Revenue is up and profit hasn't moved
You did another two million in work this year and kept the same money. The work wasn't the problem.
Revenue growth adds indirect cost in steps: a project manager, a coordinator, a yard, another truck, and more insurance. Each of those was a decision that felt small at the time. Overhead as a percentage of revenue only falls if revenue grows into the cost base faster than the cost base grows. When it doesn't, you buy volume and sell margin, so the P&L looks flat while everybody works harder.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying.
Other problems step 03 solves
Other things that go wrong
What owners ask
Why is my revenue growing but my profit is flat?
You did another two million in work this year and kept the same money. The work wasn't the problem. Revenue growth adds indirect cost in steps: a project manager, a coordinator, a yard, another truck, and more insurance. Each of those was a decision that felt small at the time. Overhead as a percentage of revenue only falls if revenue grows into the cost base faster than the cost base grows. When it doesn't, you buy volume and sell margin, so the P&L looks flat while everybody works harder.
Which part of the system fixes this?
The step is number 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying. It's drawn from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Is this normal for my trade?
Across the 48 trades in the benchmark reference, 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 sits, and your own job costing tells you where you sit, which is the number that pays payroll.
Where do I start?
Chart overhead as a percentage of revenue for the last three years, not the dollar amount.
Can I fix this without touching anything else?
You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 03 depends on step 01, job cost structure and step 02, equipment cost basis. 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.