ONE PROBLEM, IN DETAIL

UNDERGROUND UTILITY: BORE PITS AND MOBILIZATION

QUICK ANSWER

Bore pits, casing, and drill setup concentrate cost before the first foot of product pipe bills. Enrichment: keep pit excavation, shoring, and dewatering coded separately from bore production so the unit price and the setup cost stop hiding each other.

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

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

WHERE THE MONEY GOES.

Bore pits and mobilization (the front-loaded footage)

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.

Underground Utility 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 underground utility 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.

As their own schedule-of-values lines, front-loaded to when the cost happens: pit excavation, shoring, dewatering, and casing before a foot of product pipe bills. Buried in the unit price, the setup finances the job for the owner.
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 underground utility job and your last full year. We will show you what this is worth in dollars before we talk about working together.

You don't hire a CFO because it's safe, you do it because the real risk isn't having one.
Book a 20 minute diagnostic

20 minutes. No sales pressure. We will tell you exactly what's broken before we talk about anything else.

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