Almost every contractor who calls me opens the same way.
Crews are busy. Backlog is full. Bids are coming in. And they still can't figure out where the money goes.
They think they need a bigger year. Usually they don't. They just need to see the year they're already having with clarity.
I've sat across from hundreds of subs, from concrete to civil to marine, doing anywhere from $1 million to $25 million. The stressed ones almost never have a revenue problem. They have a visibility problem.
The money is there. They just can't see it, so they can't control it.
Here are the 4 places it hides:
1. Job costing. Most owners track four buckets: material, labor, equipment, subs, and call it job costing. It isn't. Four buckets tell you what the company spent. They don't tell you which job made money and which one ate your year. Real job costing puts every hour, every invoice, and every piece of equipment against the job that used it. Do that, and half your "winners" turn out to be break-even.
2. Overhead. You bid an overhead percentage into every job. If it's wrong, and for most subs it's badly understated, every project starts underwater. I've seen contractors bidding 10% while the real number was 30. Every job lost money the moment they signed.
3. Billing and collections. This is where profit turns into cash, or doesn't. Bill too little on your pay apps and you finance the job yourself. Let receivables age and you borrow against money you've already earned. The work is done. The cash is just stuck in someone else's account.
4. The cash flow forecast. Your P&L tells you what happened. Your WIP keeps the bank comfortable. Neither tells you what's coming. A rolling 13-week cash flow forecast does. It's the one tool that lets you see a tight week while you can still do something about it.
Here's what fixing those looks like in real numbers.
One GC doing $13.5 million had good crews and messy books. We built the job costing and tightened spending, and net profit went from 7% to 14% on the same revenue. That lifted the value of his business from $2.3 million to $5.5 million. $3.2 million more.
A $3.4 million civil sub had four cash advances stacked up, 32% overhead, 5% gross profit. We restructured, rebuilt the job costing, and collected $245,000 he was owed. The advances are gone, overhead's at 15%, gross profit's at 33%.
Neither won more work to get there. They saw the work they already had.
When the four run right, here's the picture: Projects at 22 to 30% gross profit, the company around 12% net, and enough cash that a slow month is an inconvenience, not an emergency. You pay yourself a real salary. You take a week off without the business falling apart.
If you've been telling yourself the next big job fixes the cash, I'd gently push back. A bigger job just moves more money through a system you still can't see. Fix the visibility first.
Which of those four can you see clearly today, and which are you guessing at?
If you're guessing at more than one, that's exactly what I help contractors fix, and it doesn't take a bigger year. I run a call where we go through your real numbers and I show you where the cash is stuck.
No pitch, no cost: https://app.constructioncfo.net/book/find-whats-tight
Prefer to start on your own? My free tools walk you through your overhead, billing, and margins in about a minute each: constructioncfo.net/tools-for-construction-subcontractors
