Get in touch with us
We serve home owners and small businesses across the country remotely with things like computer repair, training and support. We also handle onsite work in Oregon, Washington, and Utah currently. Please stay tuned as we expand into your area!
Scheduling a Site Walk Today!
We can send a technician by for a site walk to explore solutions that will fit perfectly in your budget and help to make your life easier.
Office Address :
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah
Mail Us :
scheduling@aguyiknow.com
Call Us :
888-375-7517
503-707-0284 FAXFrequently Asked Questions
Our goal is to get as much work into your budget as possible. In order to do this, we charge by the minute (at wholesale rates) by the mile and parts and pieces out our cost.
With full transparency, you can see what is being done on your project in real time, you can add tasks for us, or subtract work that you want to do, or provide input on the work as it is happening.
This is revolutionary in the industry and saves our clients 40% to 60% on any project that we touch. If you have the money to get the work done, there is no more efficient way of using your budget dollar to get as much done as possible.
Site walks are free for the first visit. You control the size of the retainer that work are working on, giving you full control of the project and our engagement, as much as you want that is.
How are bids done?
Bidding work or getting quotes follows the same pattern whether it is for building a building or configuring a website.
First the contractor estimates the time, materials and transaction costs that a job will take. They then multiply that total by 1.125. This results in what is called the loaded cost. That loaded cost is then "margined." This is done by dividing the loaded cost by 1 minus the desired margin resulting in the margined price. To that margined price is added 10% as a buffer. This allows the project manager to track down the project owner for a change order for 1/10 the total job time. Here is the formula:
Quoted Price = ((T&M*1.125)/1-margin)*1.1
Contractors get a feel for what their competition is doing and what margins they sit at over time. They then know how to price their work in order to come in the middle of the pack. By removing the load (or burden), margin, and buffer we save our clients anywhere between 40% to 60% depending on the margin variable. In addition to that we approach our work differently in order to save further with job efficiency and correct talent engagement.
Site walks and first visits are free
We dispatch an estimator or project manager to your site in order to get a feel for the job. We send you the paperwork to get the job started and you fund the project.
Back in the mid 1990's
When the F-16s were grounded, our founder was able to participate with a team of people that got them airborne again. This is where the bug for solving impossible problems with innovative solutions bit him.
A team was assembled with the first goal to start an arbitrage site on eBay. This was super exciting as we reached about 4000 hits a minute and were selling out of some 5000 Columbia Sportswear backpacks in minutes just a school was starting. A Guy I Know Inc. got the attention of a particular Power Seller who, we later discovered, had claimed that we were selling stolen property as we were beating him by some 50% on the platform with a single product, our first. This resulted in 6 months of limbo trying to prove our innocence while forking out some $5k/month just to house the inventory. The process of the investigation chased away all of our vendors and potential vendors. Even our logistics partner started their own site and went around us. We finally reached one of the Safe Harbor employees, a poor overworked soul, (with the help of our logistics partner in Utah) who was able to see the problem once she could look at it. We were brought back up on the site on a probationary basis but by that time we had had to move on.
We then assembled a group of journeyman electricians and were installing security, surveillance, access control, fire and life safety systems in the Pacific Northwest for some large Fortune 500 comanies. This lasted until some enterprising middle manager decided that it wasn't fair to pay us in 5 days but we should be pushed out to 111 days and then again to 180 days. This mandated $900k in funding just to float payroll right in the middle of the real estate bubble bursting. No one had a $9M home to put up for collateral so we could not proceed one more day. A little side note, our client's labor costs when we with other subcontractors were competing was around $45/hour. When they broke some 2500 companies across the country with an average employee count of 10, their labor rates jumped from the surviving subcontractors to some $!20/hour plus financing fees etc. This scenario was part of a scam run across multiple industries, including real estate, by ivy league MBA graduates using insider trading laws as cover to artificially raise share value to leverage their own career ascensions from one publically traded company to another doubling their compensation at every stop.
Without $1M in capital, that phase died.
We, like ronan, were free agents now and decided that we would serve customers directly rather than having others find them for us. We were pulling racoons, possum, rats and spiders out of crawl spaces. Basically, anything that our clients needed done, legally, we were up for. Our team returned to college to get our degrees in I.T., Marketing, and Business.
This is when our service offering exploded. We were primarily focussed on larger publically traded companies but quickly discovered that too often they will stretch 30 day terms to 10 months, then pay half what is owed and introduce you to their legal team if you wish to complain about it. This is with glowing references and sign offs completed.
So, we started focussing on small to midsized businesses because they usually pay their bills. During the last three years we experienced a rash of unpaid invoices so we moved to a retainer with time and materials billing model. Now we offer over 90 disciplines that you can engage temporarily or permanently to help you business to succeed. So, how can A Guy I Know help you today?