In a drawing office, the moment you need a Revit modeller rarely coincides with a moment that suits you. A project is brought forward, a stream of revisions comes in from the site, and the two modellers you have already have their weeks fully booked. The schedule holds out for a little while with overtime and reshuffling, and then it no longer does.
That is the moment our team steps in. We provide drafting and modelling work, not engineering, and we focus on work with high volumes and a lot of repetition.
Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and together the core of our team has around twenty-five years on the clock. We work remotely from our own office, with our own licences and the latest versions. You pay no ongoing payroll costs and keep one fixed point of contact. During a peak, we add extra drafters to the running project without any recruitment process. Our focus is on the Netherlands.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When you need an external Revit modeller and when you do not
Outsourcing does not pay off for every type of work, and we would rather say so straight away. It pays off mainly when there is volume and the work is repetitive. Think of a large series of sheets from a revised model, a revision round on an existing set, or an as-built file that has been waiting for months. A family set that has become cluttered over the years is also work that your own team rarely fits in between other tasks, even though cleaning it up makes the whole project faster. There are situations in which your own team is better off keeping the work.
Design work in which a choice changes every day is hard to outsource, because coordination then takes more time than the drafting. The same applies to work that depends entirely on knowledge held by one internal person and not recorded anywhere. What we also do not do is engineering. Calculations, structural advice and permit procedures stay with you or your consultant. In practice we often see a split where your permanent team keeps the design and the special components, while we pick up the detailing and the repetitive part.
That makes both sides faster. In a first conversation, we simply look with you at which part lends itself to outsourcing. Sometimes we advise a smaller package than you proposed yourself. That is not modesty but an assessment of where the gains lie. A sharply defined package almost always delivers more than a broad assignment with vague edges.
The costs when you temporarily need a Revit modeller
Temporary capacity has a different cost structure from employment. There is no recruitment process, no onboarding period on the payroll and no idle time once the project is finished. We invoice by the hour or per project at a fixed price, and we decide together which form fits. For a defined package, such as a fixed number of sheets from an existing model, we can agree a price in advance because the scope is clear. For a stream of revisions that varies in size from week to week, an hourly basis fits better, because then you pay for exactly what has been done. We only charge pure working hours.
If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops, and we do not mean that symbolically. Across hundreds of drawings, that approach makes a noticeable difference by the end of a project. We do not offer a prepaid hours card or monthly hours subscription, because that means buying capacity you may not use. What keeps costs down in practice is preparation. A complete handover, documented CAD standards and one contact person save hours that would otherwise be lost to follow-up questions. Repetition also lowers the price, because once we have built a parametric family, each subsequent use costs almost nothing.
We only prepare an estimate after reviewing the documents, because without drawings any figure is a shot in the dark. We are happy to have that conversation before anything is fixed. You then know where the hours go and which choices make the drafting cheaper. That saves discussion about the invoice afterwards.
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.
Clients who bring in a modeller through us
The companies that come to us are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly companies with technical drafting work. At the table are managers, team leaders and owners, in other words people who are responsible for the schedule themselves. The reason is almost always capacity. Too little time, too few drafters, or a peak that the in-house team simply cannot handle. At an engineering firm it is often detailing that is lagging behind the design. At a contractor we are more likely to see revisions and as-built work, because the construction phase produces changes that someone has to process. Manufacturers come to us with repetitive work around products and with families they want to reuse across projects. We started this service last year because a client asked for it, and we have offered it as a regular service ever since.
For Firefly we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, including revision files that were in poor shape when they arrived. What these clients have in common is that they are looking for drafting capacity, not an adviser. They have the technical expertise in-house and lack the hands to get it down on paper. Our clients are in the Netherlands and that is where our focus lies. We do not yet have public reviews, so we would rather let a first assignment speak for us than tell a story about ourselves. A small start is the most honest way to do that. If you want to see what our work looks like, give us a defined part of a running project and judge for yourself afterwards. That costs little and says more than a presentation.
The process with our Revit modellers
The process starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You supply the details and usually existing drawings that need revising. We review those documents and point out what is still missing before we name a schedule. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, and as soon as we have enough information we can start.
Barry, our project manager, picks up the enquiry first, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side and is responsible for project supervision. We then deliver in stages. That first block is deliberately small, because a misunderstood convention then costs a few sheets instead of the whole set.
We adjust based on the feedback and then move on to the next part. The meeting rhythm differs per client, because one wants an update every two days and another is happy with a weekly moment. In between, contact runs by email and phone, and we visit you or you come to our office. For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email. For larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we work with software that you can log into to follow the project.
Every delivery goes through at least three review layers before it leaves our office. At the end we hand over the complete package in your firm's structure, and ownership of that work lies with you. We are open to a non-disclosure agreement if you want to arrange one in advance. That belongs in the first conversation.
Frequently asked questions when you need a 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.