BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO'VE BEEN ON THE JOB.
SPM The Construction CFO is the fractional CFO and construction accounting practice of Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, working with commercial subcontractors and self-performing general contractors doing $1M to $12M in revenue. It's two people. Josh Luebker founded it after more than 150 projects as a commercial project manager and master electrician, and he takes every first call and runs every onboarding himself. Stewart Bohrer came out of commercial electrical operations on large data center work and runs the monthly delivery on every account. SPM holds benchmark data on 48 construction trades, gets a client fully operational in 60 days, and starts at $1,900 a month.
Most fractional CFOs learned construction from a textbook. The people running SPM came from job sites, and that's why the system gets built off the estimate and the draw schedule instead of a template. Job costing that mirrors how you really bid, a forecast built on when your general contractors really pay, and an overhead rate that includes the equipment and the shop, because somebody here has stood in front of a crew and explained why a job lost money.
Every figure on this row is generated from the data files that build the rest of the site, so a number here can't disagree with the same number on a benchmark page.
TWO PEOPLE. ONE FOCUS.
That's a deliberate size and it has a cost we will state plainly: there's a limit on how many contractors can be onboarded at once, and sometimes the answer is a wait. The upside is the one thing most firms can't offer. Nobody junior touches your file, because there's nobody junior to pass it to.
A former commercial construction project manager and master electrician who now runs the books he used to be measured against.
Josh ran commercial construction before he ran finance. More than 150 projects as a project manager and master electrician, worth over $2.1B combined, with individual jobs from $50,000 to $300M. Data centers, military bases, hospitals, and high rises, across multiple states.
He kept watching the same thing happen. Subcontractors with full schedules, good crews, and a profitable P&L would run their cash down to nothing and nobody could tell them why. The answer was never in the accounting. It was in how the work was estimated, coded, billed, and collected, and no accountant was looking there. So he built the practice that does.
Josh takes every first call himself and runs every onboarding personally. He is also the author of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is the written form of what SPM installs.
Came out of commercial electrical operations on large data center work, and now runs the monthly delivery on every account.
Stewart spent years in commercial electrical construction operations, most of it on large data center projects. That's scheduling, manpower, procurement, and the daily argument between the field and the office about what a job is really costing.
The reason that background is on this team rather than an accounting background is the same reason the practice exists. Somebody has to read a job cost report and know whether the number is wrong or the job is wrong, and only somebody who has run the work can tell the difference.
Stewart runs the day to day after Josh finishes onboarding: the job costing, the WIP reporting, the monthly financial review, and the follow through on what got decided in it. Your account doesn't get passed to junior staff, because there are no junior staff to pass it to.
You'll see both "$300M" and "$2.1B" attached to his record and they aren't in conflict. $300M is the largest single project he managed. $2.1B is the combined value of all 150 plus of them. The range on an individual job runs from $50,000 to that $300M, which is the useful part: the same cost discipline has to work on a job worth less than one of your trucks and on a data center.
OPERATIONS FIRST. FINANCIALS FOLLOW.
This is the whole method. Nobody here starts with a chart of accounts. We start with how the work gets won and executed, and the financial structure gets built to match it.
Construction finance fails by a thousand papercuts. A cost code posts to the wrong bucket, a pay application goes in three days late, an equipment rate has not moved since the machine was bought, and a change order gets performed on a verbal. Any one of those is survivable on its own, and all of them together are the difference between a good year and a year nobody can explain.
So we go around the whole ship and mend every plank, because steering harder never fixed a hull. Mended together they add up, and across our own client work the lift comes to 7 to 9 points of net profit before taxes. That is a figure from SPM's own engagements rather than an industry benchmark, and it is the whole argument for one engagement covering bookkeeping, controllership, and the CFO work together. Four vendors each mending their own plank is how the leaks stay in.
We don't start with a chart of accounts. We start with how you bid, how your crews are organised, and when money really moves. Then the financial system gets built to match that, rather than a generic accounting setup getting bent to fit construction.
Cost codes are built against your own estimating assemblies, so actuals compare directly to the number that was bid. Cost codes built off a generic template produce blended totals that hide variance until closeout, which is when nothing can be done about it.
Cash forecasting is built on your real pay application cycles, retainage terms, and how each general contractor really pays. A forecast that assumes 30 day terms on a job billed monthly and paid at 73 days is a forecast that will be wrong every month in the same direction.
Equipment, scaffold, fleet, shop, and supervision belong in the rate you bid. Most contractors bid 10 percent and run 18 to 28, and the difference is unallocated cost sitting in the wrong place on the P&L.
Not observations, and not a report emailed over for you to interpret. You leave the meeting with a short list of specific things to do, and the next meeting starts with whether they happened.
WHAT THE SYSTEM DOES WHEN IT RUNS FOR REAL.
14 anonymized client engagements, every figure taken from the client's own books. No company is identified, because a contractor's financial position is his business and not our marketing. Each row links the full study.
Visibility Into a Business That Felt Random.
80% Spent at 60% Complete, Job After Job.
39% Gross, 6% Net, and 33 Points In Between.
$365,000 Recovered and All Debt Cleared in 120 Days.
From Four Merchant Cash Advances to Debt Free.
$1.3M Less Revenue and More Profit.
6.7% to 11.2% Net in 120 Days.
$24,000 to $1.1M in Net Profit.
Overhead 30 Percent to 17, $309K in the Bank.
$310K Collected in 30 Days and the House Kept.
A $2.3M Business Became a $5.5M Business in 9 Months.
Financial Infrastructure Built From Zero, $2.6M in Profit Sharing.
One Customer to Eight, and a 15% Price Rise Nobody Fought.
Breakeven to $12K a Month in 75 Days.
THE SHORT LIST OF THINGS WE DON'T DO.
Not payroll, not tax preparation, not audit or review engagements, and not a bookkeeping-only service. Clients keep their CPA for tax and compliance work.
That last one is worth saying twice, because it's the most common misread. SPM doesn't replace your CPA. Your CPA files the return and handles the compliance work, and they do it better with a set of books that are already right. SPM is the layer between the field and that return, and it's priced as one engagement with no scope gaps between the bookkeeping, the controllership, and the CFO work. Pricing runs from $1,900 a month and there's a rate for every revenue band published on the site.