Client Profile - Growing Fast, Flying Blind

The Business

A specialty contractor on Cape Cod — residential and light commercial, 28 employees across two crews, $8M in revenue. The owner had built the business on reputation and referrals over fifteen years. He had more work than he could take on. He was also making less money than he had three years ago, on twice the volume.

The Situation

On paper, the business looked healthy. Revenue was growing, the backlog was strong, the crews were busy. But margins had been compressing for two years and the owner couldn't explain why. He was working harder than ever and paying himself less.

He had a bookkeeper but no CFO-level visibility into where money was actually going. He priced jobs the way he always had — experience and gut feel, adjusted for material costs. He had no consistent way to track job-level profitability. He knew some jobs made money and some didn't, but not which ones, or why, or how to tell in advance.

He was also the entire sales function. Every estimate, every proposal, every client relationship ran through him. His foreman was excellent — technically, the best he'd ever worked with — but had never been asked to take on anything beyond the job site.

What Was Actually in the Way

Two overlapping problems, both structural.

The first was a revenue problem disguised as a pricing problem. The owner wasn't pricing wrong — he was pricing without information. Without job-level cost tracking, he had no baseline for what work actually cost to deliver. The margin compression wasn't coming from bad bids. It was coming from scope creep, rework, and crew inefficiency on specific job types that he had no visibility into.

The second was an owner-dependent sales model with no succession path. Every dollar of revenue ran through a single person who was already at capacity. There was no pipeline process, no qualification criteria, no way to forecast what was coming. The backlog felt healthy until it didn't — and the owner had no early warning system.

The CGA Partnership

We ran a Revenue Growth Advisory engagement first, with Business Performance Planning introduced in the second quarter once the revenue infrastructure was in place.

First 30 days — follow the money. Before touching the sales process, we worked with the bookkeeper to build a simple job-level profitability tracker — not sophisticated accounting software, just a structured way to close out each job against its estimate. Within six weeks, the owner had his first clear picture of which job types made money and which ones didn't. The answer was specific and actionable: two categories of work that he'd been winning aggressively were consistently unprofitable at his crew size. He stopped pursuing them.

Days 30–60 — build a sales process. We defined a simple qualification framework: the characteristics of a job worth bidding, the red flags that indicated a problem client or a margin-killer, and a minimum threshold for bid investment. We then worked with the owner and his foreman to design an estimating process that the foreman could run for smaller jobs — freeing the owner to focus on the relationships and proposals that actually required him.

Days 60–90 — pipeline visibility. We built a simple pipeline tracker — not a CRM, just a structured view of what was in proposal, what was in backlog, and what the next 90 days looked like. For the first time, the owner could see demand shaping up before it hit him. He started saying no to jobs that didn't fit. That felt wrong at first. His margin improved within a quarter.

Performance Planning (Q2 onward): Once the revenue work was stabilized, we introduced a lightweight operating rhythm — monthly leadership meetings with the foreman and office manager, a quarterly priority-setting session, and a simple scorecard tracking the metrics that actually drove profitability. The business started running with structure instead of just momentum.

Where They Are Now

Margins are recovering. The owner isn't bidding every job himself anymore — his foreman estimates and closes work under $75K independently. The pipeline is visible two months out instead of two weeks.

He still works long hours — that's the nature of the business. But he's working on the right things. The jobs he takes on make money. The ones that don't, he's learned to walk away from.

He's also started thinking about a third crew — something he wouldn't have considered a year ago because he had no way to manage the complexity. Now he does.

Is This Your Business?

• Revenue is growing but you're not sure your margins are keeping up
• You win a lot of work but some jobs just always seem to go sideways
• Every estimate, every proposal, every key client relationship runs through you
• You have no real visibility into what's coming — the backlog feels fine until it doesn't