When our clients hire an external Revit modeller, it rarely comes from ambition, but from pressure on the schedule. There is a peak in the drawing office, a deadline that cannot move, or a vacancy that has been open for months. Meanwhile the work keeps coming and the backlog keeps growing.
We absorb that with a team that is already in place. Our team drafts and models, and with a large, flexible team of drafters we scale up or down for each project. When things are urgent, we add people straight away, because we do not have to recruit anyone.
We do not do engineering and we do not give structural advice, so responsibility for the content stays where it belongs. What we take over is the volume work, such as revisions to existing DWG files, detailing in Revit, as-built drawings and building smart families. Everything is done remotely from our own office, with our own licences. We respond to enquiries within 1 to 2 working days, and in the conversation that follows we go through the project.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Who hires an external Revit modeller and why
Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers. More broadly, they are companies with technical drafting work that runs continuously. At the table are managers, team leaders and owners, and they almost always have the same problem. There is too little time, too few drafters, or a peak comes along that their own team cannot handle. At an engineering firm, that often means the engineers start drafting themselves. That costs expensive hours on work a drafter does faster. At an architectural practice, we see it in the detailing phase, where the number of sheets suddenly triples.
A contractor gets stuck on revisions and as-built material that is only complete late in the process. Manufacturers more often have a recurring pattern, such as a product line that has to be drawn in dozens of variants. In all these cases the need is not for knowledge but for hands. We supply those hands without you having to start a recruitment process. Hiring a new drafter takes months and is no solution for a peak that will be over in two months.
It started last year with a client's request, and since then we have offered this work as a regular service. We have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for Firefly. Our focus is on the Netherlands and we work nationwide. So you do not need to be nearby, because the work is carried out remotely anyway. Visits are welcome, and we regularly come by ourselves when a set is better discussed around the table.
Three review layers on every externally drafted model
External drafting stands or falls on quality control. If you put work out of house, you do not want to add a second internal review round. That is why we apply at least three review layers to everything we deliver. A drafter draws or models the part. A second team member then checks that work for dimensions, layers, symbols and completeness. Next, Sam, our team leader, reviews it, with his background of more than fifteen years in architecture. Finally, Barry, our project manager, checks the whole before it goes to you.
As a result, errors remain minimal in practice. With high volumes, that difference is significant. A wrong layer number on a single drawing is a one-minute correction. The same layer number on three hundred sheets costs a whole day. We catch that before the set leaves our office. The partial deliveries help too, because you see early on whether our interpretation is right. For Firefly, we received as-built material where the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand.
It was hard to read and messy. We worked it out ourselves instead of calling the client all the time, and still delivered it neatly. That attitude is part of external work, because an external party that calls at every turn costs more time than it saves. We do, of course, report the assumptions we make, so you can adjust course. We do not have certifications and we do not claim them. The quality control lies in the way we work and in the experience of the team, because everyone here has worked with CAD for more than ten years.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
The costs of an externally hired Revit modeller
We work on an hourly basis or for a fixed price per project. We decide together in advance which form fits, and that mainly depends on how sharply defined the scope is. If there is a defined set of one hundred and fifty revision drawings, a fixed project price is convenient for both sides. If the scope is still moving, for example because the design is evolving, an hourly basis is fairer. On an hourly basis, we only charge pure working hours. If someone wanders off for five minutes for a cup of coffee, the clock stops. That is not a slogan, it is how we have set up our time recording. You can largely influence what keeps costs down yourself. A complete handover saves the most, because searching through a half-finished file is expensive time. Clear CAD standards save time next, because we then do not have to fix things afterwards. Bundled feedback per partial delivery also helps, because scattered comments during the week cost start-up time again and again.
The biggest saving lies in smart modelling. A parametric family that covers a component in several sizes takes repeated drafting out of the hours. In piping work where a 90 and a 110 valve keep coming back, that saves at least seventy percent of the time. We prefer to make that investment at the start rather than halfway through. You have no ongoing payroll costs, because the assignment stops as soon as the work is done. In case of illness or holiday we replace the person, so there is no hidden cost there either. We only prepare an estimate once we have seen the documents, because otherwise it is guesswork. If you want to discuss the breakdown, call us or fill in the contact form.
How this differs from a freelancer or a permanent employee
A freelancer is one person, we are a team. You notice that difference the moment something goes wrong. If a freelancer falls ill, the work stops and the search starts all over again. With us, a colleague takes over, because the replacement comes from the same group and knows the conventions. A freelancer also delivers their own work, without a second pair of eyes.
With us, every part goes through three review layers before it leaves our office. A permanent employee is a different story. They build up knowledge of your firm and that has value, but they also cost months of recruitment and then an ongoing salary.
For a three-month peak, that is an expensive solution to a temporary problem. A permanent drafter also means fixed capacity, while volume inevitably fluctuates. Our large, variable team scales up for each project and back down again. What we do not replace is the project knowledge in your head. We are not engineers on your project and we do not make design decisions. That separation is exactly what makes the collaboration workable, because it is clear who is responsible for what.
A secondment agency places someone in your drawing office, whereas we work from our own office. As a result, you do not need to provide a workstation, licence or supervision for our people. If you want to know whether this fits, it is best to start with a small first assignment. That lets you judge our speed and accuracy before transferring more work.
Frequently asked questions about hiring an external Revit modeller
Let us take on your Revit modelling
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.