Fractional CFO for Plumbing Companies
You can run a plumbing company on instinct for a long time. Then you add trucks, add a construction division, and one day the business is too big to feel and too complicated to guess at. That's the day a CFO stops being a luxury.
Service, construction, and commercial are three businesses
Residential service, new construction, and commercial work look like one company from the outside, but they earn their money in completely different ways and on completely different cash cycles. Service is quick cash and high margin. Construction is slow draws, retainage, and thin margins that only work at volume. Blend them on one P&L and you can't tell which one is funding the other.
A fractional CFO pulls them apart, so you know your real margin by division and can decide where to put the next dollar — instead of growing the part that feels busy but quietly loses money.
The numbers that tell you whether to add a truck
Revenue per tech, billable hours, average ticket, dispatch density — these are the metrics that decide whether adding a truck makes you money or just adds a truck payment. Most plumbing owners add capacity on a feeling and find out a year later whether the feeling was right.
We'd rather you find out in a model. Build the unit economics once and every expansion decision gets a lot less dramatic.
How Kaizen runs it
You get a senior CFO a few days a month on top of clean, division-costed books. We run a rolling cash forecast, break out margin by division, build the per-truck and per-tech KPIs, and pressure-test your labor rates and pricing — then hand you the short list of decisions that actually matter this quarter.
It's the difference between managing a plumbing company and just being the person it happens to. One of those is a lot less stressful, and it isn't the one you're probably doing now.
What's included
- Margin broken out by service, construction, and commercial
- Per-truck and per-tech KPIs — revenue, billable hours, average ticket
- 13-week rolling cash forecast
- Labor-rate and pricing analysis so the numbers actually work
- Receivables and retainage tracking on construction draws
- Add-a-truck and new-division scenario models
- Monthly board-ready KPI and margin pack
- Diligence-ready financials for a future sale
Pricing
Straight answers
We already have a controller/bookkeeper. Why a CFO?
Different altitude. A controller keeps the numbers right; a CFO decides what to do with them — pricing, divisions, expansion, cash. Many clients keep their controller and add us on top for the strategy layer.
Can you separate service from construction margin?
Yes, and it's usually the first eye-opener. Service and construction have different margins and cash cycles; splitting them shows you which division is really driving the business and which is along for the ride.
What size company is this for?
Usually $3M+ in revenue, or anyone running more than one division or a fleet of trucks. Under that, a good bookkeeper and a simple cash forecast is often enough — we'll say so if it's you.
Do you replace our accounting team?
No — we sit on top of it, or bring our own bookkeeping if you'd rather. The CFO work is judgment and forecasting; it needs a clean books foundation underneath, whoever keeps it.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
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