Mobilization you never got paid for

Moving equipment in and getting the first crew productive costs real money that no line item on your bid covers. Mobilization is a fixed cost that doesn't scale with the size of the job. That makes it brutal on small work and easy to miss on any bid built from unit rates, since a unit rate spreads a fixed number across a variable quantity. Trades that move equipment and set up site infrastructure have the most exposure here. If you can't say what it costs you to start a job, you're absorbing that cost on every one you take.

The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It's drawn from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.

Across the 48 trades that publish a figure, net profit at $1M–$5M averages 7% before taxes. If you're well under that and this page describes your month, the two are usually the same story. The published average tells you where the pack is, and your own job costing tells you where you are, which is the number that pays payroll.

Price mobilization as its own line, separate from the unit rates.

You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 04 depends on step 01, job cost structure and step 03, overhead calculation. Install it ahead of those and it produces numbers the field won't trust, which is worse than the problem you started with.