Steel Edging

The numbers this sheet uses

These are mine, measured on my own jobs in Central Texas. Your steel might be $2.75, might be $4. Use your number. Two things the sheet keeps out on purpose, and both are in the footnotes. The soil moves the pace more than the crew does: rock, roots and clay. And curves, corners and the stake count are not in the number. A straight 200-foot run and a 200-foot serpentine bed are not the same job. Quote both at $7.50 and one of them is paying for the other.

Sell price to the customer

$7.50 a linear foot, installed

What the steel costs

$3.25 a foot

What the crew is paid

$23 an hour, average

The burden

1.35

What an hour of labor costs

$31, the wage times the burden

The pace

25 feet per man-hour, good soil, straight runs

The setup hour

One hour of a crew of 3 per job, $93, forty feet or four hundred

The ceiling, and the unit problem

The $3.25 of steel over the $7.50 price is 43.3%. The most gross profit that exists on one foot of this edging is $4.25, which is 56.7%, and that is if the steel installs itself. Steel sits between mulch, where the material is a third of the price, and sod, where it is 61%. Hold on to that, because it decides which lever is worth pulling.

The three columns run the way they always do. At 25%, $1.88 of gross profit, $5.63 of allowable cost, $2.38 left for labor. At 30%, $2.25, $5.25, $2.00 for labor. At 35%, $2.63, $4.88, and $1.63 is the entire labor budget for one foot. Divide each by $31 and you get 0.077, 0.065 and 0.052 man-hours a foot.

Here is a mistake I have seen in a lot of pricing sheets in this trade, and it has nothing to do with the prices. Those three numbers are useless. Not wrong. Useless. Nobody has ever stood in a yard and thought about 0.05 of an hour. Your foreman does not think that way, and neither do you. So flip it over. Same math, upside down: 13.1 feet an hour, per person, to make 25%. 15.5 feet an hour for 30%. 19.1 feet an hour for 35%. Now it is a number you can argue with, and now you can find out whether it is real.

Price in the unit your crew already thinks in. Yards a day for mulch, pallets a day for sod, feet an hour for edging. Math nobody can check against a real day is how you lose 10 points and never notice.

The real pace

Forget what you want to make. What is real on steel edging is 25 feet per man-hour, in good soil, on straight runs, with a decent crew. The $31 hour divided by 25 feet is $1.24 of labor a foot. Add the $3.25 of steel and the foot costs $4.49. The $7.50 price minus $4.49 is $3.01 of gross profit, which is 40.1%. That is the best number in three sheets. To make 35% you could charge $6.91. There is 59 cents of room in the price, and that room is for something. It is not for discounting.

The crew table goes the other way round from mulch, because the unit is already flipped. A crew of 2 for 8 hours is 16 man-hours, times 25 feet, 400 feet in the day. A crew of 3 is 24 man-hours, 600 feet. A crew of 4, 800. A crew of 5, 1,000 on paper. Run it backward: a crew of 3 comes home with 400 feet, not 600. The 24 man-hours over 400 feet is 16.7 feet per man-hour. Labor is now $1.86 a foot instead of $1.24, gross profit is $2.39, and the 40% item became a 32% item without anybody touching the price.

The footnote matters more than the crew size. Rock, roots and clay change this number more than the crew ever will. The same 2 people, the same effort: 400 feet in sandy loam, maybe 150 through tree roots. On edging, the soil is a bigger variable than the person holding the hammer.

The hour that does not shrink

Small edging jobs do not make less money. They lose money, and sheet 2 puts numbers on it. Unload, stage the steel, mark the line, get the tools out, clean up, load out. Call it one hour of crew time whether you brought 40 feet or 400. A crew of 3 at $31 an hour is $93, and the $93 does not shrink.

Take two jobs at the same $7.50 and the same 25 feet per man-hour. The 40-foot job is $300 of revenue. At $3.01 a foot the per-foot math says you made $120.40. Take the $93 hour off and $27.40 is left, which is 9.1% on the job. The 400-foot job is $3,000 of revenue and $1,204 of gross at the pace. Take the same $93 off and $1,111 is left, which is 37.0%. The per-foot margin was identical on both. The hour was $2.33 a foot on forty feet and 23 cents a foot on four hundred. It changes by ten times.

For the 40-foot job to make 35% with the hour in, it is not a $7.50 job. The steel plus the labor plus the hour, divided by 0.65, divided by 40 feet, is $10.48 a foot. On the 400-foot job the same line reads $7.27. That is what a minimum charge is. It is not greed. It is the part of the job that does not shrink. Under about 60 feet, quote the hour, not the foot. When edging rides on a job the crew is already on, that job is paying for the hour and the foot price holds. Sold on its own, 40 feet is a $10.48 job.

The per-foot margin was the same on both jobs. The hour was $2.33 a foot on forty feet and 23 cents on four hundred.

Price, speed, purchasing, and the hour

The grid on sheet 3 has the price per foot across the top, feet per man-hour down the side, and the gross margin in every cell, with $3.25 of steel and a $31 hour throughout. The circle at $7.50 and 25 feet is $3.01 a foot. Push the crew 10% faster, 25 feet an hour up to 27.5, and you climb one row to 42% and $3.12. That is 11 cents. Charge 50 cents more, $8 a foot, 7%, and you move one column across to 44% and $3.51. That is 50 cents, straight through. Price beats speed 4.5 to 1, from a 50-cent bump nobody will notice.

Here is where cheap steel changes the story from sod. Your entire labor cost on this edging is $1.24 a foot, and a 10% raise is 75 cents. So on edging, free labor would beat a 10% raise. On sod it could not. That is the material-share rule. Steel is 43% of the price, sod was 61%, mulch was 33%. The lower that number, the more your crew's pace is worth. The higher it is, the more the work has to come from your price and your supplier. Edging sits in the middle, both levers are live, and neither one is the big one.

Buy the steel at $3.00 instead of $3.25 and that is 25 cents a foot, straight through, from one phone call about volume. Still more than twice what a 10% faster crew gets you. But look at the $93 again. On a 40-foot job, 50 cents a foot is $20. The hour is $93. On small edging, the lever is not price, speed or purchasing. It is the minimum. And the 59 cents of room at $7.50 is what pays for the hour on the jobs that do not cover it. Do not give it away.

Where it goes wrong on your job

The pace was set in good soil on a straight run, and nothing about your site is in it. These are the days that miss it. The ground fought the crew: caliche, roots, a bed that was all clay, and 25 feet an hour became 15. The line was all curves and corners, and the stake count doubled while the footage did not. The job was 40 feet, sold by the foot, and the setup hour ate the margin before the first stake went in. The edging was an add-on to somebody else's job and the crew spent the hour anyway, because the steel was on a different truck. The supplier raised the foot and the estimate still carries last season's steel. One more bed the customer pointed at while the crew was there, and nobody billed it.

One job over budget usually has a story like one of those behind it. Write it down and move on. Five jobs over with no story is your real pace, and then one of three numbers has to move: the price, the pace, or the minimum. On edging, check the minimum first. It is the cheapest fix on the sheet, and it is the one most jobs under 60 feet are missing.

What to do with this

Ten minutes, tonight, on the last three edging jobs you ran. Get the feet from each invoice and the crew's hours on the job from your foreman. Divide the feet by the hours and you have feet per man-hour, in a unit you can argue with. Then look at the smallest of the three. Put the $93 hour against it and read what the job made, not what the foot made. If that number surprises you, watch the episode and set a minimum. If it does not, you have lost 10 minutes.