The Job Needs Five Mobilizations and You Priced Two
You graded that pad once and got paid for it once. The steel hauler rutted it, somebody buried spoil in it, and you graded it a second time on your own dime.
A trade that comes once and leaves can't be damaged by the trades that follow it. Your product is the dirt everybody else works on, which turns your finished work into a haul road for the rest of the job. Rework at fine grade gets performed under a contract priced for one pass, and it gets charged to the original grading phase because nobody opened a code for it.
The size of it
You run three to five mobilizations and lowboy moves while getting paid for two, and Clean Water Act exposure runs up to $25,000 per day per violation for conditions another trade created. The rework hides inside your grading phase and corrupts the unit cost you bid the next job from.
The site package is three to five separate visits priced like two. The sequence runs clear and grub, mass grade, underground, and building pad. Then you're off site while vertical goes up, back after dry-in for fine grade, curb, base, and paving, and back once more for topsoil, seed, and pond cleanout. Between those visits every other trade drives across your finished subgrade, tears the silt fence, buries spoil, and washes concrete out on your site. You hold the SWPPP for the whole site, so an inspector's notice of violation for somebody else's tracking or washout comes to you.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them.
What else costs sitework contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What sitework owners ask
How to bill for regrading a pad another trade tore up?
You graded that pad once and got paid for it once. The steel hauler rutted it, somebody buried spoil in it, and you graded it a second time on your own dime.
What does it cost?
You run three to five mobilizations and lowboy moves while getting paid for two, and Clean Water Act exposure runs up to $25,000 per day per violation for conditions another trade created. The rework hides inside your grading phase and corrupts the unit cost you bid the next job from.
What do I do first?
Count the mobilizations in the sequence the job really runs when you bid, and price each one with the lowboy moves included, so remobilization is a line the GC can see.
What are sitework contractors supposed to be making?
Sitework runs 18% gross margin, 15% overhead and 3% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 4 points below it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them. It comes from chapter 6 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.