Eye Balling Verses Measuring Estimates???

Paul Burns

Lornmastro,

Most of the best posts have been deleted by other sites when they went through overhauls of their sites. I think the best stuff was 5 or more years ago when I was younger and Richard Kaller took the opposing side. Richard was sooo good that he had me double checking myself often, even though I was living it every day! I really wish Richard was still around and am a bit surprised at the amount of respect that he has gotten since his passing. i think it may be because a lot of people that learned through his posts, have simply taken the information and run, and might not even find out about his passing for months or years. That is one of the strange things about this cyber life.

I think the best lesson that I ever got from Richard, and dis-agreed about a lot of these with him too, was the Change Order. Before RK, we hardly used them at all. After being schooled by RK, we learned that change orders were just about our last and one of our biggest "profit leaks" to plug, and also added income and repect and responsibility to our painters, which works like a charm to this day. I bet that we ate 100K worth of what whould have been change orders, before learning how and why to use them from RK.

As much as I dis-agreed with Richard, and argued for weeks with him sometimes, I think we both had a certain respect for each other. However, I know that RK was MUCH more of a businessman than I will ever be, and I miss and think if him EVERY day!

I guess missing RK is kind of why I am on this rant, but i really think that to really understand a subject, you really need to hear both sides and then make your decision. The discussions that RK and I had over the years were from the deepest depths of my being. Not being nearly the wordsmith that RK was, it was much harder for me to get my point across, however I eventually did, most of the time anyway. Sadly, a LOT of those were erased from the PWC board where I first encountered RK's posts where everyone was laughing at him. My first response toRichard's posts was "You all had better stop and listen to this guy, he OBVIOUSLY knows his sh**! It's all history from there.

I've never met anyone quite like RK. He could make me soo mad that I wanted to reach in the screen and rip his face-off. But at the same time I knew that I had too much respect for him to ever do something like that. I'm happy that our latest conversations were more mutually kind to each other than they had been at times in the past.

If you want to read a lot of good stuff, do a search for "Kaller" on some of these boards. I don't think he ever posted ANYTHING boring. It is just sad that a lot of the good stuff is gone forever. But that's life, I guess.

Even when I totally disagreed with him, he still made me think. And like I said earlier, sometime he even made me doubt myself, which would make me prove it one way or the other, and sometimes, again! LOL To me, THAT is learning. Take the hypothesis/system and then prove it or dis-prove it. Until then, it is just a hypothesis!

Pawl

George Z

Paul, you are right it is like piecework. There is an amount of money
to be had(painters only), based on how many hours it should take.
If it takes less hours it is still the same amount.
If it takes more, the painters still get their hourly. Mostly an estimating
problem when that happens. It's a simple spreadsheet Mark H sent me
and we changed a bit. We have only been using it for couple of months
now and it seems to be working.
As far as being successful or profitable, we are getting there.
I like simple. The simpler the better.

On RK, when I was lurking on those boards years ago, I used to print
some of the posts, a lot of Richards. I am glad I did. You are right,
"eating it" was something he was always against.
We give nothing for free now. Change orders are over 15% of our
sales now. When there is additional work, there is no one else bidding.

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