$24,000 IN NET PROFIT. THEN $1.1 MILLION.
An erosion control and SWPPP contractor was doing $5.2M and netting $24,000. Sites weren't tracked individually, so nobody knew which ones earned and which ones consumed the earnings of the others. We built per site job costing, corrected the overhead rate, and added WIP reporting. Net profit reached $1.1M the following year.
A SWPPP and erosion control business runs dozens of sites at once, each with its own inspection schedule, material draw, and crew travel, and each one small enough that no single site justifies its own report. That's what makes this trade uniquely exposed. Averaged together the sites produced a company that looked roughly break even, and the average was hiding a wide spread where a handful of sites were funding the rest. Giving every site a visible number was the whole intervention, and it worked because the profitable work was already in the building.
A $5.2M SWPPP SUB. FIFTY SITES, ONE NUMBER.
An erosion control and SWPPP contractor doing $5.2M a year, running inspection, installation, and maintenance across a large number of active sites for civil general contractors and developers. Crews were experienced and the customer base was strong enough that work was never the constraint. The company netted $24,000 on $5.2M, which as a profit generating business barely registered.
NO IDEA WHICH SITES PAID.
Every site was billed and costed into one pooled view, so the company knew what it made in total and nothing about where. A site with long crew travel and heavy maintenance looked identical in the accounting to a site 10 minutes away that needed almost nothing.
Pricing was set the same way for all of them, which meant the sites that were expensive to service were priced as though they were cheap. Nobody was declining or repricing anything, because there was no information that would have told them to.
Overhead was also carried at a rate nobody had recalculated against the current volume, so the pooled number that did exist was wrong in a second way on top of being pooled.
POOLED COSTING HIDING THE SPREAD.
The chain ran from job costs pooled at the company level instead of tracked per site, into pricing that couldn't reflect the real cost to serve a site, into a portfolio where profitable sites subsidised unprofitable ones, into a net margin near zero at a revenue level that should have produced real money.
The Job Profitability System was the module that wasn't running, and this is its clearest possible failure mode. Multi site service work can't be managed on an average, because the average is the one number guaranteed to describe none of the sites.
WHAT CHANGED, WEEK BY WEEK.
THE NUMBERS, NOT THE FEELING.
In 2025 the company netted $1,105,000, a 30 percent net margin, on $1.6M less revenue than its peak year. The revenue it gave up was the revenue that had been consuming the profit of everything else.
Total time from first call to per site reporting running every month: about 10 weeks. The full profit result showed in the following complete year.
DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
This applies to any contractor running many small jobs or sites at once rather than a few large ones. The signals are consistent: costs are pooled because no single site seems big enough to track, pricing is broadly the same across very different sites, revenue is respectable and net profit isn't, and nobody can point at the worst site in the portfolio.
If you can't point at your worst three sites without looking, the average is doing the same work here that it was doing there.
See how CFOS applies to SWPPP subcontractors specifically on theSWPPP Operating System page, or book a 20 minute call and bring your own numbers.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
