Make-ready is months of cash out before a billable foot
You applied in the spring, wired make-ready money to the pole owner, and the transfers still aren't done while the bucket crew waits.
Most subs wait on a general contractor who at least wants the job finished. You wait on a power company and a cable incumbent who hold no contract with you and have no deadline you can enforce, and neither of them has a reason to move your poles this month. You paid them first, which makes fiber one of the few places where a sub funds another utility's labor months before earning a foot of his own.
The size of it
Make-ready checks and crew build-up go out months before the first billable aerial foot, and crews get shuttled to lower production filler work to stay fed. Cash leaves on the utility's calendar and comes back on the carrier's.
Aerial fiber runs a fixed sequence and you own almost none of it. You file the attachment application, the pole owner surveys, the make-ready estimate comes back, you pre-pay it, then power and telco move their lines or the pole gets replaced, and only then can your lasher touch it. FCC shot clocks are measured in months, and large pole orders get batched, so a three hundred pole route moves at the speed of the slowest attacher on it. By the time transfers finish you've already hired the crew, moved the bucket and the lasher, and sent money to the pole owner.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them.
What else costs fiber contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What fiber owners ask
How long does make ready take before we can lash fiber?
You applied in the spring, wired make-ready money to the pole owner, and the transfers still aren't done while the bucket crew waits.
What does it cost?
Make-ready checks and crew build-up go out months before the first billable aerial foot, and crews get shuttled to lower production filler work to stay fed. Cash leaves on the utility's calendar and comes back on the carrier's.
What do I do first?
Book each make-ready pre-payment as a job cost on the route it belongs to so that route carries its own cash timeline.
What are fiber contractors supposed to be making?
Fiber runs 22% gross margin, 15% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits right on it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.