When does a contractor need a CFO?
Not at a specific revenue number. Under $1M to $100M in revenue, doing commercial progress-payment work, the real trigger is structural: you can't tell which job made money until it's over, or growth keeps coming and the cash doesn't keep pace with it.
That's a job costing and monthly cadence problem. Below is how to tell if it's yours, and the two ways to fix it.
Six signs it's already you
None of these are about how hard you work. They're about what the numbers can and can't tell you yet.
| What's happening | Read more |
|---|---|
| You ask if a job is making money and the answer takes days and turns out to be a P&L printout | Your bookkeeper can't answer the question |
| There's a tax return once a year and nothing in between | There's no monthly close, only a tax return |
| Job costs are old enough that the job they describe is already closed | Your job costs are six weeks old |
| Nobody can say what's earned but not billed, or billed but not earned | You don't have a WIP schedule |
| The field prices one way and the office codes cost a different way | Cost codes the field ignores |
| Project managers run schedule and nobody owns the margin | PMs aren't accountable for margin |
Build it yourself, or have it installed
Run On CFOS publishes the 8-step system in the open, no cost to read, with 6 working templates behind it. Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC is the firm that installs it for owners who would rather buy the result than build it themselves. Neither is the wrong answer. The question is which one you are.
What owners ask before deciding
When does a contractor need a CFO?
Not at a revenue number by itself. Under $1M to $100M, under $1M it's the cheapest form of this you'll otherwise pay more for later, and above $100M you almost certainly already have a finance team. The actual trigger is structural: you can't tell which job made money until the job is over, or growth keeps coming and cash doesn't keep pace. That's a job costing and monthly cadence problem, and it's what a CFO function fixes, whether you build it yourself or have it installed.
Fractional CFO vs full-time CFO, which does a trade contractor need?
Almost never full-time at under $1M to $100M. A full-time CFO is a $150,000-plus salary for work that, once the system is running, takes about five hours a month of an owner's time to keep current. Fractional gets you the same job costing structure, monthly cadence, and accountability meeting without holding a full salary through the slow months. Full-time starts making sense once the business is complex enough to need daily financial decisions, which is a later problem than the one most owners searching this term actually have.
What does monthly financial oversight actually look like for a trade contractor?
Weekly bookkeeping so the numbers are never more than a few days stale, a WIP schedule that says what's earned versus billed, a cost-to-complete on every open job, and one CEO report a month that puts gross margin, overhead, and net profit in front of the owner before the month is decided instead of after. Most owners spend about five hours a month once it's running, reviewing rather than producing.
Can I do this myself instead of hiring someone?
Yes. The whole system, 8 steps in order, is published on this site at no cost to read, and six of them come with working templates. Owners who would rather build it themselves start at <a href="/run-on-cfos">the system</a>. This page exists for the owner who read that and would rather someone install it.
Building it yourself? Leave an address and I will tell you the day CONTROL publishes.
A handful of emails between now and release, then it stops. Nothing is sold on and one click unsubscribes.
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 8 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.
SPM The Construction CFO 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.