A sub's laborer steps off a ladder wrong on your job. His lawyer sues the sub, and he sues you, because it was your site. You pull the sub's certificate out of the file. Your company's name is right there in the box at the bottom left. That box is w...

It is week seven. The framing is done, the roof is on, and the rough-ins start Monday. You have billed 40% of the contract and collected most of it. On paper you are ahead. Your account says otherwise. Payroll went out twice. The lumber package was ...

Your customer asks what you need to get started. You say a third, because that's what everybody says. If you're remodeling a kitchen in California, that answer is illegal. The cap there is $1,000 or 10% of the contract, whichever is less —...

Most contractors price a job backwards. They look at what the last guy charged, shave a little off it, and hope the math works out on the back end. Sometimes it does. More often the job finishes, the money is gone, and nobody can point to exactly wh...

Ask a builder what a carpenter costs and you get the wage. Twenty-eight an hour. It's the number on the check, it's the number in the estimate, and it is wrong by about a third. I'm a working construction CFO. Labor burden is the single most common ...

Nobody skips the safety meeting because they don’t believe in safety. They skip it because it’s 6:40 on a Tuesday, the concrete truck is coming at 7:15, and the foreman has no idea what he’s supposed to talk about. I’m a working construction CFO, an...

I have never lost money on a change order because the form was wrong. I’ve lost it because a signed change order sat in somebody’s truck for five weeks and never made it onto an invoice. I’m a working construction CFO, and if you want to know where ...

The first time somebody asks for your safety binder, it will not be a casual request. It’ll be a compliance officer standing on your job, or a GC’s safety manager before they’ll let your crew through the gate, or an adjuster three weeks after somebo...

Every builder gets asked the same question at the same point in the conversation. The plans are on the table, the client has been quiet for a minute, and then: so what does something like this run per square foot? It is a fair question. It is also t...

Paying a guy on a 1099 feels like the smart, lean move. No payroll taxes, no workers' comp premium, no benefits — just a check and a form at year-end. That's exactly why so many contractors do it, and exactly why so many of them are sitting on a lia...

I'm a working construction CFO, and I've learned to treat permits and inspections like money, because that's exactly what they are. Here's why tracking them is an operations discipline, not a filing chore. Inspections are sequent...

Every dispute on a construction job comes down to the same question: what actually happened, and when? The client says the delay was your fault. You say it rained for six days and their selections were three weeks late. The sub says he was never tol...

Ask most contractors where the money leaks on a job and they'll point to the estimate, the subs, the materials. Real leaks, all of them. But there's a quieter one that almost nobody names: the field paper trail — or the lack of one. The st...

Most construction "onboarding" goes like this: the new hire shows up at 6:45, someone points at a truck, and by 7 he's swinging a hammer with a W-4 he'll fill out "sometime this week." No safety orientation, no I-9 on file,...

The most expensive words in construction are "just go ahead and we'll square up later." You're on site. The owner points at a wall and asks for two more can lights and an outlet on the island. It's a fifteen-minute conversation. You say sure, your e...