friends in the same business and I always ask questions, like you are doing. I just removed 1000 cyds of fill, got paid to remove it, I have a place to store it, In about 3 weeks I got a call for 700 cyds of fill, turned around and sold it, to another customer, made double money on it and I used my trucks. I will agree that I was lucky on this one, but I have done this several times. I also have friends that need free fill, dirt, clay, concrete, bricks, etc. Land fill charges $50 a ton. It took me a few years to learn all this stuff and find the resources to dump Try to give a fair price and hopefully you will get more work at this site.
I am working for an electric service company that does subdivision hydro services for residential and commercial stuff. They decided this winter to get into moving topsoil piles to keep some of their other equipment moving. They bid on a pile about 500m long, 100m wide and 30m high. The pile was placed 2 years ago with land scrapers. The companies largest excavator is a John Deere 200C LC and they have a 953C Cat Track Loader. The deadline to have the pile moved was march 1st, and they started on jan. 17th figuring no sweat. They had their 2 33ft dump trailers, a rented dump trailer and 3 tandem/pup dump trucks to move the pile to be loaded with the 200 Deere. The pile is out in a field and gets full on wind all the time and with our brutal winters.... frost gets a little deep. At first I got sent with another 200 Deere with a frost tooth to bust frost for the main hoe. On feb 10th they moved me and the track loader there to help out for a couple days and ordered 5 more tandems for me. The dump site was a 1hr round trip for the trucks so on average the trucks got about 8 rounds per day and hardly made a dent on a day to day basis. We got a call from a tree farm a couple weeks back and they said they would be glad to take the dirt....for a fee. So we ended up renting a D8 from another contractor at the dump site to push up loads and now an operator for it as well. Last week we started onto the lowest stage of the pile, about 4m high now, 500m long and 30 wide. We brought the 200 back with the frost tooth and he started chipping away, the frost is well over 8ft deep across most of the pile so they had to now rent a D155 Komatsu at 3000 a day to rip frost, he spent a week ripping and we still have some to deal with in places. Now we are into road ban, running 75% of GVW on all the trucks and still have well over 3-4 weeks of work left. We are now paying for 24 tandems, 4 tandems w/pups, and 8 30ton dump trailers, the D8 at the dump site, and I am needed on 3 other jobsites and the 200 is needed. The boss said their taking a licking on this one, they didn't think the pile would fluff up so much when they started breaking out the frost. He also told me they are paying almost 4000 a day to the lady at the dump site to dump there. I got talking to one of her employees the other day when I was cleaning up their driveway and apparently she just went out and bought a 3yd loader, and brand new topsoil screener. I think someone got screwed on the dump site deal. They are still bent on doing this every winter. The owner of the company wants to have at er again next year but isn't willing to buy a larger excavator to get the job done. They are looking for a business partner to supply a larger machine to do the job. I have been tossing around the idea of lookin for an old Deere 992 to buy, spend some money on and run it myself and load trucks. I would think it will make a nicer bench loader than a 200 with a 50" bucket.
I would want the topsoil! I sell screened topsoil for $20 a yard and price is going up. The land I own is worth like 6 times what I paid for it in the topsoil. I have stripped about 100 trucks so far this winter for a parking lot and plan on renting a screen this summer for it, next year I will do the same. That could work out to be $32,000 a year in topsoil just off of my own property.
I pretty much agree with everything said to some extent. I bid a job a few years ago and got myself into a bind on the removal, I lined up a place to take the fill near by; figured out the loads/hr and threw that number plus a bit on the bid and got the job. Come time to move the material I got everything lined up; the hoe and 6 trucks......and got to work. At the end of the 1st day the dumpsite said that was it they' d take no more and I was only 1/4 way done. I did find another site for some however in the end I had to truck twice as far and to a site that charged me to dump their. I kept the same time frame I just had to double down on the trucks to keep schedule and avoid the daily penalty date which was rapidly approaching. Needless to say I lost my a** on that part of the job to avoid the penalty. In the end just cya......Get it from the dumpsite in writing so their is no mind changing after you have already committed if you think it could be a problem.
Make your bid time sensitive. And make sure the GC understands this and why. All our bids are good for 30 days. If they're not signed and back to us by then, we're not bound to the bid price. Usually the price is the same in 60 days, but a lot can change in one month. You need the option to adjust your price if your costs go up. You may get hammered with work and may find that you need to hire help to keep your customers happy. Fuel prices can go up. You may need a new dumpsite, etc.
Its $30 a yard here.