Growth planning for owner-operated trades
Checkgrowth Plan is a one-person consultancy. I write the growth plan your company already needs, in language your foremen can read, and I'm out before the ink dries.
See how it worksCalendar: Q2 booked. Next open engagement window begins the Monday after Labor Day; two held slots for returning clients, six open.
Who this is for
Mechanical contractors. Electrical shops. Industrial millwrights. Commercial HVAC service. Fabricators and weld shops. Fleet operators and vacuum-truck outfits. Specialty concrete, insulation, fireproofing, coatings. If you started in the field and the office grew up around you, we probably speak the same language.
You don't need a forty-slide deck. You need to know which three jobs are bleeding money, which two hires to make this year, whether the second truck pays for itself before year three, and what "growth" actually looks like on paper so your banker, your GM, and your spouse all see the same picture.
Most owners who call have hit one of three walls: the estimator is also the owner, the field super is the owner's brother-in-law, or the T&M work is papering over a T&M pricing problem. If any of that sounds familiar, keep reading.
Method
The engagement is fixed-scope and fixed-fee. Three weeks from kickoff to plan delivery. I do not stick around, I do not re-sell you on phase two, and I do not sit on a board seat.
Two days on site. I ride along on a service call, I read the job folders, I sit in the Monday 6:30 huddle, I walk the yard and count trailers. I meet the estimator, the controller, and whoever actually answers the dispatch phone. By the end of day two I can tell you where the leaks are.
Three years of P&L, WIP schedule, job costing by service line, truck-hour utilization, and backlog aging. I don't need a perfect data room — exports from your accounting package and a shared folder are fine. I'll flag what's missing in your cost codes, and you'll want to fix it anyway.
A written, plain-English growth plan. Twelve to eighteen pages. Targets, bottlenecks, hires, equipment, pricing moves, and a 90-day action list with owners' initials next to each line. You get the Word file and the PDF. No subscription. No login. No dashboard.
* WIP schedule = work-in-progress schedule; the contractor-accounting report that reconciles billings to costs on open jobs. If yours is three months behind, that's line one of the action list.
What you walk away with
Fixed fee, quoted after the first call. Typically 0.5% to 1% of annual revenue. No success fees, no equity, no percentage of savings.
By the numbers
About
I spent eight years running operations for a mid-size mechanical contractor — 40 trucks, three branches, a service division that grew up in a hurry. I came up through estimating and project management, sat in the GM seat for the last four of those years, and left on good terms after we sold to a regional roll-up.
Since then, seven years advising owner-operators on growth, succession, and the unglamorous work of getting the books in order before the bank, the bonding company, or the buyer asks to see them.
I am not a coach. I am not a platform. I don't have a methodology with a trademark on it. I am one person with a notebook and a spreadsheet who writes a plan, hands it over, and gets out of the way.
I take on roughly eight engagements a year. If we're not a fit, I'll say so on the first call and point you at someone who is — usually a peer group, a fractional controller, or a succession attorney, depending on what you actually need.
Contact
I take calls from four buckets and nobody else. Former clients who want me back. Owner-operators referred by a former client. The two contractor-book CPA firms in the region (you know which ones if you bond work over $5M). The bonding agents who write the MCAA and ABC surety accounts between Minneapolis and Columbus. That's the channel list; it does not grow because I don't want it to.
Geography: Upper Midwest and Great Lakes — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. On-site day one has to be reachable by a pre-dawn drive from a single Minneapolis departure. If your yard needs a connecting flight to reach by 6:30 Monday, I'm not your guy.
The intake conversation is 30 minutes. I'll tell you on that call whether the engagement fits. If it doesn't, I'll name a peer group, a fractional controller, or a succession attorney depending on what you actually need.