Resources

Pick your trade and revenue band. Three targets, the shortfall you carry, and the order to close it.

All 48 trades across 7 bands, with sources and methodology.

Every figure exact, every name kept out of it. What was wrong, why, and what changed.

21 working files: job cost codes, equipment rates, overhead, alignment, PM standards, cash flow, the lender WIP schedule and the CEO report skill.

Thirteen months, eleven charts, benchmarked to the trade. Built on invented figures so you can read it before handing over an address.

Gross profit on the project, net profit on the company, and cash on the balance sheet, in the order they come.

A range, not a number, because where you sit inside it is decided by how much of the work your own crews touch and how clean your cost codes are.

Twelve percent sits above what every one of the benchmarked trades averages. That's the point of it. It's a target, and the published averages are what happens without one.

The figure comes from the working capital rule applied at one revenue size, and the rule scales to whatever size you are.

Zero is not zero. The floor a construction company has to hold is 3 to 6 months of fully burdened monthly operating expenses, and everything under it is a deficit nobody measured.

Growth does not fix a weak financial system, it magnifies it. Three tests that say whether you are stable enough to grow.

52 weeks divided by a 4 week billing cycle is 13 periods. What that does to the rate you charge for iron you already own.

What your trade carries at your size, what the CFOS target is, and why the number on your bid sheet stopped matching either one.

What your trade earns above direct cost at your size, and the margin the system is built to hold.

What is left after everything, by trade and by size, and the number the system is built to reach.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

How the group compares on margin, overhead and net profit at $1M–$5M.

Seven cost categories and three levels of granularity, built so the estimate and the ledger use the same words.

A true internal rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport, charged to the projects that used it.

What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying.

The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.

Live job costs inside thirty seconds, with the bookkeeping cadence that keeps them true.

Billing dates, change orders, and notices, run as standards that hold without anyone chasing them.

Weekly bookkeeping, cost to complete, and one CEO report, on the same days every month.

Five hours a month of owner time, spent ahead of the work.

Your P&L says you made money and your bank account says you didn't. Both are telling the truth.

You get paid when the GC gets paid, which means the GC's problems are now your problems.

Add up your retainage receivable. Compare it to your net profit for the year. They're usually about the same number.

If the overhead percentage in your estimating template is lower than what you carry, every job you win loses money before a single hour is worked.

The rate in your bid sheet was right once. Revenue doubled, you hired two PMs and a fleet, and nobody went back to it.

The machine is paid for, so the jobs use it at no charge. Then the transmission goes and the year is gone.

The field did the work. The paperwork never caught up. Ninety days later nobody can prove it happened.

Underbilling looks like a timing problem. Often it's a job that has gone over, and nobody has said so yet.

You can compare the estimate to the job cost report, but the two use different words, so the comparison means nothing.

By the time the report is right, the job is closed and the only thing left to do is feel bad about it.

The best year you ever had on the income statement was the year you almost didn't make payroll.

You moved money on a Thursday night and told nobody. It's happened more than once.

The stack on the corner of the desk is a financial statement. It just isn't a very good one.

It comes back as a fast yes when every other answer was slow. The daily draw starts before the job does.

The surety looks at working capital and equity. Both come from a clean close, and yours happens once a year in March.

If someone asked today which open jobs are over and by how much, the honest answer would take a week to produce.

You have 200 cost codes. The crews use four of them, and one is called Miscellaneous.

You take draws when cash allows. That means your own pay is invisible in every bid you write.

Moving equipment in and getting the first crew productive costs real money that no line item on your bid covers.

The big jobs get watched. The small ones get squeezed in, and nobody ever costs them out.

One general contractor is 40% of your year. Their payment terms are your payment terms, and their bad quarter is your bad quarter.

Two crews run the same scope under the same conditions. One finishes ahead of the other, and your reports can't tell you which one it was.

You bid the material in March and buy it in September, and by then the price is nothing like the number you used.

You asked whether the Henderson job is making money. Three days later the answer was a printout of the P&L.

The workaround has a workaround. Someone maintains a spreadsheet that the whole company depends on.

The books get done once a year for the accountant. In between, you run the company on the bank balance.

Your PMs are measured on schedule and on the client being happy. Nobody is measured on the number at the bottom.

You know it's coming. Winter hits anyway, and every year the bank account takes it as a surprise.

The GC wants a number today. Getting one takes three days, so the work starts anyway and the price gets argued later.

You know your numbers. You don't know whether they're any good, because you've never seen anybody else's.

You know the wage. You don't know the burden, so every labor line in every estimate is a guess with a confident number on it.

You did another two million in work this year and kept the same money. The work wasn't the problem.

You estimate during the day and bill at nine at night, so the pay application misses the cutoff by one day and waits a month.

You checked the scope, the schedule, and the price. You didn't check whether this GC pays, and that's the term that decides the job.

You bid the job assuming the steel was worth something. Between the bid and the teardown, the price moved.

Your last productive day was in August. Release depends on vegetative cover, so the money doesn't reach you until next spring.

You can't legally dig until someone else marks the utilities, and if the marks are wrong you pay for the strike.

Switchgear and transformers are quoted in weeks that turn into quarters. You buy early to protect the schedule and carry it on your own money.

The submittal has been sitting on the engineer's desk for five weeks. The lead time didn't pause while it sat there.

You priced the wire in February and you buy it in November. The metal doesn't care what you signed.

You set temp power before the slab and you're still there at closeout. Retention is held against all of it, the whole way.

Zero is not zero. If you do not know your New Zero, a balance above zero tells you nothing.

A line with no rules stops being a backstop and becomes the operating account.

Paying the wrong one first can put you back where you started, with less cash and the same problem.

Hiring ahead of the work is the most common way a good year turns into a bad one.

Cutting blind takes out the thing that was producing revenue and leaves the thing that was not.

A machine you own bills nothing on the weeks it sits, and the note does not care.