Blog

Practical articles for general contractors on growth, margins, and getting out of the day-to-day.

  • The 5 Numbers Every GC Owner Should Check Every Monday Morning

    Monday morning on a jobsite starts the same way for most GC owners: phone already ringing, a foreman waiting on an answer, and a problem from Friday that didn’t solve itself over the weekend. You spend the day reacting. The owners I know who broke through the $5M ceiling do one thing differently. Before the…

  • Cash Flow Killers: Why Profitable GCs Still Run Out of Money

    Your P&L says you’re profitable. Your bank account says otherwise. Welcome to construction, where the gap between “earned” and “collected” can kill a good company. The killers Profit is a theory. Cash is a fact. You can’t pay subs with work-in-progress reports. The fix is boring and essential: bill fast, collect faster, forecast weekly, and…

  • 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 Why it gets worse as you grow At $2M, you…

  • The Owner-Operator Trap: Why $2M–$5M GCs Get Stuck

    Between $2M and $5M, most general contracting firms hit a ceiling. The owner is the estimator, the project manager, the problem-solver, and the closer. The company can’t grow because it can’t run without you — and you can’t clone yourself. How you know you’re in the trap Why working harder doesn’t get you out The…

  • More Revenue Won’t Fix a Broken Construction Company

    Most GC owners try to grow their way out of chaos. More revenue. More jobs. More people. But if your company can’t run a week without you at $4M, it won’t magically run without you at $8M. You’ll just have bigger fires. Scale doesn’t fix a broken foundation. It amplifies it. Every weakness in your…