Gets him to look at what you've already built
You work for or with the owner of a construction company: you built the job cost structure, you send the monthly reports, and he still runs the business off his gut half the time, because a report only works once somebody trusts it enough to act on it. CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System is written in the language he already uses on a job site, which is often the thing a spreadsheet can't do.
It's rarely the report
You've built the structure. The numbers are right. The owner still makes the call from memory, though, not from the report you gave him, because the report speaks a language that isn't his and the trust was never built to close the shortfall. This book was written by a master electrician who ran the jobs before he ran the numbers, in the words a crew already uses, which is the difference between a structure an owner follows and one he nods at and sets aside.
See the full system this book is built from at all 8 steps.
8 steps, six templates, a monthly cadence
What controllers and fractional CFOs ask
I already build the reports. Why would the owner need a book too?
A report only changes anything once he reads it, trusts it and acts on it, and none of that's guaranteed just because it exists. This book is written in the language he already uses on a job site, not in the language a report speaks, so it's often the thing that gets him to actually meet you at the table instead of nodding past the numbers.
Is it condescending to give my own boss a book?
Framed right, no. It reads as "here's a faster way for the two of us to get on the same page," not as a lesson. The honest pitch is that you're already doing the work and would rather spend the meeting on decisions than on re-explaining what a report means.
Will this contradict what I've already built for the business?
It's very unlikely to. The system lines up with what most controllers and fractional CFOs already care about: job cost structure, overhead, and a monthly cadence. If anything it gives you a shared vocabulary for what you're already doing, which is usually the missing piece, not the missing report.
What if the owner already reads his numbers carefully?
Then he's already the exception, and the book still holds up as a second opinion he respects, from someone who ran jobs instead of just an advisor telling him what to do.
Is this a good gift for an owner I report to versus a client I advise?
Both. The only difference is who's on the org chart. In either case, you already know better than almost anyone where he's not engaging, which makes you well positioned to pick this for him.
$9.99 ebook, $24.99 paperback
Paperback if you want it on his desk rather than one more unopened file. Six chapters include a QR code straight to a working template.
Ordering ahead of a planning meeting? Leave an address and I will tell you the day it publishes.
A handful of emails between now and release, then it stops. Nothing is sold on and one click unsubscribes.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.