The whole brick package hits cash before course one
You take the full brick package in one or two drops at buyout, then lay it out over the next eight months while the cash sits in a stack on the ground.
Plenty of trades buy material early. Masonry is the one where splitting the order damages the finished product, so the early buy is mandatory and it can't be staged to match the billing curve. A drywall sub can take another truck of board next month and nobody will ever know. A second kiln run bands the wall for the life of the building.
The size of it
Material runs 35 to 45 percent of a masonry contract and it hits as one cash event months ahead of the first billing. Stored-material billing needs a bill of sale, off-site insurance, and GC consent, and plenty of subcontracts refuse it outright, which leaves your working capital or the AP line covering all of it.
Brick is fired in plant color campaigns, so the whole job's units get bought and delivered at buyout, before a single course is laid. A second run of the same blend won't match the first, and the difference reads as a horizontal band across the elevation from the parking lot. Cast stone and custom-molded units stretch 8 to 12 weeks from design lock and want a deposit when the molds get made. None of that spend is attached to a pay application, because there's no work in place to bill against yet. So you carry eight months of material on a bank balance that was built for weekly payroll.
Three moves, in order
Step 07: Monthly cadence
Weekly bookkeeping, cost to complete, and one CEO report, on the same days every month.
What else costs masonry contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What masonry owners ask
Why do I've to buy the whole brick package up front?
You take the full brick package in one or two drops at buyout, then lay it out over the next eight months while the cash sits in a stack on the ground.
What does it cost?
Material runs 35 to 45 percent of a masonry contract and it hits as one cash event months ahead of the first billing. Stored-material billing needs a bill of sale, off-site insurance, and GC consent, and plenty of subcontracts refuse it outright, which leaves your working capital or the AP line covering all of it.
What do I do first?
Pull your last three brick jobs and write the buyout delivery date next to the date the first pay application funded. The days between them are the float you've been financing without pricing it.
What are masonry contractors supposed to be making?
Masonry runs 21% gross margin, 14% 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 07, monthly cadence. Weekly bookkeeping, cost to complete, and one CEO report, on the same days every month. It comes from chapter 7 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.