A GENERALIST CFO SEES YOUR BOOKS. A CONSTRUCTION CFO SEES YOUR BUSINESS.
Most fractional CFO firms serve restaurants, SaaS companies, professional services firms, and construction companies, and they bring the same financial framework to all of them. That works for a restaurant. It doesn't work for a $6M civil subcontractor whose cash position depends on a 13-week forecast that accounts for DOT retainage, bore pit mobilization cost, and unit-price WIP reconciliation. Construction subcontracting has specific financial failure modes a generalist CFO has never seen, and can't fix without trade-level knowledge.
The financial mechanics of commercial subcontracting are shared across trades, so job costing, WIP, pay apps, retainage, and change orders work the same way whether you pour concrete or pull wire. What changes by trade is where the margin hides. It's equipment for civil, peak labor for concrete, work-type mix for electrical, and site density for SWPPP. A CFO who knows the shared mechanics but not your trade's bleed points still takes a year to find what a trade-specific CFO finds in the first month, and you fund that education out of your own margin.
WHAT IT MEANS.
A trade-specific construction CFO is a CFO whose financial work is built on how commercial subcontracting behaves, meaning percentage-of-completion accounting, retainage mechanics, change order billing, and mobilization cash cycles, rather than on a general business framework applied to a contractor.
FOUR THINGS THE FRAMEWORK DOES NOT COVER.
WIP accounting isn't standard accrual
Percentage-of-completion accounting is the standard for construction and it's not the same thing as regular accrual accounting. It creates overbilled and underbilled positions that sit on the balance sheet and mislead anybody reading it as a normal current asset or liability. A CFO who hasn't worked a WIP schedule reads those lines as timing noise, when they're the most important disclosure on the statement.
Job costing requires construction logic
A civil contractor needs cost categories built around how the work is executed on site, meaning labor by phase, equipment by asset, material by commodity, and direct job expense by superintendent. A generic Labor, Material, and Overhead structure can't answer a single useful question about a civil job. The structure has to come from how the job gets built, and that's trade knowledge rather than accounting knowledge.
Change order management is a financial function
Unbilled change orders are the largest single source of margin loss in commercial subcontracting. Whether a CO gets billed within 48 hours of approval or at job close is a P&L decision, and it decides whether the money gets collected at all. A generalist treats the CO log as project administration, so nobody is accountable for the dollars sitting in it.
Mobilization capital is a specific cash cycle problem
The mobilization shortfall on a $1.8M project runs $80K to $150K of cost before pay app one gets collected. Forecasting that requires modeling billing calendars, GC cutoff dates, retainage, and equipment leases together, not reading the bank feed and projecting a trend off it. A generalist forecast built on bank data can't see money that hasn't been invoiced yet.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A generalist treats equipment as a depreciation line, which misses cost-basis allocation across jobs and any visibility into idle time. One client's balance sheet rose $779K in three months after the equipment cost flow was rebuilt. Nothing about the fleet changed. What changed was where the cost got charged and who could see it.
A contractor reporting a healthy 8% margin broke down to rough-in at 19%, trim at 31%, and service at 44%. Once the work types were separated, the bid mix could be restructured toward the profitable ones. Generalist reporting shows the blended 8% and there's no decision available from that number.
A $6.7M civil contractor went through two bank-recommended generalist CFOs who couldn't diagnose the job costing or estimating problem. Overhead was running 30% against a 29% gross margin, so the company was losing 1% on every job it built. Both of those CFOs were presumably smart and willing, and the loss was hiding in a place generalists don't know to look.
We have recovered $10.7M+ in client AR since 2023 using construction-specific knowledge of pay-app cycles, retainage triggers, and notice deadlines. On one client whose previous generalist CFOs never recovered the receivables at all, the construction-specific collections process cleared the $348K LOC in 60 days. The invoices were the same invoices. The process knew what leverage existed.
WHY IT WORKS IN THE FIELD.
Josh Luebker came up as a PM and a master electrician, so when a change order protocol gets installed the field understands why it exists. That's not a soft benefit. A generalist CFO struggles to get compliance because he can't explain the operational reason behind a financial control, and a control the field doesn't believe in gets worked around inside a month.
Construction margins move a lot by trade, so the right gross margin for a SWPPP contractor isn't the right gross margin for a masonry contractor, and the overhead rates differ the same way. We set targets off benchmarks from 48 active trade specializations rather than a generic construction average. A target borrowed from the wrong trade is worse than no target, because people hit it and think they're done.
A construction CFO reads an AR problem differently. Seeing $400K sitting past 90 days, the question is whether that's retainage, disputed change orders, or genuine slow pay, because each one needs a completely different response and only one of them is a collections problem. Asking the right question first is what makes the first month productive instead of exploratory.
We get to a working system in 60 days because the broken billing structure and the missing CO discipline are recognizable on sight. A generalist spends that same 60 days learning what a WIP schedule is for. Smart and willing gets a generalist there in three to five years, and the question is whether you want to fund that education out of your margin.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
