The bid you priced in March decides the margin you keep in September.
PE-grade financial leadership for electrical contractors doing $2M–$50M — a monthly system built for bid-to-actual discipline, GC payment lag, and the day a buyer comes calling.
Margin gets decided months before you can see it.
Electrical work commits you early — to a price, a crew, and a material cost — and tells you the truth late. That lag is where the money hides.
Licensed electricians decide your year
The scarcest labor in the trades. Billed hours per electrician, comp that keeps your best from being poached, and productivity by job — that's the whole ballgame, and most shops don't measure any of it.
The bid locks the margin
Estimate versus actual is the number that runs project work — hours, materials, and change orders. Copper and gear prices move between bid and buy; if you don't track the gap job by job, you find out at year-end.
GC work pays slow, service pays fast
Project work rides pay-when-paid terms and retainage; service work collects in days. Blended together they look fine — until the project side quietly consumes every dollar the service side brings in.
Your CRM and your books don't talk
The job system knows every install; the accounting system knows every dollar — and they're barely connected. That gap is exactly where financial decisions go to die.
We know your business from both sides of the table.
We won't pretend we've pulled wire. We know electrical where it decides your future: the economics, the cash cycle, and what buyers will pay for.
We've paid electrical invoices at national scale
As CFO of a national trades platform, our founder hired, priced, and paid electrical subcontractors on thousands of jobs across the country. He's seen your pricing, your scopes, and your margins — from the other side of the invoice.
Electrical contractors, evaluated as an acquirer
Our founder has personally met and qualified over 100 potential trades acquisitions — electrical contractors among the most frequent. He knows what a healthy electrical business looks like inside a data room, and what makes buyers pay up.
Same engine, bigger scale
Crews, projects, subcontractors, slow-paying customers — the same economic engine as electrical, scaled from $69M to $245M as an operations CFO. The playbook transfers; only the numbers change.
The monthly rhythm — in your language.
The same five-step system every LeeFO client runs, applied to how an electrical contractor actually makes money.
Set targets — by service vs. project mix, crew, and bid margin
A ground-up budget that splits service from project work, sets bid-margin floors on today's material costs, and plans licensed headcount against the backlog — not against hope.
Track actuals — estimate vs. actual, every job, every month
Margin by job and by crew, hours bid versus hours burned, change orders captured versus given away — against target, in dollars. The bid book gets smarter every month.
Forecast cash — 13 weeks out, with retainage and GC lag modeled
Pay-when-paid terms, retainage releases, and material deposits all visible a quarter ahead — so a growing backlog never becomes a shrinking bank account.
Score the Success Signals — owned by your ops team
Four to six numbers scored green, yellow, red every month — typically bid win rate at target margin, billed hours per electrician, change-order capture, billing speed, and collections.
Act & course-correct — before the next bid goes out
Every month ends with an action plan: the bid-floor adjustment, the change-order process fix, the collections call list — each with an owner, a deadline, and a dollar value.
The spread is real: average electrical contractors run low-to-mid single-digit operating margins, while disciplined shops hold high single digits and better. On a $10M shop, every recovered margin point is ≈ $100K a year — and a multiple of that at sale.
A right hand for the numbers — so you can run the business.
Your time is the scarcest resource in the company
You're carrying people, culture, customers, sales, and field execution. Nobody handed you a spare ten hours a week to research financial best practices — and there's almost too much conflicting information out there to sort what actually matters. That's the job we take off your plate: we learn your business, bring clarity to the numbers, and calibrate the 4–6 Success Signals that point your operating team at the financial goals.
Cash gets watched at both ends
In project-based trades, payment lags the work — customers, insurance carriers, GCs, and property owners all pay on their schedule, not yours. We keep a cadence on both ends of the business: signed work and sales activity on one side, billing, collections, and cash conversion on the other — so a strong sales month never hides a collections problem.
Electrification is making electrical contractors more valuable — if the numbers hold up.
EV charging, panel upgrades, data centers, grid work — demand for electrical capacity keeps climbing, and buyers and consolidators have noticed. What separates a premium multiple from a pass isn't the backlog — it's clean books, provable estimate-vs-actual discipline, and a data stack a buyer can trust. If you can prove you have a diamond, buyers compete — and competition drives your price. Even if you never sell, running sale-ready pays you every single year.
Or ask us what buyers look for — we've been one.
Fair questions, straight answers.
Do you actually know the electrical business?
We know it from the two sides that decide your financial future. As CFO of a national trades platform, our founder hired, priced, and paid electrical subcontractors on thousands of jobs across the country. And as a buyer, he has personally met and qualified over 100 potential trades acquisitions — electrical contractors among the most frequent. You know how to run the crews — we make sure the crews make money.
How is a fractional CFO different from my bookkeeper or my CPA?
Your bookkeeper records what happened. Your tax CPA reports it to the IRS. Neither one forecasts your cash 13 weeks out, tracks estimate-vs-actual by job, scores your KPIs monthly with your ops team, or hands you an action plan with owners and deadlines. That forward-looking layer is the fractional CFO's job — and you keep both of them.
What does a fractional CFO cost?
One flat monthly fee with a fixed scope — no hourly billing, no surprise invoices. Most engagements run in a predictable monthly range depending on complexity, locations, and scope — a fraction of the $350K+ a full-time CFO costs. We'll scope yours on a free call.
How do you justify the fee?
In dollars you can check. Margin points found and kept — on a $10M shop, one point is about $100K a year. Change orders captured instead of given away. Cost leaks plugged by a new set of eyes. And value built for the day you sell: provable numbers typically add to the multiple buyers will pay — a business that can prove it's a diamond invites confident buyers and competitive bids.
We're buried in project work — is this a bad time?
A full backlog is exactly when the numbers matter most: project work commits cash months ahead, and pay-when-paid terms mean the busier you get, the more working capital you need. The 13-week cash flow tells you how much backlog you can actually afford to win.
Do we need new software?
No. Whatever estimating or job-management system you run, the real problem is the same everywhere: the operational data and the accounting data don't talk to each other, so nobody can see which jobs actually make money. We bridge that gap with the systems you already have.
Win the bid and keep the margin.
A free consultation, then an assessment of your books and pipeline. You'll know your low-hanging fruit, in dollars, before you commit to anything.
Book a Free Consultation