How a $13M Crane and Concrete Company Went from Financial Fog to Full Clarity

Client Case Study — Heavy Equipment & Construction

Running a $12M crane and concrete operation is not the same as understanding it financially. For years, the owner of this Southeast-based heavy equipment company knew his business was busy. Cranes were working, concrete was pouring, and the phones kept ringing. What he didn't have was a clear picture of whether any of it was actually making money, and by how much.

That was the starting point. Over the course of roughly six months, this client went from running two divisions out of a single Sage 50 system with no divisional P&Ls, no cash flow forecast, and no tax strategy, to completing a full accounting platform migration, building a granular equipment-level forecasting model, executing a proactive year-end tax plan that reduced a significant tax liability, and laying the groundwork for a formal FY27 budget. This is what that transformation looked like.

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Who This Client Is

The company operates two primary divisions out of the Southeast. The crane division handles industrial crane rental and rigging services, including large-scale plant shutdowns for major energy customers. The concrete division (ready-mix) serves residential, commercial, and industrial work across the region. Combined, the business runs roughly $12–13M in annual revenue, employs a sizable field workforce, and owns a substantial fleet of heavy equipment.

The business had been operating for many years and was well-respected in its market. The owner had strong operational instincts and a capable team. What was missing was the financial infrastructure to match the size and complexity of what they had built.

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Phase One: Getting Oriented in the Numbers

The first coaching call in December 2025 was focused on something most business owners take for granted: just getting the financial data into a usable format. Sage 50's architecture required the client's internal team to manually run twelve separate monthly reports and compile them into a single spreadsheet, because the system had no native 12-month comparative balance sheet.

That session established the data structure that would underpin everything that followed. The team identified the four priority areas to populate: the bank review, gross margins by division, baseline expenses, and debt details. It sounds basic. But for a business this size, having never organized financial data this way before, it was the necessary foundation for all the analytical work that came later.

By early April, the picture was coming into focus. The business was carrying roughly $12.6M in revenue across both divisions, with the concrete side generating a 21% gross margin and the crane division running closer to 30%. Those numbers confirmed what the owner had sensed intuitively: cranes were the more profitable business. What he hadn't been able to see clearly until that point was just how much more profitable, or what was driving the gap.

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Building the Forecasting Infrastructure

One of the central projects across this engagement was replacing the company's high-level, top-down budget with a granular forecasting model built from the equipment up. The crane division runs on hourly rental rates, minimum charge structures, and trucking fees that vary by crane size. None of that complexity was reflected in the existing budget, which made it nearly impossible to evaluate whether individual assets were pulling their weight.

The new model was built to calculate a fully loaded cost per hour for each crane, factoring in operator labor, fuel, depreciation, insurance allocation, annual permits, and maintenance. Revenue inputs were structured around actual operating patterns: days per month, average hours per day, minimum charge thresholds by crane class (4-hour minimums for smaller equipment, 8-hour minimums for the largest cranes), and standardized trucking fees for cranes over 60 tons.

A break-even utilization study revealed that at roughly 38% utilization, the crane division covered its costs. The owner's target was 60–70% fleet-wide, which at the revenue per hour those cranes were generating, represented meaningful margin expansion. That kind of specific, equipment-level visibility had simply never existed before in the business.

A parallel cash flow forecast was built at the same time, a simple, business-focused tool with color-coded alerts and weekly roll-forward capability, designed to give the owner and his team a forward-looking view of cash rather than a backward-looking accounting report. The previous system had produced an accounting-style cash flow statement that was technically accurate and practically unusable for operational decisions.

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A Performance Year That Demanded Proactive Tax Planning

By late April, it was clear that FY26 was going to be a strong year, stronger than the company had seen in some time. A major power plant shutdown project for one of the largest energy companies in the country had driven a significant revenue surge. Through April, the business had posted roughly $12.4M in revenue and approximately $1.1M in net profit. May was projecting another $1M in revenue. The crane division was running a net margin close to 50% in April before full overhead allocation, a level the owner hadn't seen before.

That level of profitability created an immediate and meaningful problem: a large tax bill. The estimated federal and state tax liability was approximately $190k combined. In prior years, the company's tax planning had been largely reactive, meeting with the accountant after the fiscal year closed and making decisions with whatever options were still available.

This time, with four weeks left in the fiscal year and a fractional CFO in the room, the approach was different. The team convened a proactive year-end meeting with the company's longtime accountant and mapped out a coordinated strategy before the books closed.

The plan had two components. First, the company purchased approximately $270k in needed assets before year-end, specifically two pickup trucks and a skid steer, financed through the company's banking relationship at favorable rates to avoid the expensive factory insurance required by manufacturer financing. Using 100% bonus depreciation on those purchases meaningfully reduced taxable income. Second, roughly $100k in officer bonuses were distributed, shifting that portion of income from the corporate tax return to personal returns where it could be managed separately. The cash for those bonuses was drawn from the company's operating line and repaid with incoming Constellation payments that were already in the AR pipeline.

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Strategic Clarity on Where to Grow

The financial visibility that came out of this engagement did more than just answer historical questions. It started shaping how the owner thought about the future of the business.

The ready-mix concrete division had historically been treated as an equal growth priority alongside cranes. Once the divisional economics were visible, that assumption came under scrutiny. The concrete side faced a structural cost disadvantage, as cement suppliers who also owned competing ready-mix operations were able to source at costs the client couldn't match, creating an approximately $20–30 per yard input cost gap versus local competitors. Cranes, by contrast, had no such structural ceiling, and the margin profile confirmed it.

The decision that emerged was a strategic prioritization: lean into crane rental and specialty rigging as the primary growth engine, keep concrete steady without expansion, and begin building a more repeatable pipeline for industrial shutdown work rather than relying on the episodic nature of the relationships that had produced the current year's results.

The owner had also identified a market shift toward larger crane capacity, specifically a growing customer preference for 350-ton cranes even on jobs that could technically be completed with something smaller, driven by new industry safety margin requirements. That demand signal, now visible in context of the divisional financials, made the case for fleet investment in a way that gut feeling alone couldn't.

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The Accounting System Migration

Running a $12M operation on Sage 50 with no cloud access had created a persistent bottleneck. The CFO had no direct system access during the first several months of the engagement, which meant every data request had to be routed through the internal team and manually exported. That friction slowed the work.

The decision to migrate to Sage 100 was already in motion when the engagement began, but getting it across the line took focused effort. The company's implementation partner shepherded the transition through several complications, including an unexpected issue with the original payroll processor that forced a last-minute pivot to the company's banking partner to establish the necessary payroll infrastructure. The first payroll was processed in Sage 100 in early June 2026, representing the practical go-live of the new system after months of preparation.

The capabilities that Sage 100 brought were material. Multi-period P&Ls with full drill-down to source transactions. Job-level income statements. A PO approval workflow that routes any purchase order above a set dollar threshold for review before it can be issued. An ODBC connection allowing live data queries in Excel. Automated bank feeds through Plaid. None of that had been available in the prior system.

The implementation also prompted a set of process improvements that went beyond the software itself. A standardized transaction description convention was established for all fixed asset entries, creating a searchable digital record to replace what had previously been a paper-based filing system. Accrual accounting was adopted for fixed monthly expenses. A shared OneDrive folder replaced the paper-based tax document exchange process with the company's accountant. These are the kinds of changes that seem procedural but compound significantly over time.

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Building the Financial Team Around the Business

One consistent theme across this engagement was the work of building a financial team, not just delivering financial analysis. The company's longtime accountant was highly effective at tax minimization but had not historically operated in a proactive financial planning role. The fractional CFO engagement created a structure around that relationship, bringing the accountant, banker, and internal team into coordinated conversations rather than operating in separate silos.

The company also consolidated its banking during this period. Multiple prior banking relationships were refinanced into a single note, creating approximately $47k per month in improved cash flow from debt service reduction. A new debt service coverage requirement from the lender was incorporated into ongoing planning as a standing financial constraint, not just an annual review item.

Shareholder agreements and key-man insurance policies, items that often fall to the bottom of the priority list in fast-moving businesses, were advanced materially during this period. Legal counsel was engaged to draft formal shareholder agreements defining the rules for stock transitions. Key-man policies were reviewed against competitive alternatives. These aren't flashy financial improvements, but they represent the kind of structural work that protects a business and its owners over the long run.

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What Changed

The transformation here wasn't a single dramatic event. It was a series of connected improvements across financial infrastructure, decision-making tools, tax strategy, and organizational process, all of which compounded into something meaningfully different from where the business started.

• A business that had no divisional profitability visibility now has a P&L review by division and a granular equipment-level forecast model
• A reactive tax posture became a proactive one, with a coordinated year-end strategy that materially reduced the tax bill on a strong performance year
• An outdated accounting system was replaced with a platform capable of supporting the complexity of the business, including job costing, PO controls, and live data integration
• The growth strategy shifted from instinct-driven to data-informed, with clear reasoning behind where to invest and where to hold steady
• A financial team structure was established around the business, with the CFO, accountant, banker, and internal team operating in a coordinated cadence rather than in isolation

None of this required the business to be rebuilt. It required bringing financial clarity to a business that was already working hard and had the fundamentals in place to perform at a higher level. That's typically what fractional CFO work looks like in practice.

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