A maxed $348,000 line of credit, paid off in 60 days
A civil contractor was carrying a maxed line of credit and 30% overhead, and couldn't point at where either came from.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
The line of credit was at $348,000 and had been at or near the ceiling long enough to feel permanent. Overhead was running 30% of revenue. The owner knew something was off and could describe the feeling precisely without being able to name a single line item causing it.
What was actually happening
Thirty percent overhead on a civil business at this size is roughly double what it should be, and it had grown one reasonable decision at a time. None of it looked wrong in isolation. Underneath that, collections were happening when somebody remembered, so the money the business had already earned sat in other people's accounts while the line of credit funded the gap. The line of credit wasn't a debt problem. It was a receivable that had been converted into interest.
This is a known failure and it has a page of its own, with what it costs and how to size it in your business.
The work
We took overhead from 30% down to 17%, which is the single biggest lever at this revenue, and put a collections process on a schedule so chasing money stopped being a mood. Both are ordinary. Neither had ever been done deliberately.
The result
Thirty days in there was $309,000 in the bank. The full $348,000 line of credit was paid off inside 60 days. The owner paid out $65,000 in bonuses that year.
Other contractors carrying the same thing
All 14 are on one page, filterable by which step did the work.
What owners ask about this one
What was actually wrong?
Thirty percent overhead on a civil business at this size is roughly double what it should be, and it had grown one reasonable decision at a time. None of it looked wrong in isolation. Underneath that, collections were happening when somebody remembered, so the money the business had already earned sat in other people's accounts while the line of credit funded the gap. The line of credit wasn't a debt problem. It was a receivable that had been converted into interest.
What did you change?
We took overhead from 30% down to 17%, which is the single biggest lever at this revenue, and put a collections process on a schedule so chasing money stopped being a mood. Both are ordinary. Neither had ever been done deliberately.
How long did it take?
60 days. That is the time to the result on this page, not to the last piece of the install.
Which part of the system did it?
step 03, overhead calculation and step 07, monthly cadence. Installed in dependency order, which is the same order every client gets, because a step that reads from a number nobody established yet produces output that looks finished and isn't.
Do these figures apply to every civil contractor?
No. This is one company at $5M–$10M and the numbers are its own. What generalizes is the mechanism, not the magnitude. The published civil benchmarks across all 7 revenue bands are on its trade page, and those are the figures to measure yourself against.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centers, 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.