$365,000 of receivables recovered, all debt cleared in 120 days
A commercial electrical subcontractor had a collections problem long enough that it turned into a debt problem.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
Receivables were sitting uncollected and the business had been borrowing to cover what wasn't arriving. That is a sequence rather than two separate problems, and by the time anyone calls it a debt problem the collections problem has usually been running for a year or more.
What was actually happening
Money the business had already earned was sitting in general contractors' accounts, and nothing in the company's week was responsible for getting it out. Meanwhile payroll and material bills kept their own schedule. When the money you are owed and the money you owe run on different clocks and nobody is managing the difference, borrowing is the only thing left, and the interest becomes another fixed cost on top of the one that caused it.
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 job costing from scratch so each job could be billed for what it had actually earned, then put a systematic collections process in place with a specific person, a specific day and a specific list. Ordinary work. It had simply never been anybody's job.
The result
$365,000 of overdue receivables recovered. All debt cleared within 120 days. The owner paid out $23,000 in Christmas bonuses, the first time in eleven years.
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?
Money the business had already earned was sitting in general contractors' accounts, and nothing in the company's week was responsible for getting it out. Meanwhile payroll and material bills kept their own schedule. When the money you are owed and the money you owe run on different clocks and nobody is managing the difference, borrowing is the only thing left, and the interest becomes another fixed cost on top of the one that caused it.
What did you change?
We built job costing from scratch so each job could be billed for what it had actually earned, then put a systematic collections process in place with a specific person, a specific day and a specific list. Ordinary work. It had simply never been anybody's job.
How long did it take?
120 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 01, job cost structure 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 electrical 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 electrical 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.