$1.3M less revenue, and more profit than the year before
A concrete subcontractor had overhead on the books at 5% when the real number was closer to 12%, so every bid was wrong by the difference.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
Revenue was up and cash never seemed to reflect it. The owner described it as a feeling that something was off, which is the most common way this arrives. The books said overhead was 5% of revenue.
What was actually happening
Five percent overhead on a concrete business at this size isn't lean, it's miscoded. Costs that belong in overhead were sitting in job cost or in places nobody looked, so the rate that went into every bid was understated by roughly seven points. A bid built on a wrong overhead number is wrong before anyone prices a yard of concrete, and it stays wrong for every job you win with it. The more work you take at that price, the further behind you get, which is exactly why the revenue kept climbing and the bank account didn't.
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 corrected the overhead rate to the real 12% and rebuilt job costing so the categories matched how the work actually gets bid. In the first week we collected $203,000 of overdue receivables, which bought the room to fix the pricing without a cash crisis in the middle of it.
The result
The owner implemented profit sharing for the first time, $130,000 paid out to the team. The following year the company did $1.3M less revenue and made more money than the year before it.
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?
Five percent overhead on a concrete business at this size isn't lean, it's miscoded. Costs that belong in overhead were sitting in job cost or in places nobody looked, so the rate that went into every bid was understated by roughly seven points. A bid built on a wrong overhead number is wrong before anyone prices a yard of concrete, and it stays wrong for every job you win with it. The more work you take at that price, the further behind you get, which is exactly why the revenue kept climbing and the bank account didn't.
What did you change?
We corrected the overhead rate to the real 12% and rebuilt job costing so the categories matched how the work actually gets bid. In the first week we collected $203,000 of overdue receivables, which bought the room to fix the pricing without a cash crisis in the middle of it.
How long did it take?
Week one for the cash, the following year for the profit. 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 01, job cost structure and step 03, overhead calculation. 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 concrete contractor?
No. This is one company at $1M–$5M and the numbers are its own. What generalizes is the mechanism, not the magnitude. The published concrete 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.