$25M BUSINESS
ON A SPREADSHEET TO
$2.6M PROFIT SHARING.
A $25M international commercial marine general contractor was executing massive projects flawlessly. Port of Jamaica. Port of Honduras. Projects worth $25 to $30M each. They knew how to do the work. They could execute anything. Their entire accounting depended on one person, running everything on a shared Excel living document anybody could access and change. For a $25M international business, everything was in Excel. They tried Xero once. It could not handle the complexity. So they went back to Excel. We built everything from scratch. Within weeks they got $5M in individual project bonding and $10M in aggregate. They are working on a $4.5M LOC. The bank account has never dipped below $1.2M. Over $1M in net profit after all expenses and partner salaries. $2.6M paid in profit sharing.
A business that grows from $2M to $25M does not usually upgrade the financial systems along the way. The accounting setup that worked at $2M is still running at $25M. The distance between the two eventually becomes visible. Sometimes as a crisis. Sometimes as a sale that gets discounted. Sometimes as the realization that you are running a 25 million dollar business on a spreadsheet.
This international commercial marine GC was executing massive projects flawlessly. Port of Jamaica. Port of Honduras. Projects worth $25 to $30M each. They knew how to do the work. They could execute anything. From the outside, the business was a success. The work was real. The team was capable.
Underneath, the financial picture was invisible. There was no job costing structure. No WIP reporting. No project-level profitability visibility. The general ledger ran on a shared Excel living document that anybody could access and change. For a $25M international business, everything was in Excel.
They tried Xero once. It could not handle the complexity of their business. So they went back to Excel. One person managing everything. Payroll. Accounts payable. Accounts receivable. Wiring money to different countries to pay vendors. Literally everything. If that person got sick, the business stopped. If they made a mistake, nobody caught it because there was no system to flag it. They could not get bonding or lending. Their financials were just too messy for anyone to trust.
$25M Business Running on Excel
The general ledger lived on a shared spreadsheet. Anybody could change it. No revision history. No audit trail. No system to catch mistakes. The entire company depended on whether one person was having a good day.
No Job Costing Structure
Costs hit the books at the company level. There was no way to see which projects were profitable, which clients were the high-margin ones, or which work types had what economic characteristics.
Reports Took 8 to 10 Hours
Any financial report required hours of manual work pulling numbers from the spreadsheet, cross-referencing, and reformatting. Fast decision-making was impossible.
Could Not Get Bonding or Lending
The bank and surety could not get a clean read on the financials. For an international business with $25-$30M projects, that locked them out of growth opportunities and good credit terms.
- Moved off Excel into proper accounting software: everybody could access the same current data. The reports that took 8 to 10 hours to pull were instant. Nobody was the bottleneck anymore. CONTROL Chapter 5.
- Job costing structure: 7-category framework configured to the marine work types. Cost codes that mirror the SOV on every contract. CONTROL Chapter 1.
- Equipment cost basis: true daily and weekly rates for every piece of floating and rolling equipment. Accounts for salt environment, maintenance reserve, and realistic utilization. CONTROL Chapter 2.
- Real overhead calculation: proper indirect cost categorization. Market-rate owner compensation. CONTROL Chapter 3.
- WIP reporting: monthly Work-in-Progress reports for surety and bank. Earned vs billed. Costs to date. Projected costs at completion.
- 13-week cash forecast: rolling weekly forecast that catches potential cash dips 8 to 10 weeks out. CONTROL Chapter 7.
- Monthly CEO meeting: standing review with action items, trended data, and a structured agenda.
- Profit sharing plan: with project-level profitability finally visible, a profit sharing pool could be built and distributed based on real financial performance.
First 90 days. Job costing live on all active projects. First real reports generated. Accounting person finally had help. She had a system that could catch mistakes instead of her being the only safeguard.
Bonding and lending unlocked. Within weeks, the business got $5M in individual project bonding. $10M in aggregate bonding. They are now working on a $4.5M LOC. Capital that was completely unavailable with the Excel setup.
Today. The bank account has never dipped below $1.2M. The business has over $1M in net profit after all expenses and partner salaries. They paid out $2.6M in profit sharing. All because they stopped running a $25M business on a spreadsheet.
WANT IT INSTALLED FOR YOU?
CONTROL teaches you how to build the system yourself. The Construction CFO, a service of Sulphur Prairie Management, builds and runs it for you. Same system. Same outcomes. From $1,900 per month. 60-day onboarding.
Same way most do. It grows. A company that starts at $2M and gets to $25M over 10 to 15 years often runs on the same accounting setup the whole way. They tried Xero once. It could not handle the complexity. So they went back to Excel. Books got closed. Taxes got filed. Payroll ran. The underlying structure was built for a $2M business. At $25M, the distance between operational reality and financial visibility was massive.
Anyone can change it. Mistakes do not get flagged. There is no audit trail. For a $25M international business wiring money to vendors in multiple countries, that is a structural liability. If the one person managing the file got sick, the business stopped. If they made a mistake, nobody caught it because there was no system to flag it. The entire company depended on whether one person was having a good day.
Job costing structure. Always. Without project-level visibility, every other system is built on guesswork. Once you can see which projects, which clients, and which work types are truly profitable, every other decision becomes data-driven. Estimating. Hiring. Equipment. Bidding strategy.
Net profit has to be high enough to support both retained earnings (for working capital and bonding) and a meaningful profit share. At $25M revenue with $1M+ in net profit and bonding requirements covered, a profit sharing pool can be built and distributed based on real financial performance. The $2.6M was paid out across multiple cycles as the business stabilized.
Because the 13-week cash forecast catches potential dips 8 to 10 weeks ahead of time. The operating discipline allows for adjustments before the dip hits. Slow new work. Accelerate collections. Defer discretionary spend. The $1.2M floor is not a target. It is the outcome of running the cadence correctly. Once you have the forecast, the floor maintains itself.
