$2.6M paid out in profit sharing, bank never below $1.2M
A marine general contractor at eight figures had no job costing, no WIP reporting and no project-level visibility at all.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
A business this size usually has something. This one had a bank balance and a tax return. There was no job costing, no work in process reporting and nothing that told anyone how a specific project was performing while it was still running.
What was actually happening
At $25M the absence of project-level reporting stops being an inconvenience and becomes the whole risk. One bad job at that scale can absorb the profit from several good ones, and without WIP the loss turns up only when the job closes. The business was profitable, which is why the problem never got pushed on. Comfortable is the hardest condition to change from.
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 the whole structure from scratch: job costing, WIP reporting, and a monthly cadence that puts the numbers in front of the people who can act on them while there's still time to act. Building it from nothing is slower than fixing something already in place, and it holds better afterwards, because nothing has to be unlearned.
The result
The bank balance hasn't dropped below $1.2M since the engagement started. The business generated over $1M in net profit and paid out $2.6M in profit sharing.
Other contractors with the same problem
All 14 are on one page, filterable by which step did the work.
What owners ask about this one
What was actually wrong?
At $25M the absence of project-level reporting stops being an inconvenience and becomes the whole risk. One bad job at that scale can absorb the profit from several good ones, and without WIP the loss turns up only when the job closes. The business was profitable, which is why the problem never got pushed on. Comfortable is the hardest condition to change from.
What did you change?
We built the whole structure from scratch: job costing, WIP reporting, and a monthly cadence that puts the numbers in front of the people who can act on them while there's still time to act. Building it from nothing is slower than fixing something already in place, and it holds better afterwards, because nothing has to be unlearned.
How long did it take?
Since the engagement started. 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 the one before it never established produces output that looks finished and isn't.
Do these figures apply to every marine contractor?
No. This is one company at $25M–$50M and the numbers are its own. What generalizes is the mechanism, not the magnitude. The published marine benchmarks across all 7 revenue bands are on its trade page, and those are the figures to measure yourself against.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.