HE RAN THE WORK BEFORE HE RAN THE NUMBERS.
Josh Luebker is Founder, The Construction CFO. A former commercial construction project manager and master electrician who now runs the books he used to be measured against. Josh ran commercial construction before he ran finance. More than 150 projects as a project manager and master electrician, worth over $2.1B combined, with individual jobs from $50,000 to $300M. Data centers, military bases, hospitals, and high rises, across multiple states. Josh takes every first call himself and runs every onboarding personally. He is also the author of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is the written form of what SPM installs.
That order is the whole argument for taking financial advice from him. A construction P&L is the output of decisions made while the work is being bid, coded, billed, and collected, and somebody who has never sat in a bid review or argued a change order can only read the output. He built this practice to work on the decisions instead.
WHAT HE DID BEFORE THIS.
Stated once, here, with the units attached to every figure. The same three paragraphs render on every page of this site that describes him, out of one file, so no two of them can disagree about his own career.
Commercial construction, then finance
Josh ran commercial construction before he ran finance. More than 150 projects as a project manager and master electrician, worth over $2.1B combined, with individual jobs from $50,000 to $300M. Data centers, military bases, hospitals, and high rises, across multiple states.
Why he stopped building and started counting
He kept watching the same thing happen. Subcontractors with full schedules, good crews, and a profitable P&L would run their cash down to nothing and nobody could tell them why. The answer was never in the accounting. It was in how the work was estimated, coded, billed, and collected, and no accountant was looking there. So he built the practice that does.
What he does himself
Josh takes every first call himself and runs every onboarding personally. He is also the author of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is the written form of what SPM installs.
TWO NUMBERS, TWO MEASUREMENTS.
Older pages about him print a combined career total directly beside the value of his largest single project, with nothing saying which is which. Both figures are correct. Printed together without their units, they invite a reader to assume one of them is a mistake, and a reader who thinks one figure is wrong stops trusting the rest of the page. So here is what each one counts.
Every project he managed, added together across a career. It answers how much construction he has been accountable for in total, which is the question behind "has this person operated at my scale or above it".
The smallest and the largest single project inside that total. It answers a different question, which is whether he has run work the size of yours. A contractor at $4M cares more about the bottom of that range than the top of it, because that's where his own jobs sit.
Both figures live in one field in one data file, written as a single sentence with the units inside it, so a page can't render half of the statement.
HOW THE FINANCIAL WORK GETS BUILT.
A field background is only worth talking about if it changes the output. These are the positions that follow from it, and each one is a decision an accounting first practice would make the other way.
Operations first. The financials follow.
We don't start with a chart of accounts. We start with how you bid, how your crews are organised, and when money really moves. Then the financial system gets built to match that, rather than a generic accounting setup getting bent to fit construction.
Job costing mirrors the estimate.
Cost codes are built against your own estimating assemblies, so actuals compare directly to the number that was bid. Cost codes built off a generic template produce blended totals that hide variance until closeout, which is when nothing can be done about it.
The forecast follows your billing, not a calendar.
Cash forecasting is built on your real pay application cycles, retainage terms, and how each general contractor really pays. A forecast that assumes 30 day terms on a job billed monthly and paid at 73 days is a forecast that will be wrong every month in the same direction.
Overhead includes what the job really costs you.
Equipment, scaffold, fleet, shop, and supervision belong in the rate you bid. Most contractors bid 10 percent and run 18 to 28, and the difference is unallocated cost sitting in the wrong place on the P&L.
Every monthly meeting ends in decisions.
Not observations, and not a report emailed over for you to interpret. You leave the meeting with a short list of specific things to do, and the next meeting starts with whether they happened.
TWO PEOPLE, ON PURPOSE.
Josh takes the first call and runs the onboarding, which is 60 days from signature to a closed month on the new structure. The vp of operations, the construction cfo runs the monthly delivery after that. There's no third layer, which is a limit as much as it's a feature: it caps how many contractors can be onboarded at once, and it's the reason nobody is ever introduced to a junior associate they didn't agree to work with.
Josh Luebker, Founder, The Construction CFO. Master Electrician License. Based in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas.
VP of Operations, The Construction CFO: job costing, WIP reporting and the monthly financial review.Read the cadence
SPM The Construction CFO, the practice of Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC.Entity details
CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.runoncfos.com
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