ONE PROBLEM, IN DETAIL

SITEWORK: PHASE BILLING ACROSS A PACKAGE

QUICK ANSWER

Clearing, mass grading, utilities, and paving prep each have different cost curves inside one contract. A flat monthly percent-complete bill underfunds the early phases where the iron and the trucking concentrate.

This page covers one problem. The full picture for this trade, including the other places margin leaks, is on the sitework operating system page.

BY JOSH LUEBKERPublished 2026-08-06Updated 2026-08-06
WHAT BREAKS

WHERE THE MONEY GOES.

Phase billing across a package

Covered in full in the quick answer above. The sourced numbers and what controls it are below.

WHAT THIS TRADE SHOULD EARN

THE NUMBER TO MEASURE IT AGAINST.

Sitework contractors run about % net profit at $1M to $5M, rising to roughly 6% 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 20%, against a CFOS target of 10%.

Full sitework benchmark bands by revenue

WHAT CONTROLS IT

THE SYSTEM THAT FIXES THIS.

Cash Flow Cycle System

Billing, documentation and collections, which is where the days hide.

How the Cash Flow Cycle System works

COMMON QUESTIONS

FREQUENTLY ASKED.

Same-day field directives: every "while you're out there" request gets a signed T&M ticket or a priced change order before the machine moves. A package contract makes drift easy to ask for and hard to bill later; the directive log is the boundary.
Phase-weighted, not flat percent-complete. Clearing and mass grading concentrate the iron and trucking cost early; utilities and paving prep spend differently. Weight the schedule of values to each phase's real cost curve so the billing follows the spend.
Three tiers, and which one you are in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. Core is where you stop guessing: job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a monthly meeting that ends in decisions, while your bookkeeper keeps doing the books. Executive is where you stop touching the books, because we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Strategic is where every job shows its margin while it is still running, because the job costing and WIP platform is set up and managed for you. No payroll. No scope gaps.
Sixty days. We migrate your books back to the start of your last taxable year, set up ControlQore, and build your job costing structure from scratch. Fully operational in two months.
WHAT THIS TIES INTO
Josh Luebker, The Construction CFO
Josh Luebker
FRACTIONAL CFO · THE CONSTRUCTION CFO

Former commercial project manager and master electrician: 150+ projects worth $2.1B combined, from $50,000 to $300M. Now fractional CFO to commercial subcontractors.

IS THIS COSTING YOU MORE THAN YOU THINK?

Bring one sitework job and your last full year. We will show you what this is worth in dollars before we talk about working together.

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