ForConstructionPros.com

Gerry Kesselring and Gabe Vitale will be the first to tell you that those three percentages won't mean the same for every contractor, but they'll also be the first to tell you how important finding those numbers has been to each of their sweeping companies.

That's because those three figures represent job costing benchmarks that have helped Kesselring's company, Contract Sweepers & Equipment, and Vitale's company, C&L Sweeper Service, improve their bidding, efficiency, and bottom line over the last few years.

By now most contractors have run across the term "job costing," whether they implement it formally in their business or not. And in actuality most contractors perform at least the most basic type of job costing at the end of the year when they total up their expenses and sales and try to figure out if they made any money. But much more than a year-end wrap-up, job costing can be the most effective management tool a contractor can apply to his business. And it's a tool that, when used regularly, can help a business adapt to changing economic conditions almost as they occur - instead of lagging a year behind.

"If you don't have good measurements I don't know how you're successful," Kesselring says.

Their efforts at comparing and contrasting job costing information has its roots in the North American Power Sweeping Association (NAPSA), where both are long-time members, and in a NAPSA benchmarking survey the association conducted several years ago. The work they've done together has helped both companies establish benchmarks for each company to aim for. "To a point we were able to come up with benchmark figures, yes," Vitale says.

He and Kesselring say that their efforts have enabled them to determine that fuel costs should be roughly 9.3% of revenues, that direct labor (wages only) should be 25% of revenues for parking lot sweeping, and that direct labor for broom sweeping should be roughly 25.5%. Neither of the labor figures includes benefits, insurance etc. (They caution that these job costing figures are benchmarks for the two operations and might or might not be applicable to other contract sweeping operations.)