Two maxed credit lines and an SBA loan, cleared in 90 days
A turnkey civil contractor grew from $500,000 to $5M in two years and financed every month of it, until the house was collateral.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
Concrete, earthwork, utilities and asphalt under one roof, $500,000 in year one, $5M in year two, and $12M projected for year three. By November the owner was awake at 3am convinced he was about to lose his house. He had maxed two lines of credit, taken an SBA loan, and put a personal line of credit against the home. Merchant cash advances were the next call.
What was actually happening
Nothing was wrong with the work. The business won jobs and spent on them faster than it collected on them, every month, and growth made the gap wider each time. That is what a growth curve does to a contractor with no cash flow forecast: every new job is funded by the last one, and the faster you sell the further behind the money gets. The debt was a symptom of timing, and no amount of additional revenue was going to fix a timing problem.
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 built a cash flow forecast so the gap became visible before it arrived, then deliberately slowed the pace of new work for two months to let receivables catch up. That decision is the one most owners won't make, and it's usually the one that works. Alongside it we overhauled billing: schedule of values set up so it bills the way the work actually happens, pay application timing aligned to each owner's cycle, and collections on a routine instead of a panic.
The result
In the first 30 days $310,000 of overdue receivables landed in the bank. Both lines of credit and the SBA loan were paid off within 90 days. Clean books and a defensible cash projection got him approved for a $750,000 loan he couldn't have qualified for three months earlier, and his line of credit availability was raised to $750,000. He is projecting $12M with $300,000 sitting in the bank as a floor. The house is still his.
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?
Nothing was wrong with the work. The business won jobs and spent on them faster than it collected on them, every month, and growth made the gap wider each time. That is what a growth curve does to a contractor with no cash flow forecast: every new job is funded by the last one, and the faster you sell the further behind the money gets. The debt was a symptom of timing, and no amount of additional revenue was going to fix a timing problem.
What did you change?
We built a cash flow forecast so the gap became visible before it arrived, then deliberately slowed the pace of new work for two months to let receivables catch up. That decision is the one most owners won't make, and it's usually the one that works. Alongside it we overhauled billing: schedule of values set up so it bills the way the work actually happens, pay application timing aligned to each owner's cycle, and collections on a routine instead of a panic.
How long did it take?
90 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 06, project management 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.