The civil contractor had been in business for 70 years. Third generation. The kind of company that builds a region's infrastructure and knows every GC in the market by first name. By the time SPM got involved, the situation had deteriorated to a point most contractors never come back from.
The line of credit was maxed. An MCA loan was in daily repayment — pulling cash out of the account whether jobs were billing or not. And the personal home had been pledged as collateral to the bank to access additional credit when the LOC ran dry.
The revenue was there. The backlog was there. The problem was the gap between when work got done and when the cash actually showed up — and the cost of filling that gap with expensive debt while waiting.
The line of credit was at its limit. An MCA was in daily repayment regardless of billing cycle. Every day the business ran, cash was going out before it came in.
Receivables had been chasing for months with no systematic follow-up. The money was owed. The documentation existed. It just wasn't being collected with the urgency the situation required.
To access more credit, the owner had pledged their personal residence. A 70-year family business was now one bad quarter away from a personal financial crisis, not just a business one.
The contractor was profitable on paper. The work was real. The problem was the financial infrastructure — or the lack of it. No one was watching job cost against estimate in real time. No one was running a formal AR aging and following up by account. No one had built a cash flow forecast that showed what was coming and when.
When the MCA went in — which happens when a contractor needs cash faster than a bank will provide it — the daily repayment structure made everything worse. The business was now subsidizing a high-cost lender with operating cash that should have been staying in the account.
The MCA wasn't the cause. It was the symptom of not knowing, months earlier, that cash was about to run out. The root cause was no forward visibility into cash flow and no system for collecting AR before it aged past 90 days.
Yes — but speed matters. The longer the MCA runs, the more cash it drains. The first move is always receivables: audit what's owed, document it properly, and collect aggressively. If there's enough AR to cover the MCA payoff, the business can stabilize. If not, you need a restructuring plan before more debt goes in.
Civil work front-loads cost heavily. Equipment, fuel, labor, and materials go out before a single pay app is approved. When a job mobilizes fast and the GC is slow to pay, a contractor can be 60–90 days into a job with nothing in the account. MCAs market directly to contractors in that situation. They're fast, accessible, and expensive — and once you're in one, the daily repayment makes the cash problem worse.
We start with the cash, not the books. First we audit AR — what's owed, by whom, how old, and what it takes to collect it now. Then we sequence the payoff: highest-drag debt first (usually the MCA), then the LOC, then anything with personal collateral. Payables get triaged — who needs to be paid now versus who will extend terms. Once the immediate crisis is managed, we build the job costing and cash flow structure that prevents the next one. Schedule a call if you're in a similar situation.
If your AR is aging, your LOC is tight, and you're not sure where the money went — that's what we fix.
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