Since it's Festivus season, I thought I'd share this with the group. Our firm is scaled and resourced as a consulting engineering business model and not a "free-lance" drafting/design service. As such, we have direct and overhead costs that push our fees to the limits of what contractors typically budget for design, so the majority of our work is for architects and developers. But there's a market for what we're doing and I know that our fees are fair for the service we provide. Still, we have tried to sharpen the pencil the past couple years because we've partnered with contractors on a few design/build projects and I know that there's huge opportunity for us as 3rd party designers working under the FP sub. So I was intrigued by a proposal request that we got last week for a mixed use podium project in Los Angeles where the contractor reached out and dangled this and another project, the other one being a 20-story high-rise.
To set the table, the building is 6-stories over two basement levels and about 165,000 GSF. It will utilize steel pipe throughout as it's poured in place concrete with cloud ceilings and no ceilings in the dwelling units. Three standpipe risers, one of which is partial height so multiple SP and sprinkler calc's. It will also require booster pump for which no designated room or space is shown on the plans and one side of the building requires water curtains at balcony openings that I assume are too close to the adjacent building or property line, so another calc there plus the additional drafting and coordination. And no two floors are typical to one another. Although it's still not rocket science, there's some thinking involved and for those not familiar with SoCal, wages in LA are probably in the top 5 nationwide and City of LA is a wicked AHJ. So I'm guessing that the FP contract is probably worth between $650-$700K. Oh, and of course they need this absolutely, positively ASAP. We looked at every task, optimized the hours for repetitions in the floor plans where we could, and crunched the numbers. Our proposed fee was 18¢/SF and I thought that was fair. The client came back and said that he's got another proposal for $5,000. Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now some of you may think I'm the one with the wrong perspective but here's the thing: our industry continues to basically give away its collective expertise and drag the value of its own work down. No right-minded person would take this project at that fee in this market and this contractor is going to get their ass handed to them in both plan review and inspection, guaranteed. When I mentioned the water curtains, the guy even said that there weren't any that he saw and he didn't include any "extras". He doesn't have a flow test yet, doesn't have the CAD backgrounds ready to send and isn't even familiar with the complete set of work. On top of that, he's inclined to accept the $5K proposal but wondered if I could cut my fee in half because he, "...would rather deal with a firm like (ours)..." than a moonlighter. He actually seems like a pretty nice guy, albeit one who's now stuck in a mud bog up to his waist and wearing sunglasses at night. My primary hope for 2022 is that our country stops fighting with itself. My second one is that Covid somehow gets out of the way. But my third hope is that our industry wakes up to the fact that what we do takes a certain amount of time and energy to learn what we know and that underselling (or in some cases giving away) our intellectual property is foolish and simply perpetuates the downward pressure on our market that's applied by developers, contractors and architects who know that if they kick far enough down the alley, they'll find someone who's willing to go CHEAP on fire protection for most projects. Contractors who take on design/build projects have all the liability and risk, and navigating the plan review and inspection processes is harder than ever and will only get more rigorous. Every year we hear the same complaints: "We can't find enough designers"; "The quality of design work is bad industry wide"; "We're turning town work because we can't get it designed." If you're putting 10-15¢ per SF on the sheet for design, that's your prerogative, but you don't get to complain about the lack or quality of resources if you do. Fire protection design is a professional service, so paying a fair wage and providing benefits and furnishing the hardware/software resources to design technicians is essential to raising the standard of care and that all costs money. If our industry isn't willing to pay itself fairly for professional caliber design, then why should the owners of the built environment? Happy New Year to y'all and thanks to AFSA for continuing to foster this terrific venue for the exchange of ideas. Steve _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/listinfo.cgi/sprinklerforum-firesprinkler.org
