You can't take it anymore. If you were to look one more time at those scratches on the living room floor, the foot traffic stains down the hallway, the Kool-aid stains under the dining room table, or the chipped tiles in the kitchen, you might go astray. and end up in a mental hospital. You're tired of going to a friend's house and secretly envying their perfect-looking floors. Gone are the days when we flipped through magazines and drooled over photos of well-appointed rooms with amazing-looking floors. So ask your friend which company made their plan and how much it cost, not to be nosy, but to get an idea. After you've carefully perused the flooring aisle of your local home improvement store and decided on the type you want to use, ask the contractor to come in for a quote. Your eyes widen in surprise when he tells you that it will cost you more than it cost your friend. How can this be? It's just flooring, right? How can there be such a price difference? Flooring contractors have a mix of variable costs and fixed costs in their operations, of which variable costs make up the vast majority. Fixed costs include the following: cost of vehicles, cost of equipment, cost of facilities, and cost of insurance. Contractors will pass fixed costs on to customers by typically adding $1 to $2 to the installation cost per square foot. Everything else is variable, because what they charge depends on the number and type of jobs performed by the contractor, as well as the labor and materials required. To better understand the scope of variable costs, let's look at how a contractor determines the bid for a job. A typical quote for a flooring job is broken down into six phases: Initial preparatory work...... middle of the paper...... and, it could lower the installation cost, because it can rotate between jobs at different between phases. So, as you can see, the price quoted by the flooring contractor depends on several variable cost factors. It can be a difficult task when the contractor starts his business. If you underestimate the time it will take to install the tile or do any prep work, you could end up losing money. If it fails to order enough materials, it will have to cover the cost of any additional materials needed, reducing its profit. If mistakes are made, the cost of fixing them will reduce the amount of profit you earn. It is critical that a flooring contractor understands how to properly estimate the amount of material and number of labor hours needed for each job. Failure to do these tasks properly will cause your business to fail very quickly.