THE SYSTEM, WRITTEN DOWN.
CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System is Josh Luebker's book on how a commercial subcontractor builds a financial structure that reports job margin while the job is still in progress. It covers 8 subjects: job cost structure, equipment cost basis, overhead calculation, estimating alignment, software setup, project management, monthly cadence, and accountability standards. Every chapter fixes one thing and ends in something you keep, so start with whichever one is hurting and take the others in any order you like. The order they are printed in is simply the fastest route through all eight. The cost code, equipment, and overhead templates are downloadable at runoncfos.com, where the book itself is sold. The same system, installed for you, is the CFOS engagement this site is about.
Within 48 hours of its October 1, 2026 release the book ranked on Amazon: #1 in Construction Industry, #1 in Home Improvement Estimating, #9 in Financial Accounting. Captured October 2, 2026 at 8:03 PM Central. On release day the Kindle edition was the #1 New Release in Financial Accounting, captured October 1, 2026 at 8:42 AM Central.
- ISBN-13
- 979-8187939664
- Length
- 88 pages
- Published
- October 1, 2026
- Editor
- Edited by Holly Joyner, NYT bestselling ghostwriter and LinkedIn ghostwriter for business owners. Work with Holly: TheStorySpark.com
- Contributor
- Stewart Bohrer
- Publisher
- Sulphur Prairie Operations, LLC, doing business as Run On CFOS
The honest relationship between the two is worth stating before anything else on this page. The book holds nothing back to sell the service, because what stops most owners is knowing how construction sequencing and accounting have to work together before the data is any use to either one. If you have the appetite to build it yourself, the book is the whole system and the templates come with it.
8 SUBJECTS. START WITH ANY ONE.
Any one of them is worth reading by itself, and the one costing you money this month is the one to open first. The printed order is the fastest route through all eight only because some of it compounds: an overhead rate needs direct job expense to have somewhere to live, an estimate needs the overhead rate to be real, and a monthly cadence needs a structure that has stopped moving. Each subject below links the page on this site that goes deepest on it, so you can read the published write-up of any subject before deciding whether to buy the book.
The cost code structure comes first because everything else is built out of it. The book builds it in three levels: seven broad categories at level one, a breakdown by type at level two, and the phase or timing breakdown at level three, with the rule that a $1 to $12 million sub uses one and two on every project and three on phased work. The seven are material, subcontractors, equipment, tools, labor, direct job expense, and other, so a cost posts somewhere a human can read, and never into a bucket called job expense. It insists on tracking dollars against dollars and hours against hours, because burden rates differ by employee depending on family coverage and retirement contributions, so a labor number that only exists in dollars does not show which of the two went over. It also carves out direct job expense as its own category, which is the one most estimators leave out: superintendents, non-working foremen, project managers, assistant PMs, safety, job trailers, storage containers, permits, and legal. Those costs are required to execute a specific job and they show no physical progress on it, so a structure with nowhere to put them puts them in overhead and prices the next bid wrong.
The true daily, weekly, and monthly cost of every piece you own, computed from how long you plan to own it, what it will cost to replace, general maintenance across the ownership period, insurance and registration, the major repairs that happen once or twice across the whole ownership period, and your real count of annual working days after holidays and planned downtime. The daily figure is the one job costing uses. The book is blunt about why bundled all-in hourly rates fail: when the machine, the operator, and the fuel are one number, an eight hour day that lasted twelve is a labor overrun you can't see, because it's inside a rate that looks correct. It also covers the thirteen month rule, which is that rental companies charge thirteen months in a year on monthly rentals and you should price your own iron the same way.
Overhead is everything it takes to keep the business open when you aren't building, and the book sorts it into eight categories: office requirements, software subscriptions, administrative expenses, employee benefits and development, owned equipment idle time and normal maintenance, insurance, non-direct job employees, and everything else. The category that decides whether the number is right is non-direct job employees, because it's where the estimating team, the safety manager, in-house accounting, business development, the C-suite, and the owner belong. The rule the book gives for the borderline cases is the useful part: a project manager dedicated to a few jobs at a time is a job cost, and one who floats across seven or more, or who handles company-wide functions, is overhead. Apply that rule honestly and the rate usually comes out well above what the business believed it was.
Once the real overhead rate exists, estimating stops relying on a round number somebody picked years ago. The book treats the ten percent overhead and five percent profit most subcontractors build into a bid as an assumption to be replaced, because a bid built on an overhead rate half the size of the real one is a job that loses money on the day it's won. The alignment step is where the cost code structure, the equipment cost basis, and the overhead rate get pushed back into the estimate, so budget and actual are comparable line by line. That comparability is the whole point. Without it a finished job produces a profit figure and no explanation of it.
A structure that lives in a spreadsheet is a structure one person maintains and everybody else works around. The book covers getting the cost codes, the equipment rates, and the overhead calculation into the system the company works in, so the accounting record and the job cost record are one record, so nobody spends month end reconciling two of them by guesswork. SPM does this step with ControlQore, a job costing and WIP platform, and it's included in the engagement. Reading the setup chapter and doing it yourself is a real option, and the templates are downloadable at runoncfos.com.
This is the documentation subject, and it's in the book because of what happens when documentation is thin and a claim gets tested. The standard the book sets is whatever the authority deciding the dispute will accept: a judge, an arbitrator, or a jury who knows nothing about construction. Daily logs, time stamps, and correspondence get you partway. Proving what a specific piece of equipment cost per day is what gets you the rest, which is why the equipment cost basis is a legal document as much as a pricing one. The instruction is to document as simply and as free of emotion as you can, because the reader you're writing for isn't in the industry.
The cadence is what turns the structure into a system somebody operates. Books closed and bank reconciliations finished by day 10, a 13 week cash flow forecast treated as a decision tool, and 13 months of history in the monthly report so the trailing twelve can be averaged and this month can be compared to the same month a year ago. Four balance sheet standards are stated numerically and they're the ones the book asks you to check every month: working capital at 10 to 15 percent of annual revenue with 13 percent as the target, a current ratio between 1.3 and 2, debt to equity below 1 which is tighter than the ceiling a bank will lend against, and $650,000 of cash on hand for a company using the full system.
The last subject is the one that decides whether any of the others survive contact with a busy quarter. A monthly meeting that ends in a report is a meeting nobody has to act on. The book asks for the meeting to end in a short list of specific decisions, each with a person and a date attached, and for the next meeting to open with whether they happened. That single rule is what separates a company that improved from a company with better reports, and it's the part of the system a reader is most likely to skip, because it's the only chapter that asks something of the owner personally, where every other chapter asks it of the accounting.
MOST OF THE BOOK IS METHOD. THESE ARE TARGETS.
Worth separating out, because the rest of the book teaches you to compute your own numbers and these four are stated outright. They're the balance sheet checks the monthly cadence checks, and they're the same figures every system pages on this site renders, read from one file and never typed on each page.
The book's Amazon description says it walks you through the framework Josh's firm uses to turn stressed, reactive subcontractors into businesses with 22 to 30 percent gross profit, 12 percent net profit and $650,000 in the bank at all times. Those are the outcomes the book describes. The targets this site publishes for your own business are set per trade and per revenue band, because a painting contractor and a tunnel contractor don't have the same cost structure.
THREE HONEST OUTCOMES AFTER SOMEBODY READS IT.
Nobody selling a book writes this section, which is the reason it's here. The question every reader has is whether they can build this themselves, and the answer depends on the owner rather than on the difficulty of the material.
This is a genuine option and the templates exist for it. It works when somebody in the business has the appetite to work through a cost code structure and an overhead spreadsheet for a few evenings and then defend the result against the way the company has always bid. Owners who are already comfortable in their numbers get further with the book than they expect.
This is the common path, and the reason is time. The structure isn't hard to understand and it's slow to build, and every week it's half built is a week of job costs coded into a structure that's about to change. SPM gets it fully operational in 60 days, with the books migrated back to the start of your last taxable year so the year you're in is complete, with nothing missing back to the day you signed.
The book gets read, the ideas get agreed with, and nothing changes, because the next bid was due. That's the reason the accountability subject is in there at all. If you read it and nothing has changed in ninety days, what you need is somebody accountable for the work getting done.
The book is the system written down. The engagement is somebody installing it inside an operating business, keeping the cadence in the month when a crew is short and two jobs are behind, and meeting with you when the number says something you didn't want to hear. Those are different purchases and the first one is cheaper by several orders of magnitude.
SUBCONTRACTORS WHO SELF-PERFORM, AND THE PEOPLE WHO MANAGE THEM.
SPM The Construction CFO is the fractional CFO and construction finance practice of Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, headquartered in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas and delivering its work remotely to contractors across the United States and Canada. It operates CFOS, the Construction Financial Operating System, for commercial subcontractors and self-performing general contractors doing $1M to $12M in revenue, and works as a fractional finance department for them. Founded and operated by Josh Luebker.
The book is written for the same reader. It assumes you know how the work gets built and doesn't assume you know accounting, which is why it starts at cost codes and works up to the chart of accounts, and why the equipment chapter is about what a machine costs you per day, with depreciation method left to your CPA. If you've ever finished a job that felt profitable and couldn't explain the number at the end of it, the sequence in this book is the explanation.
Find out more information at runoncfos.com, where the book is sold and the current price and release date are kept. Every CONTROL template comes with it, and the CFOS engagement is the same system installed for you.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
The paperback is $24.99 on Amazon. It is the copy you write in, which is the point of it, and it is the one to get.
Every CONTROL template lives at runoncfos.com/cfos-toolkit. A QR code printed in the book opens each one with nothing to type; if you reach the address yourself, the password is printed beside the code.
