$2.3M to $5.5M in business value on identical revenue
A marine general contractor wanted to sell, and found out what a buyer pays for is provable profit, which he couldn't prove.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
This owner wasn't in trouble. Experienced crews, strong general contractor relationships, work kept arriving. He wanted to sell and looked at what the business was worth, and the number wasn't there. Four people in accounting, no job costing, and no reporting at the project level.
What was actually happening
A buyer doesn't pay for revenue. They pay for profit they can verify will still be there after the current owner leaves, and verifying it means per-project history somebody outside the business can audit. Without job costing there's no such history, so the profit is a claim rather than an asset, and the multiple drops to match. The money was already inside the business. It was just not documented in a form anyone would pay for.
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 job costing structure, tightened spending that had never been looked at closely because the business had always been comfortable enough not to, including subscriptions, vendor terms and material purchasing, and put clean twice-monthly reporting in place for every job. Nine months of that reporting is what turned the profit from a claim into a record.
The result
Net profit went from 7% to 14% on the same revenue, recovering $917,000 a year that was already in the business. At 7% net with disorganized books he valued at $2.3M on a 2.5 multiple. At 14% net with nine months of documented profitability he valued at $5.5M on a 3 multiple. Same revenue, same crews, same work, $3.2M more in value.
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?
A buyer doesn't pay for revenue. They pay for profit they can verify will still be there after the current owner leaves, and verifying it means per-project history somebody outside the business can audit. Without job costing there's no such history, so the profit is a claim rather than an asset, and the multiple drops to match. The money was already inside the business. It was just not documented in a form anyone would pay for.
What did you change?
We built the job costing structure, tightened spending that had never been looked at closely because the business had always been comfortable enough not to, including subscriptions, vendor terms and material purchasing, and put clean twice-monthly reporting in place for every job. Nine months of that reporting is what turned the profit from a claim into a record.
How long did it take?
9 months. 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, 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 marine contractor?
No. This is one company at $10M–$25M 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.
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.