THE MCA LOOKED LIKE A LIFELINE. IT WASN'T.
Merchant cash advances charge 40% to 80% annualized interest and require daily repayments out of your bank account before you can pay anybody else. One MCA is expensive. Two is a crisis. Four, which is where subcontractors in real trouble end up, is a business paying lenders before it can pay itself. The fix is never another MCA.
The reason this one is worth a whole page is that the decision looks rational on a Wednesday afternoon. Payroll is Friday, the money is owed to you, and somebody will wire funds today. What you can't see from that chair is that the daily debit becomes the reason you need the next advance, and the second one is easier to sign than the first. Every contractor we have pulled out of this had one thing in common. The money to fix it was already sitting in their receivables, and nobody had gone and collected it.
WHAT IT MEANS.
A merchant cash advance is a short term financing product where a lender advances cash in exchange for a percentage of future revenue, repaid through daily ACH debits out of your bank account.
SPM has worked through MCA situations before. The path out isn't another MCA, a consolidation loan, or a payment plan. It's rebuilding the financial system underneath the business so it stops creating the cash emergencies that make an advance look reasonable.
The window to fix an MCA situation without permanent damage isn't wide. The longer the advances run, the more margin they consume, the harder payroll gets, and the more likely you're to take another one. Speed counts more here than in almost any other work we do.
FOUR MCAS, ONE DIRECTION.
MCA 1, taken because cash is tight
A project delays, AR is 60 days out, and payroll is Friday. A $75K MCA at a 1.35 factor costs $26K in fees, and the problem is solved for now. What you also did was commit to repaying $1,200 a day, every business day, ahead of everybody else you owe. Nobody signs that document thinking about day 40.
MCA 2 and 3, where the stacking begins
The daily repayment on the first advance creates a new cash shortfall. A second MCA covers that, and a third covers what the second one created. Each of them pulls from your bank account before you can direct cash anywhere else. At that point your gross margin is funding lenders instead of funding the business.
MCA 4, the ceiling
With four MCAs running, a $3.4M civil contractor was paying $11,000 per week in MCA repayments. Overhead was 32% and gross profit was 5%. The business was generating cash and handing it straight to lenders. This is where most operators get to before they work out that 5% gross profit can't service any of it.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A $100K MCA at a 1.4 factor costs $40K in fees, repaid over 4 to 6 months through daily ACH. While you're repaying, $800 to $2,000 leaves your account every business day regardless of your cash position. Miss payroll and the MCA still pulls. A vendor calls and the MCA still pulls.
A typical MCA runs 40% to 80% annualized. A bank line of credit for the same business runs 8% to 12%. That spread is the whole argument, and it's why the answer to an MCA problem is never a faster MCA. It's the same borrowed dollar at several times the price, collected daily instead of monthly.
A contractor with four MCAs may have $3,000 to $5,000 pulled from the account every business day before any other obligation gets paid. Payroll, materials, and rent all queue up behind that debit. The only exits are paying the advances off, which takes cash you don't have, or rebuilding the financial system underneath them.
HOW YOU GET OUT OF MCA DEBT.
The fastest source of cash is AR you're already owed. A systematic collections push, meaning calling every invoice over 30 days, sending lien warnings, and following up weekly, often recovers $150K to $400K within 30 days. That's money already earned and simply not collected, which makes it the cheapest cash in the building.
Front load every active pay application and get the next draw out before the MCA repayment hits. Billing velocity is the fastest structural fix to the cash timing problem that drove the MCA in the first place. It costs nothing and no lender has to approve it.
If overhead is 30% and gross margin is 12%, no amount of billing or collections fixes the margin problem. Overhead normalization, meaning cutting or reclassifying overhead down toward the band for your own trade and revenue on /construction-overhead-rates-by-trade, is what creates the permanent margin that pays the advances down and keeps them down. For scale, Jones Maresca and Company's 2025 Performance Benchmarks put total indirect cost at 8% to 15% of revenue for construction as a whole and CFMA reports SG&A at 11.8% across all respondents. That $3.4M civil contractor with four MCAs and 32% overhead eliminated all MCA debt, dropped overhead to 15%, and went from 5% to 33% gross profit.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
