Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

I am now a couple of weeks into my Phase 3 attachment and while digging into some information on a project I am involved in I picked up something which I thought was quite interesting and worth putting out there for comparison against other design consultants.

Reading the Risk Assessment which was completed during the tender stage I came across an entry which highlighted a predicted profit margin of 60% as a risk and a comment which indicate this was an “aggressive” tender in the hope of securing the bid and a foot in the door for future works on this major project.

I was (maybe naively) quite surprised at this. Not having any experience of working in a design consultancy I didn’t really know what to expect, but this seemed a pretty significant margin. I had a chat with my design manager to get a better understanding of the situation and found out that actually 65 -70% is the normal range on projects and 58% is the minimum allowable margin.

I was curious to know how this bears up against other people’s experience, particularly on jobs in the UK and US vs Aus?