How We Do Pricing & Bidding For Structured Cabling Jobs From Start To Finish

so a lot of people have questions about how to bid wiring jobs how we bid them and kind of the process and I'm starting outside for a reason because the type of building makes a big difference this is a my building and it's a single-story strip mall with ups driving by right now and so I'm going to start there and we're gonna come back to some of the why but it comes down to this is going to vary from location location but it comes down to building codes and some of the building codes means there's going to be fire stops in the wall and we're going to talk about that when we get inside because there's something gonna have to consider when you're doing the wiring when you're doing the cabling and now we're gonna start walking through the building I can show you how we look at it and then in the end I'm gonna show you actually how these bids go into the system that we use and how we actually send to the client get approved and get the job done and get paid now I'm doing this at my building because one I have access to it too a lot of times they can't take the camera in like for example we did these medical jobs or any other buildings they're actively being used we're adding drops to them I can't just wander around their building with a camera showing you stuff there comes a lot of legal issues so showing you my building is easy because I have permission from me the owner to do this alright so let's go inside first place to start is go to their back room maybe a D mark which demarcation is going to be where the phone lines come in and a lines come in cable comes in in our case we don't even have any of that old stuff in our building we ripped all of it out because it wasn't necessary but a lot of the companies you're now into you are still using either playing telephone lines or at least have a room that comes in and it's often where the cable comes in that is not always the same in a multi-tenant building as where their server room be but in some cases it is so you have to determine where the wires coming in to where you're running into in this case we have a cabinet and we have a patch panel now not everyone does so you either have to add a patch panel in no big deal just and the price and air we'll talk about pricing later in video you put the patch panel end or see how many ports they have open on there something else to note is was it even done properly ours is neat and clean because we put it in but we have ports open and I can look behind and you can see that there's slack other where if someone who punched it down and had no idea what they're doing this happens a lot and you're gonna see this when they do that you want to make sure you can service this patch panel we've seen some that we've just declared it's easier to put another patch panel in because of the way all the wires were kind of ringed in there we're like what we don't unless they want to pay us for cleanup we don't want to try and pull those back out because they just didn't leave us enough tension to get behind the patch panel so we can just put either another one in or you can go with a modular so we have to make sure there's enough ports on the switch enough ports on the patch panel or do we add switches and patch panels those the first things to think about it second thing to think about is how far away is this from where they want the wires so I often like to start here so I know where all the wires you're going to be landing where all my poles are going to be landing so all the poles come to the ceiling come down here and I look around and make sure there's no obstructions this is a standard drop ceiling building so there's not any instructions let's talk about distance that's the next thing you have to think about once you've established okay this is where it is and it's not always in the ideal place I mean ideally you like it centrally located that's just not how building Joe is laid out ours is the back of the building is that was the easiest best place to put it where it's most out of the way and all the servers can be back here versus you know trying to put it central in to building to make all the run short we're going to talk about how an IDF and MDF kind of complement each other and why we have two of them here so about midway through my office and so the server's back there and to get you an idea when you're looking around and I'm gonna pan the camera around here this is how you figure out the distance the easiest way I mean it's great if you have one of those little wheels to measure it out you can try to set tape measures on the floor you might the wheels for a pretty cheap that's got the little measure so feet so if you really care about exactly how many feet it is the most important part is does it exceed the 300 foot rule of how how far you can have 100 meter 300 foot I've gotten that wrong before at our videos but it's roughly the distance that you can have for standard cat5 cat6 cabling before there's a drop-off and if you're using cat6a you get ten gigabit over the full length and you're using cats six standard it only goes for 37 meters before just drop up that's a whole other video but just a couple considerations there most of the time the majority of offices here in 2018 are still just using gigabit cuz that's the standard equipment you're gonna find on there so pretty much all your jobs are gonna be well we're moved mostly to cat 6 there are some people still can't 5 I've had a few people comment that the price difference isn't there anymore it still is it's still about $40 a box cheaper to get cat 5 not that stupid clad stuff we're talking about actual copper you do not want the aluminum clad stuff don't get that you see those boxes for really cheap avoid that you're avoiding a headache and potential fire hazard if they try to use it over P OE it's just not good cable don't get copper clad aluminum that's the C CA cable crap stuff and like I said now I've got the camera back by the server and facing forward and these are your standard 2 foot by 4 foot ceiling towels they're very popular in a lot of offices and sometimes you'll see square ones sometimes you'll see these your standard drop ceiling and these are for access for ventilation ducting and of course this is where a lot of cabling goes now you can just simply count them that's some of the easiest ways when you go into a building let's look up men do a walk count the ceiling tiles and when you're measuring a cable you got to figure out okay how far off the ceiling we have a particularly kind of a lower ceiling here but you think about okay the up and then back down distance which okay let's say 8 feet in this case eight-foot high ceilings so we got 8 foot up and down it's going to come down close to the floor of the wall so there's 850 cable plus the distance from here to wherever it is and you're not necessarily going to go directly down this hallway you may you may not depending on what obstructions and the walls most the ceilings in a standard construction like this you're gonna have hollow walls and the only go just a little bit above the ceiling tiles because he started out as you know empty when he build the strip-mall they started empty don't like this so there's not generally anything up and over but bring a step stool with you take a peek in the ceiling see if there's anything that's gonna obstruct getting it from the demarcation or server room or IEF MDF in the back to any other locations and then start planning out your cabling from there awesome if they have a schematic of the building they just don't scribble it down the paper so you can start you know figuring out where these things go alright so now we're at the front of my building now what do we have here so we measured it out my building we're about counting ceiling tiles it's going to be about 50 feet from where I'm standing to the MDF or main distribution frame where we started in the very back once you've started there you can okay now I'm gonna have 50 foot runs that means every time I run the cable up to the front here there's gonna be 50 feet of cable used so you gotta kind of keep that in your head and how much cable do I need for the job and start making some mental notes for the further assistance now our place here is links for a computer store you may not wire a lot of computer stores maybe you're wearing your computer store we wanted a high density of cables up in this area now we run into this a lot with trucking companies and that we work with because they have dispatch areas or call centers whenever they have a call center the call center maybe and for example one of them has a call center next to their shipping area because they coordinate their it's at the very corner of their building and this is where the MDF IDF comes in so main distribution frame at the back where we started you may go you know what's easier is to put a IDF intermediate distribution frame over here now what we did in our building is at the front where we have all these checks so right here on the wall there's some there's another one behind this computer over here is another spot also although along the front here there's Jack Jack Jack all over the place this is led to us having this other cabinet put in now they call this cabinet an IDF or intermediary distribution frame so instead of running all these I think there's 33 or 34 drops in here maybe a few more to economy exactly I would if I was actually bidding it um when you put these in you're like okay do you want to run 33 drops all the way to the back and home run them back to the server that's great but that's not always the most practical especially like I mentioned with some of the transportation companies they're in large warehouses that means you have to have one pole going from there to here or sometimes two because you want to bond them together so here's where speed considerations come in we are perfectly fine and actually a majority of companies are for example for a costs that are phone calls do not require a massive amount of bandwidth so one run going from here to there is fine at gigabit but fiber is a consideration if it becomes a greater distance or running a cat6a and getting a switch to support ten gigabit is also an option that way you have a 10 gigabit pipe because these you know 33 connections need to get back at the same time to there and if they squeeze down to the lowest speed that's where the bottleneck would end up being but for the most part when you're talking about a call center with voice honestly it's it's perfectly fine to run gigabit voice quality is look up how many kilobits per call I mean do some math on this in case they have more phones than you think they will but generally speaking voice compresses well voice does not take a lot of bandwidth and giving it a cross to the back over a gigabit line is generally adequate because yeah I think about all those calls generally leave the building at much less than gigabit so something to think about there but so once you have the speed considerations figured out you may want to put one of these in because when we start putting all these different cables in now we have a real short runs to do and puts them all here and it makes the job a whole lot easier and there's a lot less cabling and a ceiling and the job actually is up going a lot faster so whether or not you need one make that consideration but of course if you need one then you got to consider the extra cost of adding a cabinet switches up here and documentation to it so you then have to think about ok everyone's got to connect here what if they need VLANs well then you got to make sure that you Trump the ports that go across and these are just some of the scaling considerations you need to have when you're putting these in so we did do it in our building we do it in a lot of the transportation buildings so as well those things think about that you don't want to run everything back across the building now the wiring itself this is where we talk about being in a strip mall so fire code here in Michigan the way it's worded is when you have two adjacent buildings on a strip mall this is the wall so the windows right there this is the wall by which separates me and the other and of course the other walls same thing versus the middle walls that are gonna be hollow they have to put fire stop in here I imagine this is common throughout a lot of the states I don't know the rules in there but this is one of those things that will get you you're like oh yeah I can put wedding drops here on this wall we put them above because they're for computers but most time you're probably gonna want them on the flooring that's kind of eerie or into the cubicles themselves so when you're doing this the wall is not hollow there they put a bar across there two two by fours across that means there's no way to get directly down from here to here without special drill bits how does that work it's a pain you have to kick long drill bits and drill through that to get the wire through because you can't just wall so this becomes a real pain in the butt now our solution was actually and that's why there's this corner piece here this corner piece is just your standard fiber tubing but we all the cat5 cables run down to that orange tube over here so they come from the ceiling down to get to the back area and a couple of the other wires I do go through the ceiling for things that we can run through the ceiling up here but then the bottom down is because we actually had to go down and then this way into the wall and how do you go that way into all winter studs well we actually cheated and we ran that same conduit tube underneath here and when we did that we then pulled out of the tube and went up to bring the cables up sometimes you got to get tricky on them they're kind of an exception but I wanted to note that that's something you'll run into in strip malls the other thing you're gonna run into is when people want things in the very front of the building this becomes really tricky they're like oh I want something under this desk and you're like hey look a window how am I supposed to get under the window you kind of have to do the same thing you're gonna have to come from the side and go underneath to be able to get that that's not something you're gonna be able to just you know run unless you're lucky enough and sometimes you are because building contractors do this or when we're doing new construction on we'll put a conduit in and you put a pull string in and that way it will after the construction Sun you can use the pull string to pull it down now what if you have one jack there and someone wants one more jack that way the cheat is real easy pull that jack out ties to it pull it back out tie two jacks to it pull them all back down and you can pull them down through the same conduit hopefully you're not doing any of those those are kind of one-off exceptions they're not part of your regular bidding but you have to think about that if you run into those you just add extra half hour labor how much longer you think it's gonna take you to do those and we get to the bidding part we'll talk about those breakdowns there all right so I'm at the front of the building my front lobby just so you know and there's a drop now the good news is there's a window here but the drop is on the other side so it's standard drop ceiling we came through the ceiling went down put a jack on the wall pretty straightforward now because this is like I said this is a mid mid wall because now you're looking back at that front counter area this is a mid wall which means we're gonna be able to get right into the ceiling on it no problem and pull the wire straight down through that's not a big deal at all so shops are pretty straightforward to do there's not that much to it now a couple tricks to help with where the hell do the wires go this is one of those things you kind of explain to the client that hey they should go in the walls here they should not go directly under I can't get it underneath so you gotta explain that because they may not understand and then you just tell them so when it comes to the day the job please have a post-it note exactly where you want them this saves you a lot of trouble it's cool if you want to draw on the walls put an X on it however they want to do it but post-it notes are easy because that way in case they put it too far where you can't put it in you just say hey can I move this post and over this is where it'll go you write down the number of drops to go to that location - in this particular instance even though there's one cable plugged in we did run - and then you just sell them right to the number - and get a post-it note on there and bring some post-it notes with you hand them to the client cuz just in that off chance to turn office without post-it notes that makes a big difference this helps you so much that way the day the cabling job comes in you know where everything is it's marked now cool if they have a schematic and you can actually draw it all in the schematic but the schematic is still gonna miss how high each one needs to go unless you make that note on they're actually not my leg turned off auto lights so when you're doing that those post-it notes help a lot that way you and the client know where everything goes and I even go a step further in autumn so my guys are not on jobs I have them taking photos before they actually start cutting holes if we think the clients really picky we worked with a building contractor who we along with great we just know how picky the air with everything which is fine and we always comply with that okay so you did the walkthrough you know where the wiring is gonna go you got the physical part figured out you find out how much wire you're gonna run you figured okay this customer wants and we're using my building as an example here you know about 50 drops let's say and we know that if we ran them all to the back you know it would cost us 50 times 50 in cable 50 feet links the cable but we're actually running about front so there's a little bit less cabling you can sit and do all the math on that I'm not gonna break that down for a detail but can you get the idea those are different things so you want to know how much you know cable to purchase and make the decision on that oh no I'm using invoice ninja I've talked about this before so I'm gonna walk you through the process actually how we do it in our system and how we send the bid to the client now here's our client m'q test face which you've used before and we're gonna click on data drop and I'll show you what we have here now install data drops we have it here and I just edit it as needed so it's walfish tested plated that means from the wall plate all the way back to wherever the you know if it's the IDF MDF wherever that patch panel is it means all the way back tested and plugged in and working and I've showed tools on here I've got like the client test or user to make sure the cables working fine make sure it's all good and that is how we break down the pricing now I like to keep it as simple as possible but no simpler and what I mean by that is some people like to break down each individual wall plate they like to break down every little piece of it I've seen people break down even with they referred to as like the mud ring and you can look up some of this like for the actual physical install part they break it all down and they line-item all of it and I've had people say oh no this is how we make our money and you know we mark up this mark up that reality is you're making it complicated because now you have to adjust if the customer starts with and we said 51 drops here and an established rate of 180 you and then have to go and adjust all those two quantity of 51 keeping it simple and keeping it all consolidated for the network drop means if the client says you know what you know when you did the bid but I decided can I add one more drop sure and they can also themselves look at it they see it's the unit cost which that we'll get to in a second is real easy to just adjust this number and if they decide to go with less drops or more drops it becomes really simple now the unit cost how much you're going to charge per drop completed is something you kind of have to figure out for the job so think about the overall cable you're gonna use for the job and especially the labor that is where the big part is so even if we did add 50 drops at 50 feet so if we said 50 times 50 feet we're using twenty five hundred feet of cable you know of course there's gonna be some slack and some a little bit of waste here and there so that's three bot 3000 foot boxes of cable well cables not that expensive a matter of fact you're looking at nine thousand dollars for this project at one eighty a drop but your box as a cable are four nice cat 6 cable is going to be roughly 130 dollars a box it's not most of the cost here the big thing you have to think about when you're adjusting a unit cost is the labor because it's sawing the drops the wall plates they're cheap wall plates are a couple dollars at most generally when you're buying a bulk pack of all plates or under a dollar for the wall plate the little rings a little job boxes that attach to them same thing really cheap you're talking about a few dollars going into the drop and cable wise you're only using a few dollars with the cable the rest of it is going to be the time you have to put into you like it talked about the plate at soffit of all the board the runner board across the top you're gonna the drill through that and pull the wires too now this unit cost also varies greatly depending on location we here in Michigan in the Detroit area this is a general going rate we see but sometimes we've seen it go a little bit lower we've seen some people trying to charge way less which doesn't make any sense to me is I don't think the family of the time and we've seen another state they charge way more this is because some states as I understand and when we go out of the country cuz this problem persists where they need special licenses to do it so the cost can be a lot higher because you're have to pay your texts more because the cost of living the area or you have to pay more because you have to keep up with certifications and licensing so don't look at this price and go that's what I'm gonna charge and that's what I'm gonna do to make money if you're in California I can tell you that you're not charging enough if you're in a rural area you may have to just bump for drive time because sometimes you drive more and some people like to roll that into the unit cost that's up to you I like to lion item if there's drive time in there the other thing this does is it's a quantity game you can come up with this for the client so hey you know if you're looking at a project two ways you can say well if you're only gonna go with the ten drop project I'm gonna charge you one ninety but if you go with the fifty drop project I'll charge you one seventy and you can put these things together and adjust it accordingly now everything is a drop when it comes to the wall so if there's a 4-game plate that's not one drop that's four drops and make sure when you're doing the bid you're telling that to the client because sometimes there's confusion they say i want three workstations and they told you each workstation needs a phone line and a data line no problem because they don't want to do the pass you through the phone no problem we can do that but that means each station needs two drops to make sure you tell it at the point when you're bidding it because there's been confusion where you send the bit over tour like you've sent it for double the quantity of what we wanted we're like no we did what you wanted so always make sure that you're clear that each one's a drop and that's how you bill it now granted this is where you can also offer a little discount because once you've drilled the hole once and you're pulling four cables down to the same wall fish well you can if there's a bunch of them like that you play the laws of averages here and do is count the rate it's up to you but this becomes complicated it's just generally not how we do it we've not had a problem we've done some of these larger 300 400 drop jobs and done it exactly like this where we just put it in without doing like okay when it's a four gang plate it's this rate but it's a one gang plate it's this rate that makes it complicated for the client so generally speaking come up with a unit cost for this particular job it also let them know because we've had times when we installed a lot of drops for a client and then they changed her mind and only wanted to one run drop and they want the one drop price no by the time we come out they're running one drop for this lower rate I'm gonna have to add some time to come out there so those are some of the factors that go into there and you check around you can find out what people are charging and kind of see what your market is for that and don't just go undercutting the other people there's probably a reason they have that price based on their there's a lot of things you need to have I carry liability insurance obviously the cost of client acquisition has to be factored in here you know how much we spend on marketing how much time we spend going to events to even get some of these jobs and networking events and everything else you have to think about all that has to go in here it's not just what you pay the technician it's everything that leads up to this is how you set any of your rates for things you charge so but keeping it this simple makes it real easy and this is all we put on the line items here and now you can see we've got an eight thousand five hundred dollar job out of fifty drops at 170 a drop next piece is we talked about this right here so we have this nine new rack and we showed the rack up there so this has to be put in here where do you find these well they're pretty cheap on Amazon we've actually had an itok did a video about this recently we talked about how much better of a deal frequently we find on Amazon with things then we find with some of the other places so here's a knife point 9uj locks cabinet 19 inch deep and there we go and we don't always depends on picky decline is an eight point tool excit wall mount cabinet rack or you can just call it IT won't call nut rack 19 enclosure keep it simple climb those as it is it's the wall mount enclosure that you quoted to put on there so put the description in there now here's the next question how much do we mark it up general rule I have is maybe 20 percent markup on this so I had a few dollars to this then you have to add the time is gonna take you to assemble a mounted this doesn't ship assembled think about that so I'm gonna put it together we know these things really well so we know how to put them together it doesn't take us much time so you can't base it on the first time you put it together kind of get an average and idea my staff can put one of these together and remember a be 15 mounted on the wall we actually prefer to do all the assembly parts in the office and bring him delivered unless unless something's prohibiting us from doing that that we if there's any little problems we found them all here if there was a screw missing hasn't happened but just in case it's less embarrassing to find a screw missing at a client compared to just oh look we just needed to have one more screw so you get this and then you got a mounts on the wall make sure you mount to properly if your wiring cabling please know how to do that you know find the studs bolted in error so you haven't had an hour so we you know we started at a unit cost of 149 and let's say we add like you know 35 40 dollars now now I don't recommend marking things up too much because this is where clients get often angry I've seen people do discounted labor when they break everything down and then quadruple all the parts guess what someone's going to do and they're gonna copy that they're gonna paste it and you're gonna hey look Tom reviewed one of these by the way right here they found the first result is Amazon they're gonna know how much you paid for it do clients do that yeah that happens people get curious about that so I never try to put much markup on the parts that's not where I try to make my money we've always tried to be very forthcoming we make it on labor I'll tell them to if they asked me you know we're all I'm here to business make money so we for the trouble avoiding it will say well mark this up - I don't know 169 so I had 20 bucks to it add another hour of labor and whatever your labor heat is so it starts at 149 and we'll put 25 for an example and then we'll add an hour of labor which we charge 128 hours so 294 becomes the installed price and then what we're doing here and this is just something invoice ninja does we put the three pounds assemble assemble mount cabinet all right typos sorry and when the pound signs do when they show you down here as this building the quote see how it just puts a little gray under here so when you're detailing it out we have that information in there so great there's parts what's the other parts we need now I could break these down and different we generally just list them as the particles we put the description in here actually I might have the 48 yeah we have the gigabit switches in here and stuff like that if there's any switches Network 48 port stretch this is all depends on how you set up your sis I'm just gonna listen to parts because I don't have an item for this but 48 port patch panel same thing go to Amazon how much is that patch panel usually network distribution cat6 48 there 50 bucks put a few dollar markup on there's not really any extra uh net so you know we'll put this at 65 bucks couple dollar markup quantity one quantity one anyway we go now we have the total here for eight thousand sixty nine you've made it very simple for the client the only thing that you may have to want to client about is we do some we're gonna go in this front IDF some are going in the back so 50 does exceed 48 but some are going to the back you could always relist your data drops and put data drops to the back IDF data drops to the front that's not a big deal split that so we know where they're going and you can also have to let the client know that and this happened recently with our clients we told them look you know they wanted 42 drops so forty port patch panel no problem we get there they decided that they wanted ten more well you know we suggested that they get a bigger patch panel and my guys keep one in a truck they kept a 24 in a truck so we had to add another patch panel on their parts list so they're cheap keep a few we keep a handful of these in stock at any given time so there's something you should have but it's also something you have to adjust if the clients say hey if you exceed this you will need a bigger patch panel but generally the clients you're just doing this they're just going here and either changing it to a couple dollars less a couple dollars more by adjusting the quantity and that makes it really easy like I said this keeps the simplicity of how you do the bidding with the clients because there's always changes in judgments now we're gonna add another one here we're gonna bring this one up because I just like when it looks when it's up and I put this in a second time because this is another thing we do walfish tested plated install network drops for lap and this is with your wireless access point we still have a rate for those in the same thing and we're just gonna change it to Wired wired tested mounted and this is for putting in wops so we'll put these in so your wireless access points and same thing you come up with the rate for each lap this makes it easy for the client now this is where a lot of times we make it even simpler for them and let's talk about like a unify AC so for well put in a AC - L R so we put that in there so now what we're going to do is there's the 180 we need to add and how much is the a CLR look them up real quick so what are they going for now with the unify stuff like right here's one of the long-range ones pretty straightforward I usually go by the MSRP price which i think is 119 so let's do Mart enough Marco to me is MSRP and once again if you're buying these in quantity you can get them a little cheaper but if the customer looks this is what it is so there's our little unified long range so which one are we using well let's go ahead and there we go paste that in so that's 119 plus 180 so that's 300 now the client if they're wavering back and forth about installing these how many do they want well they may say you know three is good but later before you get there or whatever maybe they changed your mind about the quote they only want to or they want four now you've got an easy way for the client who you give them the prices to put this in it's really easy for them to go hey I can change it now they don't have to change two numbers on an invoice they can calculate this themselves and it's really easy to do so here's the 48 port patch panel there's the for wireless access points and away we go now if you sold a POS which tender center piece you'll have to calculate in here as making sure there's enough ports enough wattage and a POA to run this but you kind of get the idea of keep it very simple so you can communicate with a client cuz reality is we are technicians love all the doodads and details that go into this we are fascinated by all the technology or at least a lot of us are I know I am and that's great they are looking at this as a tool so their company can operate like anything else they have a lot of other things and I come back to some of the transportation clients they have a lot of stuff to calculate I'm sure the guy selling them a large truck loves to talk about how many you know horsepower and all kinds of cool weaves being things that go on inside the engine with it but they're going I just need something to haul Freight because I am paid to haul Freight well this thing hauled afraid I want will this bring the data I want so my customers can answer the phone so when we call my my staff can do their job so can we have wireless all throughout our building in you know in the areas that you quoted and if I need more Wireless how much does that cost well cool I need one more now that you know and you right now we're not talking tech you're talking business to them you've created us to a simple template that your customers can easily work with you on and make adjustments to the pricing to get the job done and you've now eliminated some of that barrier if you make this convoluted and really long they start looking for line items and they're like I just get it done if you make it very easy to go okay you know what we wanted a couple more drops this is just kind of this ethos that we try to keep with our clients and try to really be this way with them now a couple quick notes about purchasing two parts and a few you've asked about the spot we purchase things from Amazon we do work with other vendors besides Amazon of course kind of and I as needed and who's there but do not do this this has come up a couple times with this cabling someone says cat6 cabling is cheaper than cat5 and why do you even do cat5 some clients when they're really on a budget will do cat 5 because gigabit is more than enough just to do the phones and they're fine with that cat 6 if you see it for really cheap like 56 bucks a box you're probably looking at CCA cable copper clad aluminum please run away from this stuff stay away from it you can do your own searching and find out reasons why but in short you're talking about copper clad aluminum when you do this you want standard cat 6 full copper or depending on how the code works for you you need plenum or riser now this does have to factor into your billing most cities here in Michigan and the state itself do not have any special rules regarding plenum plenum is a fire-rated stuff and we're talking about going into the ceilings like a drop ceiling that airspace is the plenum we are air may circulate that may come in contact with people so if there's a fire it was circulate there when it's all said and done this type of job because we label everything as we go we don't actually add too many extra notes but one thing we might add for notes is when we do like one two drops is like we just had a job where we installed two access points well we just labeled the ports to put them on because we hand it off as we were contracted by another IT company so well sometimes put in there and honor in here or even in a notes like a installed port 22 and 23 for a wireless access point so they know where to finish plug them in but that's it and then we email the quote to him and it's ready to go now the last thing I will talk about will need a deposit of zero dollars to get started may not be your process it depends on the client oh generally speaking we look at a 50% deposit so we got ninety eight hundred dollars here so maybe you want a partial deposit of 4900 that's kind of enough to you thing it's how do you want to work with the companies generally we like to get any new client we're gonna ask for 50% down to get things started we're not sure how the engagement scandal with them we sometimes that's for more when we're dealing with some of these out-of-state companies because they can be a little bit more of a pain we've learned so we ask for a larger deposit sixty or seventy percent down because we're having someone out of state contract us to wire their local building what's really hard to chase them for money sometimes so it's a risk you have to take in business but getting at least a larger deposit helps mitigate some of that risk on there but then we send it off to them and I'm going to show you real quick here so email the quote and now it says forty nine hundred this is just a feature that invoice ninja has to make this easy hitting marks send is kind of the same as emailing it and this is kind of a cool thing that I like is this frequently coming week we do this and it's email send the quote they see it then they go you know I want to change they call me your emails back and you know can you add this and we just had this happened the other day they wanted a few more added so he will bring this back up to a fifty two save quote and this is something really handled really well in our system so now we just email the same quote again by changing that and it updates and revises the system forum it also is kind of cool because it does keep a quote history in here so we can look at each quote and who edit it because sometimes I'm the one that may have created the quote or maybe one of my other staff created the quote they contact me and then we go back and forth so this is just a couple of things to think about and how we do the quotes and how we send them out and this is the process this isn't like me making something up and telling you this is kind of like how we do it this is what a job looks like for us except for it's usually not to be vas in but head it's so real customers every day we do a lot of cabling a lot of wiring and this process and people can tell me I'm wrong I've been doing it for years we're profitable and you know it this is it's not something you need to overthink that much do come up with your pricing you're gonna have to adjust it if you go if my pricing is a basis you may make a lot of money you may make very little because the cost of living and everything is so much more expensive where you are like California Seattle New York some of those places where you just have a lot of other expenses so you kind of gotta do you look at a big picture so there's some bigger thought you have to have but this is running a quote this is it once it's done it gets approved and money goes in the bank and that quick you go through a small office even as small as ours granted 50 jobs is kind of a lot for this big of a building but when you're building out like a dispatch center a call center areas there's a lot of jobs to go in I mean these jobs get up there $20,000 easily for a small business and you know catching on when they're moving in now I know a lot of people say how do you get the clients I've talked about this before sale sales more sales meetings chamber everything there's some more information at channel more videos coming on some of the sales stuff but that is a tough part of it there's not a magical place you could just have business land on you maybe one day I'll invent it but I I haven't found it and if someone knows one let me know thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the thumbs up leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you liked and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment if you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon outlets you tube know that you're interested in notifications hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube anyways if you want to contract us for consulting services you go ahead and hit orange systems comm and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you we work with a lot of small businesses IT companies even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network also if you want to help the channel other ways we have a patreon we have affiliate links you'll find them in a 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 72,632

Keywords: how to bid structured cabling, computer network, structured wiring, structured cabling system, structured cabling, how to build office network, structured cabling tutorial, structured cabling installation, computer network architect

Id: ARElY4BlmHY

Length: 37min 34sec (2254 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 08 2018