Selling time

Many times on forums regarding land surveying services, I hear surveyors complain about not being respected as a professional in the same way as doctors, lawyers, etc. Unfortunately, we've put ourselves in that position because we're not pricing our services based on the value of our service but rather on the amount of time it takes us to complete a project.

Let's say that you've got an illness that requires a medical specialist to treat. The other option is death. The value of that service? As they say in the commercials - priceless! Relating that to the surveying business, if a survey is needed to close a real estate transaction or the deal falls through, the value of that service should be priceless as well, right? Nope, now that we've got GPS, robotic total stations, the best software and fastest hardware money can buy, we can complete a project faster and base our fees on that reduced time.

Let's say that my tw0-man conventional crew rate for last year was $100/hour (for the sake of me being able to do the math easily) and that my rate as a professional land surveyor was also $100/hour. Let's also say that it takes that crew eight hours to complete a project and twelve hours for the analysis and drafting. That's a bill of $2,000 to my client. This year, however, I'm going to keep up with inflation and raise my crew rate and my rate to $105/hour. To keep up with "big boy" surveying firms, I decide I need to buy GPS equipment for $20,000, subscribe to a VRS system for $5,000 per year and upgrade my CAD package for $8,000. With all of this technology, we can now complete a job in the field in half the time and my analysis and drafting can be done in 2/3 of the time. So for my $33,000 investment, I'm now billing $1,260 to my client for the same project that I billed him $2,000 last year.

Let's go back to the doctors and lawyers. There have certainly been advances in technology and surgical procedures to reduce the amount of time necessary for a doctor to complete a procedure. Attorneys have most certainly reduced the amount of time necessary to research cases by use of the internet instead of poring over books in the law library. When was the last time you remember a doctor or attorney lowering their fees?

We need to stop selling our services based on time but rather on the value of our service to the client.