For those of you who have done big jobs...

[vilasman]

I am currently a newly minted master electrician and because of knowing the right people, my first contracts as a newly minted master will be 3 homes each of which will be sold at at least a million dollars. I managed this by straighten out the screw up's of 2 other E.C.'s in a million dollar house. I was talking to the master who got me to the point of becoming a master today about big jobs that he had done, and he told me that the biggest was an 80 unit, garden style apartment complex. And of course decided that a job on this level was were I wanted to go.
Now here's the question, If all goes as planned I will be doing somewhere between 20-30 , million dollar homes over the course of the next 3-5 years. The customers are there, lot's for 9 of the homes, are under contract and the real estate agent is hot on the case of finding more.
If you have traveled, what did you do, or would you have done, so that when you got to the end of the 5 years, or got to a certain level finacially, or the bottom fell out of the deal, so that you could move on the next step?
Be it doing a large project or just if the deal fell apart early, continuing on after the goose that laid the golden eggs stopped laying for what ever reason.

 

[charlie tuna]

Re: For those of you who have done big jobs...

the first mistake in your thinking is planning years ahead --- guess what---the economy changes. and your prices and profit changes with that! and don't ever forget to never ---ever---put all your eggs in one basket! you need to branch out into different facets of the industry. housing is just one facit---but it is also a very soft market and can change very fast. my $.02..................

 

[vilasman]

Re: For those of you who have done big jobs...

I get what you are saying about the residential housing market being soft...
cant argue that, here in the wash metro area we tend to get a big turnover of people with big salaries every 4 years...

Lets assume that the bottom did fall out of the market, I view this particular scenrio, of me wiring these big barn houses as one vehicle that could get me to a point where i could pursue a job where the electrical was 1/3 to 1 million $.

I mean of gone from wiring section 8, 4-6 unit buildings in areas where the cops fear to tread, to coming in after 2 other groups of electricians and fixing at last count 80 things that they screwed up in a 4800 sq foot mini manse.

I dont doubt that I am going to continue to get bigger and more complex projects, I am not so much after the money, I like the challenge of taking on jobs that other people walk away from or shake their heads at. And with those kinds of projects comes loot.

So how ever I manage to get there. If there's anyone out there who is there, or who has been there, is there anything you can tell me that you wish someone had told you.

Or is it like getting married. Where no one tells you what it's really like, but if you survive the first few years, you can look at other married guys and while you war stories maybe different, you have an understanding of what the other guy has been through?

 

[mdshunk]

Re: For those of you who have done big jobs...

Originally posted by vilasman:
I like the challenge of taking on jobs that other people walk away from or shake their heads at. And with those kinds of projects comes loot.

I work just a bit north of you, and I understand quite well where you're coming from, but consider this: While there is "loot" in projects that other people turn away from, it really wears you and your men down. While I joke that I specialize in "sutff nobody wants to do", it's making me really old really fast. Consider also that the reason some of this work is getting passed up is because there's no real way to make money on some of it. I've gotten burned a few times. Some of the jobs that will burn you look on the surface just like jobs you've made good money on. I'm not sure how to tell the two apart sometimes after all these years. I'm not sure what the moral of my story is, other than to take some lower profit gravy work too every once in a while to keep the stress level down with you and your men.

 

[tryinghard]

Re: For those of you who have done big jobs...

You have to have working capital to be self-employed. So if you do not have working capital (spend able money currently within your reach) you cannot survive waiting for contracts to pay, even the quickest paying contracts will not pay fast enough for your extensions.

The larger the project the larger your financial extension will be so larger work requires more cash to front. This problem is only a small portion of the overall problem of growth. A much greater portion of the problem you will find is staffing. My suggestion to anyone in this position is grow slow.

An analogy that seems to hold true about business: business is like a stream in that if you have a solid continual flow of water (cash) you will notice a healthy environment of wildlife and foliage but if the flow of water is intermittently interrupted, stops, or floods it will affect the environment it supports the same.

Large work requires concurrent smaller work to sustain your business the only way around this is large amounts of working capital.

 

[bigjohn67]

Re: For those of you who have done big jobs...

Follow the golden rules.

You may get 1 out of 10 jobs you bid.
Never give things for free in hopes it will land you a prospective job in the future.
Established GC's look for new contractors and promise the world for a reason. Most of the times they owe all the other money and they (EC) refuse to do work for them until they pay up on previous jobs.