FP&A and finance automation · $2M–$20M in revenue
The CFO firm for operators who make payroll every week and get paid in 45 days.
Trucks, equipment, crews, and a payroll that runs whether the customer paid or not. The gap between those two dates is where the business actually gets decided, and almost nobody is measuring it.
I ran a last-mile route contract and lost it. I know which numbers kill you and when.
Thursday night you check the balance. Friday the crew gets paid either way.
Different industries, same week. Route, trades, staffing, home health, janitorial. If your capital sits in trucks and people instead of on a shelf, this is your week.
Construction is where this pattern is documented with real numbers, so that is where these come from. Staffing, route, home health and janitorial operators run the same week. Nobody has published it at this quality yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
of construction establishments pay their crews weekly. Across all private establishments it is 32.4%. The weekly payroll is not a quirk of your operation. It is the industry.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Compensation Survey. Reference period March 2013, published 2014.days in receivable, and construction has stayed inside that range every year from 2014 through 2023. Ten straight years. The collection lag is structural, not a bad quarter you wait out.
CFMA 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker, from the financial statements of 1,290 companies. FY2023.between collecting and paying. Construction collects at 56.6 days and pays its own bills at 33.0. Somebody finances that spread, and it is the operator.
CFMA 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker, same table. FY2023.You are profitable on paper and short on Thursday.
Two different questions. The P&L answers the first one four weeks late. Nobody in the building is answering the second one at all.
You know the company makes money. You do not know which routes do.
Company-level margin hides the customer, the route, or the crew being run at a loss and funded by everything else.
One customer is most of your revenue, and they just moved to 60-day terms.
The number worth having is what one late month from them does to payroll. Most operators get that number during the late month.
The bank wants a forecast. You have a checkbook and a feel for it.
The feel is real. It is also not transferable, and it does not survive a lender review, an insurance renewal, or the week you are on a plane.
You added six trucks and now you have less cash than before.
That is the mechanism, not bad luck. The cost of new work starts the week the work starts. The cash from it lands two months later. Growth funded out of the checking account is the fastest way to run out of money while winning.
The week you cannot make payroll, seven weeks early.
This is the cash page out of a Working Capital Blueprint. The operator below does not exist and neither do his numbers — I built him so you can see the shape of the answer before you pay for the real one. The arithmetic is open at the bottom of the panel and every line ties.
Collection days
Invoice out to cash in. On its own it is only half the number that matters — the target for this vertical is set against the full gap, not against this.
Payroll-to-collection gap
Six days to invoice, 54 to collect. He funds 60 days of crew before the cash for it lands.
Largest customer
Of revenue, and 63% of open AR. Thirty days late from them is $296,000.
First uncovered payroll
Projected balance $42,000 against a $50,000 payroll. Short $8,000.
Projected bank balance each Friday, against the payroll due that day
Weeks 1 through 13 from today. The dashed line is the $50,000 that has to be in the account when the crew gets paid.
Week 7 is the Friday. The balance is $42,000 against a $50,000 payroll. Week 8 is short $26,000, week 9 is short $16,000, and by week 10 it is fine again on its own.
He is not unprofitable. He is 60 days early on the cost and 60 days late on the cash, and he put six new trucks into that gap. Twenty-two of those 60 days are above the target for his vertical, and those 22 days are $374,000 of his own money. Three moves get it back, in this order: invoice the day the work is done instead of six days later, put the largest customer on a written follow-up ladder with a person approving every message, and stop funding new trucks out of the checking account. That is the Blueprint, and the install after it is what makes those three things happen every week without you.
Show the arithmetic
Invented numbers for an invented operator. What is not invented is the method: every figure below is computed, not asserted, and in a real Blueprint every one of them traces to a source transaction in your books.
| Week | Collected | Out | Balance Friday | Payroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today | — | — | $96 | — |
| 1 | $109 | $107 | $98 | covered |
| 2 | $104 | $107 | $95 | covered |
| 3 | $111 | $107 | $99 | covered |
| 4 | $99 | $107 | $91 | covered |
| 5 | $96 | $107 | $80 | covered |
| 6 | $92 | $107 | $65 | covered |
| 7 | $84 | $107 | $42 | short $8 |
| 8 | $89 | $107 | $24 | short $26 |
| 9 | $117 | $107 | $34 | short $16 |
| 10 | $126 | $107 | $53 | covered |
| 11 | $123 | $107 | $69 | covered |
| 12 | $129 | $107 | $91 | covered |
| 13 | $124 | $107 | $108 | covered |
| Line | Figure | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $6,200,000 | Stated. $119,231 billed per week. |
| Weekly payroll | $50,000 | 41.9% of weekly billings, the labor share this vertical runs at. |
| Everything else out | $57,000 | Fuel, truck notes, insurance, rent, admin, owner draw. Weekly. |
| Total out per week | $107,000 | $50,000 + $57,000. Leaves a 10.3% operating margin at full collection. |
| Collections, weeks 1–8 | $98,000 | Average. He ran 32 trucks nine weeks ago and bills at $100,405 a week at that size. Weeks 6–8 sit under it because the largest customer stretched three invoices. |
| Collections, weeks 9–13 | $123,800 | Average. The six new trucks start collecting, plus the stretched invoices catching up. |
| Invoice lag | 6 days | Work complete to invoice sent. |
| Collection days | 54 days | Invoice sent to cash in the account. Real average, not printed terms. |
| Payroll-to-collection gap | 60 days | 6 + 54. Days between the payroll that funded the work and the cash that pays for it. |
| Target for this vertical | 38 days | Estimate, not a benchmark — what a 15-year FP&A career says a route operation should run its payroll-to-collection gap at. |
| Days over target | 22 days | 60 − 38. |
| Cash trapped past target | $374,000 | 22 × ($6,200,000 ÷ 365). |
| His own cash funding the gap | $427,000 | 60 × ($2,600,000 annual payroll ÷ 365). Permanent, until the gap closes. |
| Largest customer 30 days late | $296,000 | 58% × ($6,200,000 ÷ 365) × 30. |
What changes.
Not a longer report. A different set of facts on the table when you have to decide something.
| Without | With Groma | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | You find out payroll is tight on Wednesday. | You saw week 7 in week 1, and you had six weeks to do something about it. |
| The books | Closed when the bookkeeper gets to it. Accurate enough for the tax return. | Closed on a calendar and built to carry a decision, which is a higher bar than the tax return. |
| Receivables | Someone calls the past-dues when they remember, usually after it hurts. | Every past-due account ranked, a written follow-up ladder that runs on schedule, and a person approving every message before it goes out. |
| The numbers | Four versions of the business — sales, ops, the bookkeeper, and yours — that have never met. | One model. Every figure computed and traced to a source transaction, so it holds up when someone pushes on it. |
| Concentration | You know one customer is big. You do not know what 30 days late does. | A dollar figure, in writing, before the late month rather than during it. |
| The lender | You send what the bank asks for, late, and hope it lands. | The same package on the same calendar every month, in the form the bank actually reads. |
| When it breaks | You react. | You had 30 days. |
Published price. The front door is a paid audit.
There is no free discovery here. A free assessment buries my sales cost inside whatever you buy next, and it fills the calendar with people who were never going to buy anything. The free thing is the Scorecard. The Working Capital Blueprint is paid, every time.
Which of the three you pay gets set on the first call, and it is anchored to the size of the decision in front of you — not to my hours. Hourly billing hands every efficiency I gain straight back to you, so I do not bill that way and I will not start.
- A 13-week cash forecast with your payroll dates on it. Most owners have never seen one for their own business.
- Your payroll-to-collection gap, in days, and the dollar figure you are carrying to fund it.
- Your AR aging read line by line against what the customer actually paid, deducted, and short-paid. This is where the accounts nobody is watching turn up.
- Customer concentration as a share of revenue and of open AR, and what one of them paying 30 days late does to a specific Friday.
- A statement review — whether your P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow can carry a decision, and what it takes to get them there if they cannot.
- One total, ranked and costed: revenue your workflow is blocking, profit leaking, cash trapped. Each line with what to do about it and what it is worth.
Delivered in 14 days from the day I have your data. Below $2M in revenue I refer you out — the work costs the same to do and the fee cannot cover it.
What comes after the Blueprint — the install that fixes what it found, and the monthly work that keeps it fixed — gets quoted against what the Blueprint actually found, never before. I do not price a system I have not seen your books for.
Start with the free one.
Twelve questions, two minutes, and it shows its arithmetic. It estimates the revenue your workflow is blocking, the profit leaking, and the cash trapped in the gap. Then you decide whether the precise version is worth paying for.
No tax preparation. No payroll processing. No audit or SOX work. Those belong with your CPA, and we'll refer you to one. What we do is keep your books decision-grade, see your cash eight weeks out, free the cash trapped between payroll and collection, and tell you what to do about it.
The questions owners actually ask.
I already have a bookkeeper. Why would I pay you too?
Keep the bookkeeper. I am not trying to take that work and I will not quote it.
Your bookkeeper records what happened. That is a different job from telling you what is about to happen, and most good bookkeepers will say so themselves. What I do sits on top of clean books. If the books are not clean enough to carry a decision, the Blueprint says so in week one and tells you exactly what it takes to fix them.
My CPA handles all of this.
Your CPA does tax and year-end, and I touch neither. No tax preparation, no payroll processing, no audit or SOX work. If you need a CPA I will refer you to one.
Your CPA is looking backward at a filing deadline. I am looking eight weeks forward at a Friday. Those are not the same service and they are not in competition.
I have a controller.
Then you are ahead of most operators your size, and this gets easier rather than harder.
Your controller closes the month. What is usually missing is the forward view — the 13-week cash line, a forecast built on the drivers you actually run the business on, and variance commentary that says why the number moved instead of that it moved. I build that and hand it to your controller to run. Naming the person who will actually use it is a day-one question here, not an afterthought.
Jirav and Fathom cost a fraction of this. Why not just buy the software?
If your books are clean and your process is sound, buy the software. That is the honest answer and I will tell you so on the call.
What those tools do is display numbers your books already contain. They will not tell you the aging is wrong, will not reconcile a settlement statement against what the customer actually paid and deducted, will not follow up on a past-due account, and nobody signs their name to the output. If your cash is a surprise every month, a dashboard on top of it makes the surprise prettier.
Why is the audit paid when everyone else runs a free assessment?
Because free discovery is not free. It gets priced into whatever you buy next, and it fills a calendar with people who were never buying.
Paying for the diagnostic keeps it a real piece of work with a deliverable you own and keep, whether or not you ever hire me again. It also disqualifies fast, which is worth as much to you as it is to me. The genuinely free version is the Scorecard.
Is this AI? I do not want a robot emailing my customers.
As little AI as possible, on purpose.
Every number is computed by code and traced to a source transaction. A model writes narrative and explains; it does not do arithmetic. Nothing that moves money, touches your general ledger, or reaches your customer goes out without a person approving it first, and I keep the log that proves it. That checkpoint earns its way looser as the record accumulates clean runs. It does not disappear.
Who actually does the work?
Me. Will McLaurin. You will not be handed to a junior after the sales call.
That is a real limit on how many operators I can carry at once, and it is part of why the Blueprint is priced the way it is.
What do you need from me, and how long does it take?
Accounting file, AR aging, payroll register, and the customer contracts that set your terms. Access on day one.
Fourteen days from the day I have all of it — not from the day you sign. If your data turns out to be worse than you think, you hear that in the first week instead of at the end.
Three things I commit to in writing.
Three, because three is what one person can hold every time. A published SLA that gets missed is worse than one that was never published.
01
Blueprint in 14 days
Fourteen days from the day I have your accounting file, your aging, your payroll register, and your contracts. Not from the day you sign. The clock starts on access because that is the only part of it I control.
02
Monthly pack by the 10th
Once we are working monthly, your reporting package lands by the 10th of the following month. Same day every month, whether or not the month was interesting.
03
A one-page cash update every Friday
One page, every Friday, for as long as we are engaged. Where cash lands over the next 13 weeks and what moved since last week. A thing you can read, not a status report about work in progress.
If I am going to miss one of these, you hear it from me before the date, with the new date attached. Surfacing bad news early is the entire product. It would be strange to do that for your cash and not for my own deadlines.
Who you are actually hiring.
Will McLaurin
no file yet
Will McLaurin
Founder, Groma · Washington, DC · Duke economics
Fifteen years of FP&A: Hillel International, AAMC, Washington Gas, Cricket Wireless, Bainbridge Capital. Budgets, driver-based forecasts, variance decks, board and lender packages, diligence. The whole corporate finance apparatus, built and run inside real companies.
Then I bought a FedEx Ground route contract and operated it. Trucks, drivers, weekly payroll, settlement statements, and a collection cycle I did not control. I lost it.
That is the part of my background that matters to you. I have made the payroll call on a Thursday night with the balance open in front of me. I know which numbers kill an operation like yours, I know what order they do it in, and I know that by the time they show up in a month-end P&L the decision has already been made for you. Nobody with real FP&A credentials is sitting in that seat for this market, which is why I built the practice here.
I ran one of these. I know exactly which numbers kill you and when, and I can show you 30 days before it happens.
The number I intend to be judged on is not DSO improvement and it is not hours saved. It is dollars collected into your account, verifiable on your bank statement. Everything on this page is in service of producing that number.