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 carry it on your own money.
Long lead equipment forces a choice nobody wins. 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 sit on. Wait for the schedule to firm up and the lead time pushes your energisation date, which is the one date the GC will hold you to. Either way the exposure sits on your balance sheet, and stored-material billing only helps if the contract allows it and the owner honours it.
Three moves, in order
Step 07: Monthly cadence
Weekly bookkeeping, cost to complete, and one CEO report, on the same days every month.
Other problems step 07 solves
Other things that go wrong
What owners ask
How do electrical contractors handle long lead time gear cash flow?
Switchgear and transformers are quoted in weeks that turn into quarters. You buy early to protect the schedule and carry it on your own money. Long lead equipment forces a choice nobody wins. 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 sit on. Wait for the schedule to firm up and the lead time pushes your energisation date, which is the one date the GC will hold you to. Either way the exposure sits on your balance sheet, and stored-material billing only helps if the contract allows it and the owner honours it.
Which part of the system fixes this?
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.
Does this only happen in electrical?
Effectively yes, and that's why it has its own page. Electrical sits in 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.
Where do I start?
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.
Can I fix this without touching anything else?
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 nobody trusts, which is worse than the problem you started with.
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.