How a $25M Marine General Contractor Distributed $2.6M in Profit Sharing While Keeping $1M+ in the Bank

Marine general contracting is one of the most financially complex trades in construction. Mobilization costs are extreme — barges, dive crews, marine equipment, specialized permits, tidal and weather constraints that add unpredictability to every schedule. Contracts are often structured around milestone completions tied to conditions no one fully controls. And the payment chain is no more forgiving than land-based work, just harder to manage from a floating platform.

A $25M marine general contractor came to us with a specific problem: their US financial operations had no real structure. The business was producing revenue. It was paying its people. But there was no job costing system, no WIP reporting, no cash flow visibility, and no way for ownership to know on any given day whether the business was building wealth or just staying busy.

We built the financial system from zero. Here’s what the business looked like a year later.

Building Financial Infrastructure on a $25M Operation

Starting a financial system from scratch on a $25M marine GC isn’t a bookkeeping project. It’s a financial architecture project. The chart of accounts has to reflect how marine work actually gets estimated and executed — mobilization costs, equipment costs by asset, dive labor separate from general labor, permit and regulatory costs as direct job expenses, and vessel operating costs allocated to specific projects.

Most accounting systems for contractors this size default to a generic structure that lumps these costs into broad categories. That works fine for a residential remodeler. It doesn’t work for a company where a single barge mobilization can represent $200,000 or more in upfront cost on a $2M project, and where that cost needs to be tracked against the contract’s payment structure to understand real-time margin.

The job costing structure we built mirrored the estimating model — every cost code in the books matched a line item in the bid. When actual costs came in, they landed exactly where the estimate predicted they would, or the variance was immediately visible. That’s what real job costing does: it turns surprises into data points you can act on before the job closes.

The Bank Account Never Dropped Below $1.2M

Once the financial system was operational and cash flow forecasting was in place, the bank account stabilized in a way ownership had never experienced before.

Marine GCs live with significant cash flow volatility by nature. A weather delay can push a billing cycle by two to four weeks. A permit issue can hold up the final payment on a multi-million dollar contract. Without forecasting, these events hit the bank account as emergencies. With a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast updated weekly, they show up as planned gaps with solutions ready before the cash actually gets tight.

The result was a bank account that never dropped below $1.2M during the operating year. Not because the business was unusually flush — because the forecasting told ownership when gaps were coming and they managed around them proactively instead of reactively.

What Most Marine Contractors Miss: Mobilization Cost Recovery

The place where marine GCs most consistently leave money on the table is mobilization cost recovery.

Marine mobilization is expensive and highly visible in the estimate — everyone knows the barge costs money to move. But the full cost of mobilization, including demobilization, standby time, equipment repositioning between phases, and regulatory compliance costs specific to marine work, often doesn’t make it into the contract in a form that’s fully recoverable.

When mobilization costs are tracked at the job level as they’re incurred — not estimated at project start and then forgotten — you can see in real time whether you’re recovering them through the billing structure or absorbing them into margin. On a complex marine project with multiple mobilization events, that tracking can be the difference between a 15% margin and a 6% margin on the same contract.

$2.6M in Profit Sharing. $1M+ in Net Profit. Both.

At the end of the operating year, the marine GC distributed $2.6M in profit sharing to key personnel and still posted over $1M in net profit to the business.

That combination — meaningful profit sharing and meaningful retained profit — is what a financially healthy $25M contractor looks like. It’s not one or the other. It’s both, because the financial system makes it possible to see what the business can support before commitments are made.

Marine contracting attracts skilled people who have options. Competitive compensation keeps them. But profit sharing at that scale only happens when ownership knows with confidence what the business actually produced — not what the P&L shows on an accrual basis after year-end adjustments.

The system produced that confidence. The profit sharing followed.

If you’re running marine work and your financial system isn’t built specifically for how marine projects are estimated, billed, and managed, you’re almost certainly leaving margin on the table. Schedule a free call at constructioncfo.net to walk through your current financial structure and find where the gaps are.