Margin Fade: Where Your Construction Profits Actually Go

You bid the job at 15% margin. You close it at 6%. Nobody stole anything — the profit just faded, a little at a time, in a hundred small leaks. That’s margin fade, and it’s the silent killer of growing GC firms.

The usual suspects

• Change orders that never get priced — or never get collected
• Schedule slip that burns through the labor budget
• Estimating optimism: the bid assumed everything goes right
• Scope creep you absorbed to “keep the client happy”
• No real-time job costing, so you find out at the end

Why it gets worse as you grow

At $2M, you feel every job. At $6M, jobs run without you watching — and the leaks multiply.

Plugging the leaks

It starts with knowing your true costs per job, pricing change orders like you mean it, and holding project managers accountable to the budget. The 90-Day Business X-Ray finds exactly where your margin is going: /90-day-business-x-ray/