What a dock install actually costs: minutes per piece
The fuel receipts and the payroll you have. The number that connects them to the work is minutes per piece — and if your crews ran clocks this season, it’s already sitting in your records, waiting for a December afternoon.
· 6 min read
What did this season actually cost you? Not the fuel receipts and the payroll — those you have. The number you probably don’t have is the one that connects them to the work: how many minutes it takes your crew to install one dock section, one lift, one canopy, at your properties, on your lakes.
If your crews ran a clock at each stop this year, that number is already sitting in your records, and December is the month to go get it. It’s the difference between “we were busy” and “a cantilever dock costs us 74 minutes,” and every pricing decision you make this winter is either built on it or guessed.
Why minutes per piece, and not properties per day
Properties aren’t comparable. Pieces are. A four-section roll-in on a sand beach and an eight-section run with a 5,000-pound lift on a rock shelf can both be “one property,” and averaging them tells you nothing. Once you know what a section costs in minutes and what a lift costs in minutes, every property prices itself.
“Six properties a day” feels like a real measure because it’s the one you can see from the truck. But days aren’t comparable to each other either — a wind day, a travel-heavy day and a day parked on one big estate all count as one day. The minutes on each piece are the only unit that survives the averaging.
Pull the number while the season is still warm
In LakeOps this is the productivity report: minutes per item, split by the kind of item, by crew and by lake, straight from the clocks the crew ran on the water. One season of it is enough. You’re not after three decimal places — you’re after which work is twice as slow as you thought, and that shape jumps off the page.
Do it now rather than in March for a simple reason: the season is still in the room. When the report says one lake ran a third slower than the other, somebody on the crew still remembers that the landing was twenty minutes from the work, or that half those lifts sat in muck. In March that’s just a number with no witness.
Turn minutes into dollars: one worked example
Say your fork barge runs a three-person crew, and between wages, payroll burden, fuel, insurance and the maintenance that’s never in anyone’s head, an hour of that boat working costs you $210. Say the report shows a cantilever dock averaging 74 minutes and your standard lift averaging 45.
- That dock costs you about $259 to install before any profit.
- That lift costs you about $158.
- A property with both costs roughly $417 of crew time — before travel between stops, which your own day totals will put a number on.
Run your own numbers through the same arithmetic; the ones above are only there to show the shape. Building the honest hourly cost — including the mistake nearly everybody makes with annual overhead — is its own subject, and it’s covered in how much to charge for dock and lift work.
What the number changes
The first thing a season of real minutes does is contradict you somewhere. Almost every shop that measures finds at least one service priced on a memory of how long it used to take — the canopy that’s billed like a twenty-minute job and takes fifty, or the removal priced like an install when the fall version runs long in cold water and short daylight.
The second thing it does is separate your lakes. If one lake costs you a third more per piece — long runs from the landing, hard access, whatever the reason — that’s not a curiosity, that’s a pricing decision waiting for January.
The third thing is quieter: it tells you what a slow day meant. A crew that looked slow on paper may have been parked at the two hardest properties on the lake. Minutes per piece is fairer to your people than jobs per day ever was.
If you didn’t run the clock this year
Then this December the honest answer to “what were my real costs” is: you don’t know yet, and the winter’s pricing gets built from last year’s numbers plus your best correction. That’s survivable — it’s what the whole trade does.
But make next December different. The habit costs the crew two taps per stop: start the clock at the property, stop it when you push off. Two weeks of a normal spring mix is enough to see the shape; a full season is enough to rebuild the price list on. There’s no timesheet, nobody fills anything in on Friday, and the minutes are there whether the crew had signal or not.