Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations IamaSherpa on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Advice Please 2
- Thread starter Wavesg
- Start date
-
2
- #2
You're a little slim on details to give any kind of meaningful answer.
For instance, are you providing the equipment? Pulling the cable?
Are you programming the phones? Is it an Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, other?
Will you be placing the instruments, or simply programming for them?
Is this any type of call center (or other special trunking requirements)?
Do you have an idea how many hours you expect this job to take? Have you ever bid this kind of job before?
What area of the country are you in? Do you know the going rate in your area for installers? Telecom engineers?
pansophic
For instance, are you providing the equipment? Pulling the cable?
Are you programming the phones? Is it an Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, other?
Will you be placing the instruments, or simply programming for them?
Is this any type of call center (or other special trunking requirements)?
Do you have an idea how many hours you expect this job to take? Have you ever bid this kind of job before?
What area of the country are you in? Do you know the going rate in your area for installers? Telecom engineers?
pansophic
- Thread starter
- #3
This is all callmanager 4.1.3 servers one publisher and subcriber. 2 unity boxes one for failove. 2 MGCP gateways 2800 router with FXO cards. I'm configuring the phones, route pattern, voicemail, gateways..ect. The customer will be providing the hardware. All I'm doing is configuring the site. No special trunks are require or integration with a PBX. I calculate about 40 hours of work. This is the first time I bid for a job like this. I'm not sure what the going rate is for this type of installation. I'm in the US NYC.
Stay cool; it’s not over yet!
Stay cool; it’s not over yet!
First, I suspect that you can easily get $75 per hour based on my 3rd party knowledge of the pay scales in NYC.
2nd, if this is your first time bidding this type of job (doing job estimation), I would take your estimate and double it.
So, 80 hours at $75/hour should give you $6,000.
Now it is best to never give nice round figures when you are quoting services, because people assume then that it is a negotiable number. If you have a number that goes down to the pennies, like $6,072.56, then it appears that you have put much more thought into how you arrived at your number. Be that truth or not.
I have developed formulas for calculating jobs that I do frequently, and for jobs that I do infrequently, I try to way over estimate, so that I am not stuck holding the bag. Doesn't always work, but does most of the time.
It is just hard to get started doing it, but you will be well advised to start keeping track of how long it takes to do things if you are hoping to do this in the future. Also, you need to compensate yourself for the amount of time that you spend doing things like estimating this job. As a general rule of thumb, you can only get about 6 hours of real work out of an 8 hour day. Other time is consumed communicating with the customer, answering questions, troubleshooting unexpected problems, etc.
Good luck!
pansophic
2nd, if this is your first time bidding this type of job (doing job estimation), I would take your estimate and double it.
So, 80 hours at $75/hour should give you $6,000.
Now it is best to never give nice round figures when you are quoting services, because people assume then that it is a negotiable number. If you have a number that goes down to the pennies, like $6,072.56, then it appears that you have put much more thought into how you arrived at your number. Be that truth or not.
I have developed formulas for calculating jobs that I do frequently, and for jobs that I do infrequently, I try to way over estimate, so that I am not stuck holding the bag. Doesn't always work, but does most of the time.
It is just hard to get started doing it, but you will be well advised to start keeping track of how long it takes to do things if you are hoping to do this in the future. Also, you need to compensate yourself for the amount of time that you spend doing things like estimating this job. As a general rule of thumb, you can only get about 6 hours of real work out of an 8 hour day. Other time is consumed communicating with the customer, answering questions, troubleshooting unexpected problems, etc.
Good luck!
pansophic
- Thread starter
- #5
- Status