“How can a profitable contractor run out of cash?” The jobs are making money — the problem is that your payroll goes out every two weeks and cash comes back in 60 to 90 days. Here’s how to close that gap.

Thursday afternoon. Eighteen thousand dollars in the account. Payroll runs Friday. Twenty-four thousand goes out the door.

That six-thousand-dollar gap is the third time this year the owner has covered it from personal savings.

He has $2.2 million in active jobs. Good work. Profitable work. The order book is real, the crews are real, the clients are real. And he’s sitting at his desk on a Thursday afternoon doing the same math he has done three times in the last twelve months, knowing exactly how it ends.

This isn’t a bad business. It’s a business where payroll goes out every two weeks and cash comes back in sixty to ninety days — and nobody built a bridge between the two.

You pay your crew on schedule. You invoice when the job closes. The client pays thirty to forty-five days after that. The gap between what goes out and what comes in isn’t a sign that the business isn’t working. It’s a sign that the billing schedule and the payroll schedule are running on two completely different timelines.

Right now, the person bridging that gap is you.

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