What I Do
I coach second-generation construction owners through one journey: get the cash right, install an operating system, grow around your best customers, and build the kind of value that gives you options. Sell, keep, or pass it on. Your call.
Forty years in construction. I've built companies, sold one, and closed one. Scaling Up certified coach. I've sat on every side of this table.
The Journey
Every owner I meet is somewhere on this road. The work at every stage makes the company better to run today; the options at the end are the byproduct. And every stage is one of the four decisions every company has to get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. Find yourself below.
Best revenue year ever, and payroll is still a white-knuckle Friday. We stop the bleeding: diagnose first, Profit First, Cash Flow Story.
Could you cover the next four payrolls without touching the line of credit?
You hired more people and your problems doubled. We install the operating system, Scaling Up, with the Pumpkin Plan for strategy. Growth sucks cash; the system helps fund it.
Is your own name in more than two boxes on the org chart?
The business runs on you. Buyers call that buying a job. We run it like an investor and work the value drivers, one quarter at a time.
Do you know what your company is actually worth? Not what your CPA guesses?
Sell, keep, or pass it on. Your call, not a forced one. Exit planning that's really just good management with a destination.
Which of the three doors are you walking toward? Did you pick it?
The Operating System
Every construction company's problems come down to four things: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. Scaling Up is the operating system that gets all four working at once. A one-page plan your team actually uses, quarterly priorities, meeting rhythms that catch problems while they're small, and cash discipline. Built with your leadership team, on your real org chart, your real jobs, your real cash. Enterprise value is the scoreboard.
I grew a company the hard way. Hired eleven people in two years and my problems doubled. Every problem we solved created two more. Vacations became remote offices with a computer bag and a box of files. Success started feeling like a trap. The issue wasn't effort. It was the missing system.
I took the best man in my company, Ronnie, a guy who could fix anything with a Sawzall and a sledgehammer, and put him in the one seat where his genius didn't count: running the schedule from a desk. We lost a make-or-break framing contract mid-job. Not to a better framer. To me, "helping." Right person, wrong seat. There's a one-page tool that catches that mistake before it costs you a contract.
What the work looks like: quarterly planning sessions with your leadership team, weekly executive meetings in between. We install the tools one habit at a time: the One-Page Strategic Plan, 90-day Rocks, the accountability chart with one name per seat, a scoreboard with the numbers that matter. The whiteboard is the session; the paperwork is bookends. And the filled-out plan is not the win. The plan being how your team operates on Monday morning is the win. Tools that stick.
One manufacturer had quadrupled its revenue, and was losing money doing it. We cleaned up the accounting, put real forecasts in place, and slowed the growth down to what the balance sheet could actually fund. This year they're projecting over a million dollars in profit. And they got the first quarter in company history that landed where the plan said it would. Their words, not mine: everything we said was going to happen, happened.
Every engagement starts the same place: finding what to fix first.
Find your stage: book a Value Snapshot Call → See the full program →Where We Start
Most coaches prescribe before they diagnose. We find the bottleneck first. Fix This Next gives me the pyramid for that, a hierarchy of needs for a business. When everything feels urgent, we hold your company up against the pyramid and it tells us the one constraint that matters right now. We fix that, then find the next one. No software, no twelve-point programs. One thing at a time, in the order your business actually needs them.
For most contractors, the first bottleneck is the money.
That's what the first call is for →Make the Money Real
Money, like work, expands to fill the space available. Allocate first, operate on what's left. Profit First is the discipline that makes the money real. Profit, owner's pay, and taxes come off the top in separate accounts, and the business learns to run on what remains. If your company needs your personal guarantee on a line of credit just to make payroll, an investor sees risk, not value. This is where that stops.
One contractor turned the idea into an internal bank: separate accounts for materials, subs, and field labor, plus a growth account that sets aside money for the working capital growth eats. What if your construction company could be its own bank, funding growth, equipment, and emergencies without begging a lender? That's not a slogan. It's an account structure.
What the work looks like: we set up the accounts, do the allocation math off your real margins (materials and subs are other people's money, so we work from real revenue), and reset the percentages quarterly. Your bookkeeper runs it. I make sure it sticks.
Allocation makes the money real. The next tool finds where the rest of it hides.
Find your stage: book a Value Snapshot Call →Find Where Cash Hides
Revenue is Vanity. Profit is Sanity. Cash is King. That line comes from Alan Miltz, who built the Cash Flow Story framework. I use it with every company I coach, because it's the only framework I've found that explains how a contractor can be "profitable" on paper and still lie awake wondering how to fund Friday's payroll. Most owners only ever read Chapter 1 of their cash story: how you make it. There are four chapters. In construction, Chapter 2, how cash gets trapped, is where money goes to die.
A general contractor I know had his best revenue year ever. Then he couldn't make payroll. Front-loaded materials and labor, ten percent retention, sixty to ninety days to final payment. Profitable on paper; borrowing on his line of credit in reality. That's the construction cash flow trap. And it's invisible on a P&L.
What the work looks like: the Power of One. Seven levers (price, volume, costs, overhead, and the three cash-timing levers) moved one percent or one day at a time. If you're collecting at 75 days instead of 45 on $10M of revenue, that's roughly $822,000 you're financing with your own money. The biggest lever in construction is almost always receivables: getting paid five days faster moves more cash than cutting overhead five percent. Then your team, not me, builds and owns the 13-week cash forecast. I teach; I don't do. A forecast I run for you dies when I leave.
Monday morning: pull your last three months of receivables. Average collection time over 60 days? That's the single biggest thing you can fix this quarter.
With cash working, you get to choose your growth, and your customers.
Find your stage: book a Value Snapshot Call → The deeper dive: Cash Flow & Valuation Gap Analysis →Grow Around Your Best Customers
We were the only ones in town who could build the complicated stuff: the cuts and valleys and roof planes nobody else could figure out. We set the margin we needed and said take it or leave it. Nobody undercut us, because there was nobody to undercut us with. Then residential slowed, we went chasing plan-shop work, and suddenly we were three or four plants fighting over the same job. We'd turned ourselves into a commodity, and we didn't even notice it happening. That's what a strategy problem looks like. It doesn't announce itself. You wake up one day bidding on price and wondering where your margin went.
Constantly improving what you do for your best customers grows a company faster than taking all the work you can get. Bid work is a commodity; negotiated work is a relationship. When you're the only option, you set the price. When you're one of five bids, the market sets it.
What the work looks like: straight out of the book I'm writing for contractors. Identify your giant seeds, the clients and work where you're genuinely hard to replace. Prune the diseased pumpkins: slow pay, scope creep, margin killers. Then systematize around your strengths, because as you grow you want more of what you're best at, not more of what you're bad at.
Tag your last 12 months of revenue: negotiated or competitive bid. Under 50% negotiated? You're a commodity. Pick one capability or one customer type where you could be the only option, and start building that pond.
Focused growth is what buyers pay multiples for, whether you ever sell or not.
Not sure which customers are the giant seeds? Book a Snapshot Call →Run It Like an Investor
Stop running your company like an operator. Start running it like an investor. The drivers that move your multiple aren't ten separate problems. They're one discipline: building a business that doesn't need you, doesn't depend on any one thing, and generates real cash.
A $2M-EBITDA contractor that depends on its owner might sell at 3x. That's six million. The same earnings with a strong management team, documented systems, and diversified customers might bring 7x. That's fourteen million. Same company. Eight million dollars' difference. (EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. And yes, I had to look it up the first time too.)
When we sold our homebuilding company, the strategic buyer paid double what every corporate buyer offered. The financial buyers saw our P&L. The strategic buyer saw our market position. The difference was millions, and it came from assets that never appeared on a balance sheet. Most owners have Rembrandts in the attic: things you do that competitors can't easily copy. You think it's common sense. It isn't. The value drivers set the floor; the Rembrandts set the ceiling.
What the work looks like: score yourself on the ten value drivers. The Readiness Scorecard on this site is the same tool I use, adapted from Align5's Value Drivers Rating with permission. Then we work the lowest driver as a quarterly priority. One driver, one quarter, measurable movement. And we put a real number on the company annually. Not what your CPA guesses, not what your buddy sold for. What a buyer would actually pay. The investment banker is your real estate agent. I'm the home stager and rebuild crew. I sit on your side of the table.
If you left for three weeks with no phone, what would you come back to?
A valuable company is what buys you the last thing on this page: options.
Find your stage: book a Value Snapshot Call → Take the Readiness Scorecard →Pick Your Door
Exit planning is not about exiting. It's about growing. We're all going to exit whether we want to or not; the only question is voluntary or involuntary. There are three doors: hand it to family, sell it, or the involuntary door. Death, disability, divorce, disagreement, distress. Most owners who tell me "I'll never sell" are really saying "I haven't thought about Door 3." And Door 3 doesn't knock.
I've been through the sale. The earnout that sat behind the buyer's debt, the default, the auction on our factory floor. Debt is patient; it waits until it doesn't. It cost my family dearly, and in hindsight, I should have held on. I spent the next twenty years learning everything I could so you don't have to pay my tuition.
What the work looks like: I'm the quarterback. Coordinating the CPA, the attorney, the banker, keeping the plan accountable, and lining your personal goals up with the business plan, because the company that funds your life should also fund your next chapter. We build it like a construction schedule: work backward from your target date. The three-to-five-year work, the two-year work, the final-year work. We do it quietly, in language that doesn't panic your team. And here's what happens more often than you'd think: owners get two years into this and love the company so much they decide not to sell. Good. Then you're the strongest seller in the room, because you don't have to.
Sell, keep, or pass it on. Your call, on your timeline. The owners who do the work get options. The ones who don't get whatever shows up. I'd rather you pick your door.
Find your stage: book a Value Snapshot Call → Take the Readiness Scorecard →This Afternoon
Picture the version of this where you leave for three weeks, no phone, and come back to a company that grew while you were gone. That's not a fantasy. It's a build sequence. One call finds your stage on the journey and your first three moves. And the plan is yours whether we ever work together or not.
Not ready to talk? The playbook comes out weekly.
No spam, no selling your address. Just the newsletter.