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If you run a construction business in a place with real winters, you already know the phone stops ringing around December. What most contractors don't plan for is what that does to their cash. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself running out of cash, taking on debt, and accepting jobs you'd normally turn down just to keep the company going. Seasonality starts to feel like a penalty on a payment you didn't know you owed. Here are three things I've watched contractors do

If you pay your crew a mileage reimbursement for driving to jobsites, supply houses, or anywhere else for work, this affects you starting now. On July 13, the IRS announced a rare mid-year change to the standard mileage rate. Starting July 1, 2026, the rate is $0.76 per mile, up from $0.725. The reason is fuel costs. Gas was around $2.89 a gallon when the IRS set the original 2026 rate back in December. By mid-July it was closing in on $3.90. The old rate stopped covering wha

Simplifying the solution to the problem nearly every contractor faces. I hardly ever work with contractors who have never done something to protect cash flow that cost them more in the long run. It's such a pervasive issue, in fact, that I work with a set of contractors who would make these decisions every single week. They constantly draw from revolving lines of credit to pay their crew or their subs. They max out credit cards and hold balances to pay operating costs. They c

It's hard to get anything done without a good blueprint. If you're missing critical dimensions or the intended material is unclear, it's borderline impossible to achieve your desired outcome. It's just guesswork. But what happens when the schematic has too much detail? Let's imagine for a second that someone put way more detail on a blueprint than you could possibly need. For some reason they marked the halfway point on all length dimensions. They wrote the structural propert

What if I told you that nearly every contractor I've seen managing their own books has left themselves exposed to costly penalties, missed deductions they were entitled to, and generated financial data they can't actually use to run their business? After completing 45+ accounting cleanups for construction businesses over the past four years, I've seen only a handful that didn't need major renovations. The rest — the overwhelming majority — had the same problems hiding in the

Tax gurus love to tell contractors how to save on taxes and one piece of advice comes up so often it's practically a cliché: "Buy a new truck. Register it in the business name. Take Section 179 to write off the full cost in year one." It gets passed around job sites, contractor Facebook groups, and accounting offices like it's universal wisdom. And to be fair, it can be great advice. But only for the right contractor, at the right time, in the right financial position. The pr

If you run a construction business, you probably know roughly what you made last month. But do you know which specific job made you money and which one quietly cost you? Most contractors track their business the same way. Bank account balance up, good month. Bank account balance down, bad month. It's intuitive, it's simple, and it's completely inadequate for making real business decisions. Here's the problem with that approach: one really profitable job can carry you through