EIFS / STUCCO: THE CURE-TIME CLOCK
Base coats, brown coats, and finish coats each carry temperature and moisture windows; three-coat stucco adds cure days between coats that EIFS compresses. Cold snaps and rain rewrite the calendar.
This page covers one problem. The full picture for this trade, including the other places margin leaks, is on the eifs / stucco operating system page.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES.
Covered in full in the quick answer above. The sourced numbers and what controls it are below.
THE NUMBER TO MEASURE IT AGAINST.
EIFS / Stucco contractors run about % net profit at $1M to $5M, rising to roughly 10% at $5M to $10M. The CFOS target at $1M to $5M is10%, set at 10 percent before taxes or 3.5 points better than your trade's average at your revenue, whichever is higher. A problem like this one lives in the distance between those two figures rather than in a loss on any single job.
Gross margin over the same bands runs % to 24%, against a CFOS target of 10%.
THE SYSTEM THAT FIXES THIS.
Billing, documentation and collections, which is where the days hide.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
