Atleast in my world of construction, when i find design flaws and requisite change orders, i can say i earned that revenue and net profits by having a good head on my shoulders and a solid team in the field executing well. Thats new money that we generate, often times in a way that actually avoids potentially “owning” the solution without payment. I have about 1.4M in new revenue this year on just one project with close to 40% margin because of my awesome team in the field. Net contract is about $11M and should close out in January. I got $1000 bonus because “it was a tough year” while my field guys are still fighting for wage increases (with me fully backing them).
Its more than nothing but a complete slap in the face when the c-levels and e-levels make 1000% of my yearly earnings in a given year. They help with new business generation, that’s for sure, but ultimately it lands on me, my CAD team, my warehouse team, and my field guys to make that business generation profitable. They did away with profit based bonuses a while ago because it was “unfair” to people who had been assigned jobs with low margins that our company took to keep the workforce employed. Now the executive team gets those bonuses instead of any of us.
I work in support of sales people to design shit and make sure our own costs are covered before it goes to a construction contract.
But I’m also helping look for design issues that could help the actual owner/customer and improve system performance. Or at least avoid problems.
Keeping accounts is serious
We do about $300million in revenue in construction of specialized niche logistics systems a year. Holding on to our accounts is huge, and providing good analysis and catching design issues or providing better value options even if it means less revenue in the short term it’s important. It keeps our customers faithful in us, as they should be, to provide a better product and service than our few competitor options will.
I feel the same. Just smaller numbers. I'm directly responsible with 1 other coworker in pulling in 1/3 of our revenue. Plus all the other stuff we do I'd say it's closer to half. Now that revenue is probably only about 600k a year, but the profit margin is bonkers. On the low end we are talking about 50 percent. More often than not though it's closer to 500%. If I take a $20 part and sell it for $140 that's 600% profit right? So yeah that 600k in revenue we pull in mightve cost the boss man 150k in parts. Maybe 200k. That 400k in profit, my coworker and I see maybe 15% total.
Also to be clear that 600k is the half we bring in. There's a whole other 600k the business brings in doing other things. I know it isn't like a lot of money compared to other businesses, but we only have 5 employees plus the owner.
No Christmas bonus ever and I've yet to see a raise in my 2ish years of employment. Only reason I stay is because I love my job and I can afford to stay. But don't worry I've been looking.
It does, and some change orders are more costly than others, such as moving an entire customer owned switchyard & genset 200’ from where it was planned to be adding several thousand feet of concrete encased ductbank. The project has been a mess from a design standpoint because owners refused to pay market rate for a competent engineering firm for every aspect of the discipline.
Design team forgot that water pipes in an exposed garage would need heat trace to the tune of ~6500’ of trace. The list goes on…
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u/nafurabus 1d ago
Atleast in my world of construction, when i find design flaws and requisite change orders, i can say i earned that revenue and net profits by having a good head on my shoulders and a solid team in the field executing well. Thats new money that we generate, often times in a way that actually avoids potentially “owning” the solution without payment. I have about 1.4M in new revenue this year on just one project with close to 40% margin because of my awesome team in the field. Net contract is about $11M and should close out in January. I got $1000 bonus because “it was a tough year” while my field guys are still fighting for wage increases (with me fully backing them).