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 chaos starts, they spend twenty minutes with five numbers. Not a full accounting review — a pulse check. Here’s what they look at, and why.
1. Cash on hand vs. the next 30 days going out
Open your bank balance, then list what’s leaving in the next 30 days: payroll, sub payments, material bills, loan payments, your own draw. If the outflows are bigger than what’s sitting there plus what’s definitely coming in, you have a cash problem — and now you know on Monday instead of discovering it the day payroll hits.
Rule of thumb: you want at least one full payroll cycle plus your biggest monthly sub payment sitting in reserve. Less than that and you’re one slow-paying client away from a crisis.
2. Work in progress: are you overbilled or underbilled?
For each active job, compare what you’ve billed the client against what the job has actually cost you so far (labor, subs, materials). If you’ve billed more than you’ve spent, you’re overbilled — that’s fine, it’s basically an interest-free loan from your client. If you’ve spent more than you’ve billed, you’re underbilled — you’re financing your client’s project with your own cash.
Underbilling on two or three jobs at once is how profitable companies run out of money. Check it weekly. If a job is underbilled by more than 10%, that’s your first phone call Monday morning.
3. Backlog: how many months of work do you actually have?
Add up the remaining contract value on every signed job, then divide by your average monthly revenue. That number is your backlog in months.
Less than 3 months? You’re living bid to bid, and one lost project puts you in a hole. Three to six is healthy. More than nine and you should be raising prices — demand is telling you you’re too cheap.
Most owners guess at this number. Stop guessing. It’s one column in a spreadsheet.
4. Gross margin by job — not by month, by job
Your accountant gives you a monthly P&L. That’s not enough. You need to know which specific jobs made money and which ones bled, while there’s still time to do something about the bleeding ones.
For every active job: (contract value − job costs to date) ÷ contract value. Anything under 15% gross margin on a job deserves your attention that week. Anything under 10% is an emergency — find out whether it’s an estimating miss, a production problem, or scope creep you never billed for.
The pattern across jobs matters more than any single job. If every job is coming in 3 points under estimate, your estimating is the problem, not your field crews.
5. Receivables aging: who’s late paying you
List every invoice past due, sorted by oldest first. Anything over 45 days is a problem; anything over 60 is a project.
Here’s the part owners hate: the squeaky wheel gets paid. Your clients pay the subs who call. If you’re not calling on that 50-day invoice every single week, you’re telling your client it’s fine to pay you whenever. It is not fine. Your subs and your payroll don’t wait, so neither should your collections.
One Monday call a week on overdue invoices will do more for your cash flow than any line of credit.
Twenty minutes that change the week
You don’t need new software for any of this. A spreadsheet, your accounting system, and the discipline to look before the day starts. The owners who scale aren’t smarter — they’re just earlier. They see the problem on Monday instead of feeling it on Friday.
If you run these numbers and don’t like what you see — margins thinner than you thought, cash tighter than it should be — that’s exactly what the 90-day Business X-Ray is for. We put your financials, operations, and positioning under a microscope and hand you a roadmap to fix what’s actually broken. Learn more about the X-Ray here: https://warrenzysman.com/90-day-business-x-ray/ — or book a 15-minute strategy call here: https://calendly.com/warren-warrenzysman/intro-call — and we’ll talk through what your numbers are telling you.