Defensive Estimating: Protecting Your Profits

Master builder and business expert Bill Asdal shows builders and remodelers how to estimate based on fiscal goals and protecting the company's bottom line. His unique approach to estimating gives readers user-friendly systems to improve the process and provides hundreds of ideas and simple suggestions. Asdal takes the magic and science of estimating and turns it into an art.

This book shows builders and remodelers how to:

• Examine their business processes and modify them to meet financial goals
• Create profits unendangered by carelessness or short vision
• Defend each estimate line so that the system of planned profit is consistent and bankable

Table of Contents:

1. Understanding the Critical Number in an Estimate-Profit
2. Establish the Company Profit Number Based on Your Income Needs
3. Competencies for Building and Remodeling Success-Estimating
4. Spreadsheet Estimating
5. Seven Ways to Get the Numbers
6. Using Retail Pricing at Every Line
7. Minimizing the Workload
8. Materials Costs and Tracking
9. Estimating and Tracking Production
10. Financial Analysis: Estimating the Cash Flow
11. Defending the Profit Line in Your Building Estimate
12. Defending the Profit Line in Your Remodeling Estimate

"A must-read for anyone involved with managing a construction business. Bill Asdal promotes not only the understanding of costs, but the foresight to predict construction expenses while considering the full realm of cost as a function of profit."

- Dennis Dixon, Dixon Ventures, Inc., Flagstaff, Arizona