I am curious to know wether most of you charge per job or per drop? What is the average rate per drop of cat5 and cable, also do you charge differently for speaker drops?
Thank You,
Chris

Great question to discuss at this site.

[Link: 66.159.163.6]

Dave

All new FORUMS will be up this evening (today is monday i think)

Any special forum requests will be made today and posted.

NO HOMEOWNERS - Sorry.

I don't want to give the impression that I am a homeowner. I own a company that has strictly dealt with high end home theaters where the pre-wire is part of the job, but have been approached by some homebuilders to handle their homes. I am afraid we are to expensive for them.
Chris

I think the best way is to come up with a base rate per thing installed. A Speaker pair with volume control is say 55 bucks. A coax run is 45 bucks etc. Then you can use a spreadsheet to determine your total cost. If it's a big job, maybe a rate discount also.

Most of the electricians in our area charge $40 per outlet for a cable or telephone. To compete we charge $60 per outlet, but we run two runs of CAT5e or a single run plus two runs of RG6 if its a cable outlet. That includes pre-wire and trimout with a plate. We lose our ass on it, but it generates other sales to make up.

Why do that? We do prewires we break even on or make money at (at higher rates than I see here), and I still get the referrals because of a job well done. I understand the "investing in future sales", but selling the prewire below cost puts you at a financial disadvantage for a long period of time until you complete the prewire, meet the new home owner, close the deal, complete the deal and get paid. If your business ramps up rapidly the problem only gets worse, and puts in you a negative cash flow until business goes _down_ and you catch up on final system installations. Come to think of it, if busiess went down, you might not collect on the final jobs or get them at all, leaving you having sold your services at below your cost to do them. Think about it.

To add to Theaterworks comment:
What if they call in someone else to finish your job? Then you're screwed. We have been called in to finish jobs before. Those jobs are at the top of my "Jobs that suck" List, but we do them.

You might consider charging by the foot for wire pulls with a standard charge added for trim out. It doesn't take much time on a spreadsheet, looks very professional, helps you calculate how much wire you need, and differentiates your bid from other clowns.

Thon,
If you do this do you measure the wire once used or do you measure the walls the drop will follow?
What I mean is, say you do this for a builder, the builder will have the plans of the home. Do you say okay it is a 20 foot run across the ceiling and 8 feet down the wall and 4 foot down the wall to the can, plus 2 feet for can trimout. so it would be 34 ft. total run.
BUT when you go to do the work you actually use 50ft. because of this or that. do you go back and charge more or how would you handle it..

Let me clarify my earlier post... we collect all the wiring monies up front (prewire and trimout), and we only do tel and tv outlets if we're doing audio in the house. So we lose money on the telco part, but we have already made it up on the audio/video.

so Jarrod,
What your saying is for each home you do, the total price including audio, video, and phone is a money making price.
BUT if you broke it down you are giving a below cost rpice on phones. But it doesn't matter because that lower price is just part of a money making total.. There isn't a problem there. As long as they never ask for the same phone price without the other part that generates the profits (audio).
are you doing this for a particualr builder andd you do all their homes?

Correct, the total job makes money, but if broken down into parts we lose on the phone and tv. We work with builders, but for the customer. In other words, the builder refers his clients to us, but we get paid by the customer. Builders want to get paid today, but they never seem to want to pay me until tomorrow. Also, I don't have to get all of my change orders third party.

Yeah, I estimate the actual length of wire needed and definitely put in a lot of extra and round up. The point is not to exact to the inch, but to let the customer know that you have put some thought into "their" project, and you are accounting for each run. Once you do it a few times you will be able to edit old spreadsheets and come up with a "custom" look for each proposal.