The roll-ups are buying shops like yours. They pay for numbers, not trucks.
When the call comes, from a consolidator, a competitor, or your own kid ready to take over, the price lands on earnings somebody can believe, job by job. In 14 days, we show you your shop the way a buyer will, in dollars, guaranteed: at least 3x the fee in owner-accepted value identified, or you pay nothing.
30 minutes with Russ. No pitch. You leave knowing what a buyer would question first.
The margin is earned on the job. It disappears in the books.
WIP nobody trusts, over and under-billing, retainage, job costs that land 60 days late, and bids priced on last quarter’s math. You can run a shop that way for years. You can’t sell one that way, and every month the numbers stay soft moves the sale date a month.
The mess isn’t negligence. Growth covered it, and the people producing the numbers were never paid to look. But a buyer will look, at job-level margin, at WIP accuracy, at how much of the shop lives in your head, and whatever they can’t verify comes off the price.
Your books tell you what happened. They can’t tell you what to do next.
The decisions weren’t wrong. You made them on the only numbers you had, and those numbers were never built to decide from. Everyone who touches your books is paid to serve something else: the filing, the close, the report. Nobody is paid to prove which jobs and which GC relationships actually pay, and that is the job we do.
Three traps that eat a shop’s margin.
The Six Trap Diagnostic™ reads your numbers through the decisions that produced them. Three of the six do the most damage in the trades, and every one of them shows up in a buyer’s read with a discount attached.
Bids priced to costs that moved two years ago are margin you gave away before the crew ever rolled. Anchored bid pricing is the most common trapped margin in the trades, job by job.
Sub invoices and material receipts that never land on the job that spent them mean the true cost of a job shows up 60 days after closeout, long after the next bid went out on the same bad math.
The general contractor account you are most afraid to reprice is often the one capping your margin. The math never gets run because losing the relationship feels worse than the leak.
The mechanism reads the same across industries, because the traps do.
The account nobody would touch was the margin everyone was looking for.
The largest customer was the least profitable. The account felt untouchable, so the math never got run, and full cost allocation showed it was funded by everyone else. We repriced and reset terms instead of protecting the logo. The GC account you protect works exactly the same way.
Cash was trapped in a billing cadence nobody had revisited.
Clean-looking reports masked the leak. We rebuilt the billing and close rhythm and pulled the working capital forward. In the trades, the same leak lives in progress billings, retainage, and change orders that never got invoiced.
Anonymized by segment and revenue band until attribution is confirmed.
Two doors. Same engine. Same guarantee.
Both start with 14 days and end with owner-accepted value in dollars: at least 3x the fee identified, or you pay nothing. Typical results run 5x to 10x.
The Sellable-Numbers Scan
A consolidator calling, a succession, a partner buyout? The Scan shows you your shop the way a buyer will, in dollars, in 14 days: what diligence would knock off your number, where the value expansion lives, and the first three moves. From $10,000, fixed.
The Scan, in full →The Decision Diagnostic
Same engine, without the buyer's lens: which jobs, crews, and GC relationships actually make money, where the recoverable value sits, and what to bid next. The same numbers are costing you every month, sale or no sale.
The Diagnostic, in full →Pricing is banded by revenue and fixed before we begin: see the bands. The mechanics are public: read the guarantee. One next step either way: a 30-minute fit call.
Decide from the numbers. Prove it in the cash.
One 30-minute fit call. If it fits, the 14 days start. If your bonding agent, banker, or CPA sent you this page, this is the work they meant.