TRAINING A PM ON THE MONEY: THE ORDER IT HAS TO HAPPEN IN.
Start with one question. Ask a project manager where the money went on one of his jobs as of last month. If he can pull it up in thirty seconds, he needs coaching. If he has to ask accounting, wait for a report or download something and rework it, the system needs fixing before any training will hold. From there it's five things in a fixed order over about ninety days: help him build the cost codes against the estimate, teach him to read his own report weekly, teach him cost to complete and have him present it, write your project management standards down, and give him the authority those standards assume. Skip the order and you get a PM who can recite the report and still can't change the outcome.
A project manager who has never been taught the money isn't resisting the numbers. He has been reviewed on a report he had no part in building, in a structure nobody walked him through, for a job whose price was set before he saw it.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Construction PM training on the financial side is teaching a project manager to run the money on his jobs rather than only the schedule, in a sequence that starts with the cost code structure he helped build, moves to the report, then to cost to complete, then to the written standards that let him act without asking, and finishes with the authority those standards require.
Most subcontractors train a project manager the way they were trained, which is by watching. He learns sequencing, submittals, inspections and how to handle a general contractor's superintendent, all of it by being there. Then one day the job cost report starts going to him and nobody teaches that part at all, because the person sending it learned it from a CPA and the person receiving it learned the job from a truck. So the report turns up, the first review is tense, and within a quarter it's a formality. The training problem isn't the PM's willingness. It's that four separate skills got compressed into one email attachment.
WHY PM TRAINING DOES NOT TAKE.
It's delivered as one meeting instead of a sequence
A two hour session on reading a job cost report teaches vocabulary and nothing else. The PM leaves able to say the words and unable to do anything different on Tuesday, because the skill being taught isn't comprehension. It's a weekly habit attached to a live job with money moving through it. Anything taught in one sitting and never returned to gets forgotten inside a month, and the company concludes the PM can't handle numbers when what really happened is that nobody scheduled the second meeting.
He is taught to read a structure he had no part in building
If the cost codes were built by a bookkeeper to suit accounting, the report groups his work in ways that don't match how he builds it. He is then being taught to translate and not to manage. Every question he asks gets answered with where the accountant would put it, which is the wrong answer for a man deciding whether to move a crew tomorrow. This is the failure the alignment meeting exists to prevent, and it's why the meeting comes before the training rather than after.
The numbers reach him too late to be worth reading
A report delivered monthly, three weeks after the month closed, describes a phase that finished before he saw it. He learns quickly that reading it changes nothing, and a rational person stops reading. Books closed by the tenth with bank reconciliations finished is the floor, because until that's true every review is a review of the wrong month and the PM is right to discount it.
Standards live in the owner's head, so every decision routes back to him
We worked with a $3.4 million civil contractor where the owner and his wife handled everything. No standards existed, so nothing moved without their approval. Projects stalled waiting on decisions, billing slipped, and money came in late. They took a merchant cash advance to cover the wait, then another, then another. Four advances later they were paying $110,000 a month to stay open, with $700,000 in payables over ninety days and no line of credit. No amount of PM training fixes that, because the PM wasn't permitted to act on anything he learned.
Accountability gets taught and authority doesn't
Change order capture is the highest value financial thing a project manager does, and it's only his if he can price and submit within a day or two. Training him to spot a change of conditions while requiring the owner to approve every letter teaches him that spotting it's somebody else's problem to act on. The two have to be the same size. Where a company won't delegate a decision, that result can't be on the PM's scorecard, and the honest move is to take it off the report rather than hold him to something he has to ask permission for.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
Ask a project manager where you're spending money on a project as of last month. If he pulls the answer up on a screen inside thirty seconds, your system is working and what he needs is coaching on what to do about what he sees. If he has to ask accounting, wait for a report, download something or rework it in a spreadsheet, the system is the problem and no training will hold on top of it. Run it as the entry test before you plan any training, then run the same question again at ninety days as the exit test.
The alignment meeting is where a PM learns the cost codes properly, and he learns them by helping build them. Estimator, project manager, superintendent, controller and bookkeeper in one room, going through real estimates line by line, deciding together where every cost belongs when it gets bought. Start with something nobody argues about, such as concrete material going to the concrete material code. Then work into safety glasses, ladders and random hardware store runs, where everybody has an opinion they didn't know they had. Four one hour meetings first thing in the morning covers a full estimate.
What percent complete are we, and how much money is left to spend per line item. Those two answers roll up into whether the job is trending to make or lose money, and they turn four follow up questions loose: are we missing a change order, did we underestimate, do the specs not work the way we thought, does the build strategy need adjusting. Teach the two questions and the four follow ups and the PM is doing the work of a project controls department.
Billion dollar contractors run cost to complete on a dedicated day every month, usually the first Monday after the tenth, and the project management team presents it to leadership. Presenting is the part that trains. A PM who has to stand up and explain his own cost to complete learns the report in one cycle, where the same man reading the same report in his inbox learns it in six or never.
One client's own job reports, pulled against the budgets they had estimated, showed them running at 200 percent of their project management and superintendent budget. They also had assistant PM and assistant superintendent rates in the estimate at half the rate of a person who could really run the work. Nobody had hidden anything. The figures simply had no reader, which is what an untrained project manager costs and why the training pays for itself out of one job.
Billing on the fifteenth. A change order for every change of conditions. A notice of nonpayment on day forty after the general contractor sent their pay application. Delay notices with a date. And the owner taken out of the middle so the project manager could send orders on his own. Within thirty days the four merchant cash advances were negotiated from $110,000 a month down to $20,000. Overhead went from 32 percent to 15, gross margin from 5 percent to 33, and receivables from over ninety days to current. That's what a trained and empowered project manager is worth on one company.
FIVE THINGS, IN THIS ORDER.
Ask the question, time the answer, and write down what happened. It tells you which of two problems you have, and they need opposite responses. A PM who can't reach the number needs the system fixed and the cost codes rebuilt first. A PM who reaches it in thirty seconds and can't say what he would do about it needs coaching, which is a much shorter job. Skipping this test is how companies spend a quarter training a man to read a report he can't open.
Four one hour meetings, first thing in the morning, with the estimator, superintendent, controller and bookkeeper in the room with him. Go through your estimates line by line and give every line a home in the job cost codes. Deliberate the awkward ones out loud rather than ruling on them, because the deliberating is the training. Labor is the messiest, since a man can do one thing for thirty minutes and then switch, so agree how small tasks get coded or agree not to chase them. None of it's right or wrong. It has to be the same across the whole business or the data isn't usable. By the end of week four the PM knows the structure because he argued about it. The blueprint for running these four meetings is one of the templates that comes with CONTROL.
Weekly, not monthly, and in hours as well as dollars on the labor lines so no burden recomputation can distort what he is looking at. Sit with him for the first four. Ask him three things each time: which phase moved, why, and what he is going to do this week. He doesn't need to be right in week five. He needs to build the habit of having an answer, because the value of a weekly report is that a phase is still recoverable while it's running and a monthly one only tells him what already happened.
Books closed and reconciled by the tenth, then he fills out cost to complete: percent complete, and money left per line item. Then he presents it, on a dedicated day, to you and whoever else owns the outcome. Put it on the first Monday after the tenth and keep it there. Presenting is what converts a report into ownership, and the first time a project manager has to explain his own cost to complete out loud is the day the training stops being yours and becomes his.
Four things, in writing: when billings are due, how contract negotiation gets handled, when a notice of nonpayment goes out and who sends it, and when a delay notice goes out and how that conversation with the general contractor goes. Then let him operate inside that framework without asking. The written part is what makes delegation safe, because you aren't delegating judgement, you're delegating a decision that has already been made once. A general contractor may call you difficult for holding the terms you both signed. The ones who say so are the ones with the least experience in the trade. The full project management best practices framework is one of the templates that comes with CONTROL, so this step doesn't have to be written from a blank page.
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.
