Strategy Meets Finance

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Steve started his first business at 16 out of his sister's garage with no money, no financial background, and no idea what he was doing. He made every mistake you can make. In this episode he shares the five lessons that would have saved him millions of dollars and...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most specialty contractors either do not have a WIP schedule or do not treat it with the attention it deserves. And if your WIP is wrong, Steve will tell you straight: your financials are wrong too. In this episode he breaks down exactly what the WIP schedule is trackin...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Revenue is up. The team is celebrating. And the business owner is quietly pulling on the line of credit because cash is constantly tight. In this episode Steve breaks down exactly why profitable businesses run out of cash, what is actually happening between the income s...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Everyone is talking about AI right now. Which tools to use, how to automate, how to stay ahead. Steve thinks AI is important too. But in this episode he wants to have the conversation almost nobody is having. Not which tools to use, but whether those tools are actually...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Winning work and profiting from work are two completely different things. Most contractors are only doing one of them. In this episode Steve breaks down why pricing to be competitive and pricing to actually make money require fundamentally different thinking, where the...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   When Steve walks into a struggling business, people expect him to start with leadership, culture, or strategy. He never does. In this episode he walks through the one thing he fixes first in every struggling business, why everything else is pointless without it, and wha...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Steve gets asked this question all the time. If you were running my business, where would you start? In this episode he answers it directly. He walks through exactly what he would do in the first 90 days running a $10 million specialty contracting business, the specific...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most specialty contractors know cash flow is important. What they do not know is what actually controls it. In this episode Steve walks through the four levers that determine whether a contracting business has cash or not. They are not complicated, but if you do not kno...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most business owners have sat through a strategy session that felt productive in the room and changed nothing back at the office. In this episode Steve breaks down the three biggest mistakes he sees business leaders make when doing strategy. Not because they are not sma...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most contractors who track their gross margin are still getting it wrong. Not because they are doing anything dishonest. Because the way their accounting is set up does not match the economic reality of their business. In this episode Steve walks through exactly how thi...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   When Steve became CFO of a billion-dollar construction company, he thought he had seen it all. But sitting inside a business at that scale taught him things no classroom or accounting firm ever could. In this episode he walks through the three financial mistakes he sees...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most business owners feel pretty comfortable with their income statement. Revenue, costs, profit. Simple enough. But the balance sheet is where the real story lives and where most of the damage hides. If your balance sheet is a mess and you ever have to clean it up, tho...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Revenue is up. The team is growing. There is no shortage of work. And somehow the business feels harder to run than when it was half the size. More stress, more decisions, more fires, and at the same time less margin, less cash, less clarity. In this episode Steve break...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Businesses almost never collapse without warning. The signs are usually there months before things get critical, sometimes even longer. The problem is most owners either do not know what to look for or they see the signs and convince themselves things will turn around....

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most business partnerships do not fall apart because of personality conflicts. They fall apart because two people building something together never got aligned on the financial fundamentals. How much do we pay ourselves? How fast do we grow? What do we reinvest? What do...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most business owners have a rough idea of what their business is worth. Usually it is based on what a friend sold theirs for or what feels right. But what a business is actually worth and what an owner thinks it is worth are almost never the same number. In this episode...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Steve has been inside a lot of businesses that were in trouble. Some were losing cash. Some were profitable on paper but couldn't make payroll. Some had great teams and great customers and still couldn't figure out why nothing was working. In this episode he b...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   More revenue sounds like the answer when a business is struggling. But Steve has watched too many business owners chase growth thinking it would solve their cashflow problems, only to watch it make everything worse. In this episode he breaks down why scaling a broken ma...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   After working inside the financials of hundreds of businesses, Steve says the difference between the ones that grow and the ones that stay stuck almost never comes down to talent, market conditions, or even strategy. It comes down to habits. Specific, repeatable habits...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Steve does not talk about his personal life much. But when he does, the response is always the same: people reach out and say they could have written that story themselves. In this episode he steps back from the frameworks and the financials and shares where he actually...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   The job went well. The crew performed. The client is happy. And the margin still is not there? Most contractors blame the field when this happens. But in this episode, Steve makes the case that the margin was already gone before the first shovel hit the ground. It was s...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   When the business starts struggling, the first instinct is almost always the same. Cut costs. Cut headcount. Cut marketing. Cut everything that is not essential. Steve gets it. But in this episode he makes the case that cutting costs is usually the wrong move and why do...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Your books are clean. Reports come out on time. Taxes are filed. And you still don't know if you can afford that next hire, whether you should take on that big contract, or how much you can actually pull out without breaking the business. In this episode, Steve bre...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Most business owners track revenue. Some track profit. Almost none track the five numbers that actually tell you if their business is healthy, growing in value, and built to last. Steve sits down in this episode and walks you through exactly what he looks at in the firs...

How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check   Financial Intelligence Toolkit   Scaling sounds like the goal, but it’s also where a lot of businesses quietly break.  Growth doesn’t fix problems, it exposes them. If margins are tight, they get tighter. If cash flow is inconsistent, it gets worse. And if the strategy isn’t working, scaling just accel...