Find your numbers
Two picks get you the three numbers your trade should be running at your size, the shortfall you have, and the order to fix it in.
Your targets
| Metric | Industry average | CFOS target | The shortfall |
|---|
Gross margin and overhead come from CFMA, Jones Maresca and SPM's own trade data, because those are the figures those sources report by trade and size. Net profit is calculated from them as gross margin minus overhead, so the three rows tie. That makes it an operating profit figure: what is left before interest, other income and expense, and the tax planning choices owners make, such as bonuses, depreciation methods and retirement contributions.
Surveys report net income before taxes after those items, so a reported net can run below the figure here. At the typical contractor the difference is small: CFMA's 2025 medians are 7.1 percent before interest and taxes and 6.7 percent net income before taxes. It grows with size. Against the separate measured net profit dataset, the calculated net runs 0.8 points higher at $1M to $5M, 2.2 points at $5M to $10M and 3.5 points at $10M to $25M, because the gross margin and overhead rows change faster with size than reported net profit does.
Above the $10M to $25M band the gross margin and overhead rows are a modeled extension of the same curves. They have not been reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker, and the calculated net there runs well above survey medians, so read those bands as a model and not as a survey result.
SPM The Construction CFO. SPM Trade Benchmark Reference. 2026. Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC. https://runoncfos.com/find-your-numbers. CC BY 4.0.
Figures on this page were last revised 2026-08-21. Published under CC BY 4.0, which permits reuse of any figure here, including commercially, as long as the credit above travels with it. The same figures in machine-readable form: /benchmarks.json.
Trade level gross margin and overhead compiled by SPM The Construction CFO, validated against published CFMA and JMCO benchmarks. The CFOS targets beside them are from the book CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, published with the full reference at runoncfos.com.
- 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker, Executive Summary, Construction Financial Management Association, 2024.
- 2025 Construction Financial Benchmarker, Executive Summary, Construction Financial Management Association, 2025.
- 2025 Performance Benchmarks, Construction Companies, Jones Maresca and Company, 2025.
- SPM Trade Benchmark Reference, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, 2026.
Sourcing and method: the methodology page.
Which bands are measured. The 4 bands above $10M–$25M extend the survey curve further out and have not been reconciled against the licensed CFMA Benchmarker. How every figure was built is explained on the methodology page.
Your step sequence
Each step needs the one before it in place. This is the order that keeps that promise.
Open the full trade page
What owners ask
How does the tool work out my targets?
Pick your trade and your revenue band. All three targets recalculate at that band, up to $10M to $25M. Above that the bands are a modeled extension and no target is published: overhead one point leaner than your industry average, net profit at 10 percent or 3.5 points better than average, whichever is higher, and gross margin at whatever margin produces that net profit target once overhead is paid. Every rule reproduces the published target on all 48 trades at the first band, and the same formula holds at every other one.
What step order does it give me?
The order comes from the dependency chain in the system itself. Step 01 has nothing ahead of it, step 08 comes behind six others. The tool walks the chain so you install in an order where each step has the numbers it needs before it starts.
Where do the benchmarks come from?
The trade figures are SPM's own compilation, validated against CFMA's 2024 Benchmarker, CFMA's 2025 Benchmarker and the Jones Maresca and Company 2025 specialty contractor benchmarks. CFMA's Benchmarker is a licensed product and nothing here is copied from it. Net profit is calculated as gross margin minus overhead, so the three figures tie out in every band. Every trade in the reference publishes a row of its own. Each new edition is validated against the latest CFMA and JMCO releases before publication.
Is this a quote or a lead form?
Neither. Nothing is captured and nothing is sent. The whole calculation runs in your browser off the same 1,008 figures published on the 48 trade pages.
What if my numbers are worse than the target?
That's the usual answer, and the size of the shortfall tells you where to start. The tool orders the steps by dependency, so the first one it gives you is the one everything else is waiting on.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.
I wasn't expecting a finance book to hit this close to home. What sets this book apart is that it doesn't stop at diagnosing the problem. Josh gives you real, usable solutions pulled straight from the field, not generic advice, but the kind of guidance that comes from someone who's actually been in the trenches with owners like us. I could barely put it down. It took me right back to when I was building my own crews, facing the same struggles so many of us face when we simply don't know what we don't know. This book doesn't just tell you what's broken; it gives you a way to fix it, regardless of whether you just started or have been doing this the same way for decades.