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How does cove.tool help reduce costs?
How does cove.tool help reduce costs?

Financial Gain

Patrick Chopson avatar
Written by Patrick Chopson
Updated over a week ago

Running a successful and profitable practice is dependent on knowing the unit economics of how work is converted in dollars. Here is some simple math to consider when implementing a new technology into your practice. To see a full presentation, check out this lecture:

It takes about 2 to 4 hours to be trained to be able to run cove.tool on a project which is extremely fast.

  1. Save 15-30 Hours per project of performance modeling time per analysis run. You need to do at least 7 to 8 sets of analysis for a project to hit an aggressive energy and daylight target mandated by modern codes. Per project you are saving 105 to 240 hours per project in pure analysis and documentation time. Billed at $150/hr (typical performance consultant) this equals up to $36,000 in saving per project! This is just for energy simulation. Add any other types of analysis and the savings stack up fast.

  2. Save on average 80 to 120 hours of team time due to BIM redesign and redrafting in later stage of design. Teams can stop post-rationalizing their work and using data to drive decision making as they go. A team of three junior designers ($75/hr) and a licensed architect ($150/hr) can save up to $45,000 per design revision avoided.

  3. Most teams with 50% or below reporting see an increase AIA 2030 Reporting number by 45% within 1 year of adoption leading to increased project wins as clients, the AIA, and the public increasingly demand responsible design from architects.

  4. Allow teams to win more projects by utilizing cove.tool during pursuit stages by showing owners project cost reductions of 1% to 3% on every project. Many buildings can be optimized to meet net-zero for a marginal cost increase with the cost vs energy optimization.

  5. Let us say we have a firm of 10 people with 7 unlicensed and 3 licensed. Assuming a 2.4 multiplier on wages, we need to be charging $75/hr for unlicensed and $150/hr for licensed. From this, we can quickly back out a hourly firm burn rate of $825/hr. If there are 30 projects and we avoid 1 major design revision per project (costing 3 weeks of project time), the total operational savings could equal $99,000 a year from using cove.tool. Given 40 hours in the week for 52 weeks in the year the firm gross revenue for our example company would be $1.716 million a year if all hours are billable. Let's assume 90% utilization so the gross revenue would be $1,544,440. Given wages of $65k/year per junior staff and $130k/year for licensed architects the cost of wages would be $845,000/year. Let's assume 10% operations and overhead and insurance plus 30% for taxes. The total cost of doing business is $1,183,000. Currently, the firm owner should be making $361,440 in net profit. If you used cove.tool and avoided a design revision on every project you would be 27% more profitable. Not to mention if you could win a few more projects per year.

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