Business Owner Insights

Kelly Weber sat down with me to talk about hitting the growth ceiling — why most entrepreneurs don’t stall from lack of effort, but because the business depends entirely on them. We covered my journey from employee to entrepreneur and the strategy work I do with owners now. Part 1 Part 2

Every GC owner I know has a story about the project they should have walked away from. The owner who “just needed a small favor.” The bid you won by shaving your margin to nothing. The job outside your wheelhouse that ate three months and every spare crew hour you had. You took it because…

Your best project manager is the one you worry about least. He’s been with you for years. He knows the customers, he knows the subs, the jobs finish and everybody’s happy. So you leave him alone and spend your time on the problem PMs — the green one, the sloppy one, the one the supers…

The headline number says construction backlog is at 8.5 months, up from July. Sounds healthy. Then you look closer: contractors with data-center work are sitting on 9.9 months of backlog. Everyone else is at 8.3. One in six contractors now holds a data-center contract — the highest share ever recorded. If you’re a $2–10M GC…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…