You Pay the Pole Owner Months Before You Hang Strand
You cut a check to the power company in March for work your crews don't perform, and the first foot of strand goes up in August. In between there is nothing to bill.
No other trade pays a third party in advance to move somebody else's plant before work can start. The pole owner controls the clock: 45 days to survey on a routine order, 60 to 90 on mid-size and large ones, then 30 days of make-ready in communications space or 90 days above it, and you've no crew on site to influence any of it. Your money sits inside another company's operation, buying work you can't schedule, expedite, or invoice against.
The size of it
Five- and six-figure make-ready payments sit as cash out with zero revenue behind them for three to six months, and one mis-coded check turns a break-even aerial build into a job that looks profitable right up until payroll week.
Under 47 CFR 1.1411 the new attacher accepts the utility's estimate and pays it in full before the pole owner touches a single pole, and then the utility takes its survey window and its construction window before you can build. Cash leaves on your schedule and comes back on theirs. Code make-ready as job cost the day the check clears, tagged to the aerial route it buys. When that payment sits in overhead, the books flatter every open aerial job while the operating account drains and nothing on the P&L explains why.
Three moves, in order
Step 01: Job cost structure
Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.
What else costs telecom contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What telecom owners ask
Do I've to pay pole make ready costs up front before construction?
You cut a check to the power company in March for work your crews don't perform, and the first foot of strand goes up in August. In between there is nothing to bill.
What does it cost?
Five- and six-figure make-ready payments sit as cash out with zero revenue behind them for three to six months, and one mis-coded check turns a break-even aerial build into a job that looks profitable right up until payroll week.
What do I do first?
Open a make-ready cost code on every aerial job and post the utility check to it the day it clears, tied to the pole count and route it paid for.
What are telecom contractors supposed to be making?
Telecom runs 22% gross margin, 15% 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 01, job cost structure. Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words. It comes from chapter 1 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.