Construction & specialty contractor CFO services
A fractional CFO for founder-led contractors.
Saorsa embeds in your company on retainer and covers the strategy side of the numbers — the cash between the draw and payroll, the margin by job, the bonding line, the next machine — and works through them with you every week.
Tell us what you build and where the cash goes. Duncan replies within one business day.
Prefer to talk? Call or text Duncan: (510) 626-0509.
What gets built in the first 90 days
Four problems every founder-led contractor knows by heart
The work is billed in arrears and paid out in real time, and four things go wrong in the space between.
Cash disappears between the draw and payroll
You bill at month end, the draw lands weeks later, and the crew is paid every Friday. Retainage holds back a slice of every job until closeout, so part of what you billed is not cash yet. Materials leave the account ahead of all of it. The bigger the job, the wider the gap between what you have earned and what you can spend. So the largest contract on the schedule strains payroll the hardest.
Profitable jobs, broke company
Estimated margin fades as a job runs. Every week the crew takes beyond the estimate comes out of it. Meanwhile an over-billed job looks like cash in the account until the work catches up and the money is owed back to the job. The WIP schedule would show both, but it gets built at year end. So you learn a job lost money after the crew has moved to the next one.
Bonding capacity set by numbers no one is managing
The surety reads working capital, equity, and the WIP schedule to size your program. Those figures get assembled once a year, then left alone until the next renewal. Bonding capacity ends up set by whatever the numbers happened to say on that one date. So the bigger bid you are waiting to take depends on financials that nobody has been steering toward it.
The next machine, crew, or yard
Buy, lease, or rent the excavator. Add a second crew and the overhead arrives before the revenue does. Take on a yard and the rent starts on day one. The bank line is tied to WIP, so the purchase and the line move together, and neither is a decision you can reverse quietly. At six figures, deciding by instinct is expensive when the guess is wrong.
Fit check
Who this is for. Who it isn't.
This work fits a contractor who bills on draws and carries retainage on jobs in progress. The two lists below draw the line.
For
- Specialty trades: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, concrete, roofing, steel
- General contractors
- Civil, site, and heavy
- Design-build and fabricate-and-install shops
- Founder-led, roughly $2–20MM in revenue
Not for
- One-off residential remodelers below roughly $2MM
- Real estate developers and investors
- Architects and engineering firms
- Home-services franchises with corporate finance
If you fabricate more than you install, the manufacturing page may fit better.
How the work runs
An embedded partner on retainer, not a report vendor
By day 90 you have a working model, a monthly WIP and job-margin view, a package ready for the surety and the credit desk, and a weekly session with us. We stay on retainer as part of your team instead of handing you a report and leaving.
A long-term financial model you actually use
The model follows your cash the way a job moves it: draws in, retainage held back, payroll and materials out. Before you bid the bigger job, hire the second crew, or buy the machine, it shows where the cash low point lands and how deep it goes. You see the squeeze on paper first, then decide whether to take the work.
A WIP and job-margin view
We build it from the job-cost data you already keep. Each job shows over-billed or under-billed, and margin fade is tracked by job and by estimator. Then it is a monthly report you act on, not a year-end schedule you explain. Estimating gets a floor: the margin a job must clear before you put a number on the next bid.
A bonding- and bank-ready package when one is needed
When the surety or the credit desk is about to read your numbers, we build the financial presentation they underwrite against. When there is a machine to finance, we write the equipment memo that goes with it. We are not surety agents or a lender, and neither decision is ours. We make sure what they read is organized, current, and defensible.
A weekly working cadence with you
Each week we sit down on whichever call is next: the bid, the crew, the machine, or the customer whose pay-when-paid terms are stretching your cash. Put the open decision on the table and we test it against the model with you. The number-crunching happens before you sit down, so the hour is spent on the call itself.
Bank-side proof
Our case studies are in other industries. The bank-side work is the same.
Saorsa's published case studies are in other industries, and we would rather say so than stretch one to fit. The closest work to a contractor's bank file is the Agricultural Trading Platform: a lender relationship rebuilt on reporting the credit desk trusted. A monthly three-statement model, rolling liquidity, and bank-ready reporting replaced guesswork. The cash gap, the bank, and the equipment decision are the mechanics we are hired for.
Crosslinked Components is different: Duncan is a minority partner there, so deposits, lead times, and equipment decisions are made with our own capital on the line. The result so far: 3.7x revenue and 7.8x profit in two years.
See the Agricultural Trading Platform results+$500K
Year-over-year profitability improvement
$1.2MM
Line of credit paid down
Renewed
Credit facility, on fundamentals-based reporting
Relevant reading
Read first, write later.
Not ready to write yet? Three pieces from our Insights letter cover the ground this page touches.
Start here
Name the cash gap and get a straight read from Duncan.
Duncan reads every submission himself and replies within one business day, so a note about a draw, a bid, or the bonding line reaches the person who will work it. Tell him the problem in your own words; he answers plainly, and if this is the wrong page for you, he names the right one.
- The person who reads your note is the person who answers it, and it happens inside one business day.
- A plain take on what you named: the cash between draws, margin by job, the bonding line, or the next machine.
- If a different page suits you better, you hear that from us instead of a sales pitch.
Prefer to talk? Call or text Duncan: (510) 626-0509.
Start a conversation
FAQ
Questions contractors ask before the first call
Short answers on cost, the surety, cash, and fit, before you write to us.
What does this cost compared to a full-time CFO?
A full-time CFO is a mid-six-figure salary plus benefits, and a contractor at $2–20MM does not have forty hours a week of that work. You have a set of calls that decide the year: which bid to take, when to add the second crew, whether the machine gets bought or rented, and how much line the WIP supports. The retainer is monthly and costs a fraction of a hire. It is sized to four things: the model, the margin view, the bank and surety work, and the weekly session.
We already have a bookkeeper and a CPA. Isn't this redundant?
Keep both. Your bookkeeper records the pay app, the draw, and the retainage as they happen. Your CPA keeps you compliant and prepares the reviewed statements the surety asks for. Because we are not accountants, we do not touch the books, and the tax filings stay with your CPA. What we do is make sure the numbers inside those statements are managed all year, not assembled once. Neither of them models the job you are pricing or assembles the file your lender reads, so we work alongside both.
Our WIP schedule is a spreadsheet the bonding agent asks for once a year. Is that a problem?
Yes. A schedule built once a year hides margin fade and over-billings for eleven months, and by the time it is built the jobs it describes are closed out. A monthly WIP schedule shows which jobs are over-billed, which are under-billed, and where the estimate is slipping while there is still time to act. For a contractor, it is the most useful report you can produce, and the surety will read the same schedule you use.
Can you help us increase bonding capacity?
We can help with the preparation, not the decision. The surety sizes your program from working capital, equity, and backlog, so we build the financial presentation and the plan it underwrites against, covering all three. We are not surety agents or brokers, we do not place bonds, and no one can promise the size of a program. Our job is that the numbers the surety reads are current and defensible. No success fees.
We are profitable on paper. Why is cash always tight between draws?
Profit on paper counts a job as earned when the work is done. Cash counts it when the draw clears. In between sit over- and under-billings, retainage held to closeout, and pay-when-paid terms that make you wait on someone else's check. The model shows that gap week by week, so you see the low point before it arrives. The fix is usually billing timing, tighter terms, and a line sized to WIP.
Ask for a straight read before the next bid.
Send the draw, the bid, or the bonding question that is on your desk.
Go to the formPrefer to talk? Call or text Duncan: (510) 626-0509.