Prices went up 15% and the customer said thank you
A site work contractor wanted the system in place before he grew, which after thirty years of businesses is a lesson that costs something to learn.
What it looked like from the owner's chair
He wasn't in crisis. After thirty years of starting and owning businesses he had worked out his own pattern: always running a thousand miles an hour just to survive, always putting cash flow and systems off until it was too late to install them calmly. This time he wanted them first. One primary customer was sending steady hourly work at decent profit, and he knew that concentration was a threat, and he wanted to know what it actually cost to run his business before he started bidding competitive work against people who did.
What was actually happening
His time and material rate was the problem, and it was invisible because the work was profitable enough to hide it. He billed one flat combined number covering operator, machine and fuel. No overtime, no additional fuel burn, no insurance, no general maintenance. Anything past a six hour day he lost money and had no mechanism to find out. His ticket read something like excavator operator, $650, nine hours, which is a number nobody can verify, including him.
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 broke the equipment out and charged it per project with machine, fuel, man hours, insurance and maintenance each on its own line. Pricing went up 15% on what the estimating review turned up. He also diversified deliberately, going from one primary customer to eight contractors in the fold inside 55 days, because the concentration risk was the thing he had actually hired us to look at.
The result
He was certain the customer would push back on the increase. They didn't. They preferred the itemized ticket, because for the first time they could see what they were paying for. The diversification mattered faster than anyone expected. When the son took over at the original customer and went with cheaper labor, our client was already winning other work and didn't flinch. Thirty days later the son called back, because the cheap subcontractor had stopped performing and then stopped answering the phone. He is a regular client again, at the new pricing.
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?
His time and material rate was the problem, and it was invisible because the work was profitable enough to hide it. He billed one flat combined number covering operator, machine and fuel. No overtime, no additional fuel burn, no insurance, no general maintenance. Anything past a six hour day he lost money and had no mechanism to find out. His ticket read something like excavator operator, $650, nine hours, which is a number nobody can verify, including him.
What did you change?
We broke the equipment out and charged it per project with machine, fuel, man hours, insurance and maintenance each on its own line. Pricing went up 15% on what the estimating review turned up. He also diversified deliberately, going from one primary customer to eight contractors in the fold inside 55 days, because the concentration risk was the thing he had actually hired us to look at.
How long did it take?
55 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 02, equipment cost basis and step 04, estimating system. 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 sitework contractor?
No. This is one company at under $1M, in a partial first year and the numbers are its own. What generalizes is the mechanism, not the magnitude. The published sitework 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.