After everybody is paid and expenses accounted for, how much margin do you consider standard for business profit when bidding standard projects without the friend of friends deals, etc.?

35:22Next one comes in from Zach Jeffers in Spokane, Washington, Pacific Northwest there. Business question. After everybody is paid and expenses accounted for, how much margin do you consider standard for business profit when bidding standard projects without the friend of friends deals, etc.? Craig? Obviously, a lot depends on, I haven't said that very often these days. It depends. It depends on the type of service work you're doing.

35:56If it's in the AV production versus IT, our company, we're more in the 50% margin, but other industries or segments, it's closer to 20 or 30. Also depends if you have variables in it or if you're fixed bidding and all of that. There's a lot of people that lowball things just so they can do change requests and eat back into their original desired margin.

36:27But the one thing I would recommend is, so on Office Hours, we've done this sort of thing quite a few times. And so you can go, if I go, my bad. If you go to YouTube and look up on the Office Hours channel, just type in project management. You'll see at the February 26, 2024, we did a great show just on building bids and lots of rules of thumb and ideas about that.

36:58The whole project management series on Mondays was really outstanding. And then if you're in Showhub as well, or the new website, if you evaluate the new dev website, you can search for terms like that and just get an amazing amount of great knowledge and wisdom. Yeah, I'd say if you wanted to, I just had to jump in there real quick. Sorry to raise my hand.

37:29And the business is different for different types of entities. So depending on what scale you're playing at, it is a bottom line number, they call it. And if you're at under 5%, you're super thin, especially if you want to do something like give an affiliate type commission for somebody who gave you or referred you. So do you have 10% to give to that?

37:54That might be your entire net or is it an ongoing thing? So I'd say more like 20 would be pretty healthy. When you start looking at like Apple and anything over double digit in the software world, but we're talking two different things because they have a high top line number. So what they bring in makes that net, it could be a 2% net, but 2% of a very, very large number is a different story than 10% of a much smaller number.

38:21So we're playing with different margins for different businesses. Like if you look at, if you go to your local library, there's a book that you could get that tells the net margins of different industries. And it's pretty fascinating because I used to be in something called the CEO Roundtable and I would peer into restaurants and dry cleaners. We had different businesses. So it was always fascinating to see different occupancy costs, different legal.

38:44So it depends on what level you're playing at, but I'd say to answer the question, uh, 25%, so that you have room to wiggle that in case you need to, uh, just give back or invest in, in future equipment. But if you, if you're riding anything below 10%, you know, you're, you're on thin ice, you know, it's, you might be able to survive, but you're not going to be able to grow and prosper. So I would shoot to have more than 10%.

39:11All right. Courtney, did we get you? No, someone jumped in there. Oh, sorry. Can I just do one last thing? Markup is not the same as margin, so remember that. Go research markup versus margin. Go say it, Courtney. So that you know. Yeah, I used to work in the commercial business. And so I worked with a variety of different commercial production companies, and they all had different methods of budgeting and bidding.