You float the switchgear for a year before you bill it

Switchgear and transformers are quoted in weeks that turn into quarters. You buy early to protect the schedule and fund it on your own money. Long lead equipment forces a choice with no good answer. Release the order early and you fund the deposit and progress payments, sometimes the whole unit, well before there's a pay application it can go on. Wait for the schedule to firm up and the lead time pushes your energization date, which is the one date the GC will hold you to. Either way the exposure is on your balance sheet, and stored-material billing only helps if the contract allows it and the owner honours it.

The step is number 07, monthly cadence. Weekly bookkeeping, cost to complete, and one CEO report, on the same days every month. It's drawn from chapter 7 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.

Effectively yes, and that's why it has its own page. Electrical belongs to electrical and technology and runs 9% net profit at $1M–$5M. The mechanism behind this problem has no real analog in the other 47 trades, so the general advice doesn't fit it.

List every long lead item by job with its order date and payment terms alongside the date it has to be on site, so the float becomes a dated number you can plan against.

You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 07 depends on step 03, overhead calculation and step 04, estimating system and step 05, software and bookkeeping alignment and step 06, project management. Install it ahead of those and it produces numbers the field won't trust, which is worse than the problem you started with.