They had $4.2 million in contracted work on the books. The owner hadn't paid himself in four months.
This wasn't a struggling business. Their work was good — good enough that main contractors kept calling back. Good enough that they'd grown from two concurrent projects to six in under three years. The problem wasn't the revenue. The problem was that growth had made everything faster — including the rate at which cash was disappearing.
When I came in, the instinct in the room was to find the leak. There wasn't one.
What there was, instead, was a structural mismatch that no one had ever been taught to see. Progress claims were being submitted reactively — after milestones, when the site supervisor remembered, when someone chased. Variation orders were being done verbally on site and written up weeks later, sometimes after the main contractor had already closed their own claim cycle. Retention sums across three live projects totalled just over $280,000 — but no one could tell me with confidence which ones were past their release date. The money existed. It just wasn't being managed.
Here's what made it hard: the people running the projects were excellent tradesmen and loyal employees. They had built this company with the owner from nothing. Telling them that the way they'd always done things was now quietly strangling the business — that conversation required care that a spreadsheet couldn't provide.
And then there was the bank.
The company's credit facility was nearly fully drawn. Not because the business was failing, but because the timing gaps between doing the work and receiving payment had compounded across six simultaneous projects. To any outside observer — including the banker reviewing the next renewal — this looked like a distressed business. It wasn't. But perception was becoming its own kind of reality.
We worked on three things, and none of them were simple.
First, we rebuilt how progress claims were tracked — not just submitted, but strategically timed against the main contractor's own claim cycles. This alone changed the average collection period on two projects by 23 days.
Second, we created a variation order discipline that started on site, not in the office. Every verbal instruction got a WhatsApp confirmation within 24 hours. That paper trail, built consistently over one quarter, recovered $67,000 in variations that had previously been absorbed as goodwill.
Third — and this was the hardest — we had to rebuild the bank relationship before the credit facility renewal. That meant presenting the business not as it looked on paper, but as it actually was: a company with strong recurring client relationships, growing contract values, and a cash flow profile that was structural, not symptomatic. We prepared a business narrative, not just financials. The facility was renewed. The rate improved.
Eleven months later, the owner was drawing a salary again. Two of the six projects had completed and the retention sums — tracked properly this time — were released on schedule. The business had reduced its credit facility drawdown by 60%.
He didn't grow his way out of it. He managed his way out of it. Which is harder, less glamorous, and the only thing that actually worked.