JOSH LUEBKER, SPEAKER.
Construction financial management for people who build, delivered as arithmetic they can check rather than theory they have to trust. 6 talks, from a 30 minute session to a half day workshop, on the subjects that decide whether a subcontractor keeps the money it earns: overhead, job costing, WIP and the price of slow payment. 19 published citations behind it, every one on somebody else's site.
Read the topics rather than the bio. An organiser is deciding one thing, which is whether the room will thank them for the booking, and the only honest evidence for that's what a session does with the audience's own numbers.
HE RAN THE WORK BEFORE HE RAN THE BOOKS.
Josh is a former commercial construction project manager and master electrician who now runs the finance function for commercial subcontractors. That order counts on a stage: he ran the work before he ran the books, so a room full of contractors gets somebody who has stood in the mud and can still read a WIP schedule, and the arithmetic on the screen is arithmetic he has run on real jobs.
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.
6 SESSIONS, 5 OF THEM ARITHMETIC.
Missing payroll is a timing problem, and the money is usually already inside the business.
The five places cash hides in a subcontracting business: work performed and not billed, billed and not collected, retainage, an overhead rate below what the company costs, and growth outrunning working capital. Each with the test that finds it.
Almost every contractor in the room bids ten percent and runs far above it, and most have never computed their own number.
What belongs in overhead and what belongs on a job, owner compensation at market rate, why the rate climbs every year with no line item to blame, and the live arithmetic that produces a real rate from the audience's own figures.
If the cost codes weren't built against the estimating assemblies, the job cost report can't answer the only question worth asking.
Building cost codes against your own assemblies, production rates as the assumption and the reality, the two week window where a variance is still recoverable, and closing the loop into the next estimate.
Your bank and your surety read two columns first, and most contractors couldn't say which two.
Overbilling and underbilling and what each one says about the company, why profit fade hits all at once at closeout, and the cost-to-complete discipline that stops it.
Pay-when-paid is working capital lent to a general contractor, and it has a price nobody prices.
The carry cost of the wait, front loading a schedule of values honestly, what a surety thinks of an overbilled position, and pricing the general contractor rather than the contract.
How good people become harder to read and easier to forget, and why alignment counts for more than polish.
Delivered at Converge Construction Summit 2026 as an interactive workshop hosted by Megan Shapiro. The one talk on this list that's not about arithmetic.
5 of the 6 link to the page on this site that carries the same arithmetic, so an organiser can check the content before booking it rather than after.
PICK THE ONE YOUR SLOT WILL HOLD.
45 to 60 minutes with questions. Works best with the arithmetic on screen and the audience running it on their own numbers, which turns a talk into something they take back to the office.
Half a day. The room leaves with a real overhead rate, a real WIP read, or a thirteen week forecast started, depending on which one the organiser picks.
Josh has done these with software companies, lenders and lien specialists, including a four person public works roundtable. Panels play to his strength, because the questions come from the audience and not from a script.
Long form. The longest to date ran an hour and thirty seven minutes on job costing and holding general contractors to the contract.
AND WHAT THE ROOM TAKES HOME.
SO NOBODY FINDS OUT ON THE DAY.
There's no fee, travel radius or audience-size figure on this page either. Those depend on the event, and a range printed here would be wrong for most of them.
19 CITATIONS, ALL ON OTHER PEOPLE'S SITES.
10 podcast appearances, 5 webinars and recorded interviews, 1 conference session and 3 published pieces. Every one was published by the host crediting Josh directly, which is the standard that list holds itself to, and every entry links to where the host put it.
Hosted by eBacon, CrewCost, Billd, and LumberFi. The longest podcast to date ran 1hr 37min on Blue Collar Business. Most recent conference session: Professionally Invisible at Converge Construction Summit 2026, an interactive workshop on how good people become harder to read and easier to forget, and why alignment counts for more than polish if you want to be remembered, trusted and understood. Hosted by Megan Shapiro.
BEFORE YOU SEND THE INVITE.
