The course that Installs the system, not just teaches it
The Permanently Profitable Contractor
The Profit First Cash Flow System for Construction
You're running a profitable construction business. Your P&L says so. So why does it feel like there's never enough cash?
Because profit on paper and cash in the bank are two different numbers. This course closes that gap — permanently.
If you've ever thought "we're busy, so why is cash always tight?" — this is for you.
Self-paced: $995 (Cash Flow MRI available as an add-on) · Live cohort: $2,500 · Includes a personal one-on-one MRI session with Wade, weekly live office hours, and 3-month access to the Profit First Construction OS ($447 value)
Meet Your Instructor
Introducing the Permanently Profitable Contractor
You've Got a Good Business.
It's Also Fragile.
And That's Not Your Fault.
I've sat across from contractors doing $1M, $5M, $20M. Good businesses with smart owners. And I've watched them hit the exact same wall. Not because they can't build, not because they don't work hard, but because they're running on a financial system that was never designed for construction.
Your accountant tracks what happened. Your banker watches your debt service. Nobody is looking at the levers inside your business that control whether cash shows up when you need it. Until now, that's been nobody's job.
Here's how I know you're living this right now.
If three or more of these land, you don't have a discipline problem.
You have a cash-flow-structure problem.
And it's fixable. This is what 35+ years of construction CPAs work sounds like on the other end of the call.
This is a structure problem, not a you problem. The contractors who become permanently profitable aren't the ones who work harder. They're the ones who stopped hoping the numbers would work out and installed a system that makes them.
Imagine running your business like this.
Not a fantasy. This is what the system produces.
A paycheck you can count on
Your pay gets funded first — off the top, before it can get spent on something else. You stop being the lowest-paid person in your own company.
Sleep on Thursday night
Payroll lives in its own protected account on a fixed rhythm. No more deciding whether to pay your guys or your suppliers.
The tax bill is already set aside
Tax money is moved the day it comes in. April becomes a routine, not an ambush.
Know which jobs made money
Real revenue, true labor burden, job-by-job profit — proven with numbers, not "I feel like we did okay."
Grow without going broke
Guardrails and a cash buffer so winning the big job doesn't trigger your worst cash crunch.
Bid to win AND profit
Price from your real costs and your real targets — not gut, memory, or whatever the low bidder is doing.
The Profit First Construction OS
You don't just get the course. You get the full operating system — tools, diagnostics, community, and AI coach — for 3 months included.
Construction Financial Calculators
Every calculation you currently guess at — markup, labor burden, equipment, retainage, breakeven, change-order impact — built specifically for construction. Save inputs, reload profiles, export to PDF.
Profit First Progress Tracker
Log your actual allocations each cycle. Watch your CAPs move toward your TAPs over time. See the trend — are you getting more consistent or drifting?
"Ask Wade" — On Demand
Profit First answers grounded in Wade's book and 270+ podcast episodes. A construction-specific second opinion at 2am when the question hits. Cited sources, not hallucinated answers.
Private Contractor Community
Members-only — organized by trade, region, revenue. Success stories, events, direct messages. Accountability pods of ~8 contractors working through the same stage. Finally, people who get it.
Structured Courses + Certificates
Video curriculum with lesson progress tracking, homework submissions with rubrics, AI preflight review, manual instructor feedback. You don't finish until you've proven you can apply it.
Weekly Check-ins + Goal Tracking
Log your weekly allocations, wins, challenges, and next week's focus. Set financial KPI targets — revenue, TAP %, DSO, net profit, owner comp — and track actuals over time.
3 months of full PFCOS access included with enrollment. $447 value — free. Continue at $149/month after, or don't. No lock-in.
TWO WAYS IN
Pick the Path That
Fits Where You Are.
Both options install the same Profit First system. The difference is how much of Wade's time you want in the room with you, and whether you want the full Cash Flow MRI done on your numbers.
PLATFORM ONLY
COMMUNITY
Profit First Construction Operating System
$447
| Free basic community tier also available — | Create an account |
available now
SELF-PACED
DIY–The Permanently Profitable Contractor
$995
| + Add the Cash Flow MRI session with Wade: | $795 |
COMING SOON
LIVE COHORT
Full Program - Live With Wade
$2,500
Already a Profit First Construction OS member? The course modules are separate from the community platform — but both the DIY and Live Cohort options include 3 months of full PFCOS access as part of enrollment.
An X-ray shows a number.
An MRI shows where you actually stand.
Most contractors only ever see the X-ray version of their finances — a P&L that says "profit" or "loss" and stops there. The Cash Flow MRI goes deeper. It places your business on a five-level scale of financial health, from crisis to permanently profitable — and shows you exactly which lever moves you up a level.
Decisions made by bank balance. Payroll is a weekly question mark. No reserves, no real plan — just getting through the week.
Profitable on paper most years, but one slow-pay client or one bad job from real trouble. Taxes are still a surprise.
Bills get paid, payroll clears — but growth still strains everything, and you still can't say with certainty where the money's going.
Allocations run on a rhythm. Reserves exist for taxes and slow season. You know your real margins — and your real Debt Pressure Ratio.
The owner gets paid first and consistently. Growth is funded, not feared. You could walk away for two weeks and the business runs fine.
Most contractors land hereLevel 2 — Reactive & Fragile. The business looks fine from the outside. From the inside, it's one bad month from real trouble — and nobody's ever shown them which specific lever moves them to Level 4 or 5. That's exactly what the Cash Flow MRI identifies, in the first session, on your actual numbers.
What Wade runs on your actual numbers
Your CPA does tax returns. Your banker looks at debt coverage. Neither one is looking at the levers inside your business that control whether cash shows up when you need it. This session does.
Complete Financial Picture Rebuilt
- Full P&L with 5 years of history, classified into Profit First buckets
- Balance sheet — current assets, fixed assets, liabilities, equity
- Full debt schedule — every obligation mapped with rate, payment, maturity
Cash & Profit Levers
- AP timing impact — what changes if you slow down how fast you pay
- AR aging — what changes if you collect faster
- Cash Conversion Cycle per dollar of revenue
- Free Cash Flow Ratio — can you grow without borrowing?
- COGS breakdown and customer margin analysis
What Your CPA Isn't Running
- WIP accounting — are you over or underbilled?
- Job cost variance — estimates vs. what jobs actually cost
- Retainage impact — how much receivable is locked up
- Payment timing — the cash effect of your contract terms
- Flip Analysis — scenario modeling across multiple levers
What comes out the other side
- Executive summary narratives for every lever — written analysis, not just numbers
- Before/after scenario comparisons — current state vs. optimized state
- Prioritized recommendation list — what to do first, second, and third
The difference
- Full PDF report with charts and tables — ready to share with a partner, lender, or advisor
- Specific numbers — "Your DSO is 54 days. Get it to 40 and you free up $82,000 in working capital." That kind of specific.
- Re-run at capstone — before/after on your own numbers, measured
Whatever's keeping you up at night — there's a tool for it
Every pain a contractor names, the system has an answer for.
| The pain, in your words | What the OS does about it | The tool |
|---|---|---|
| "I mark everything up 20% and still don't clear 20%." | See the exact margin you actually keep — and what to bid to hit your target. | Markup vs. Margin trainer |
| "I price labor at the wage rate and forget taxes, insurance, and comp." | Get the true, fully-loaded cost of every hour your crew works. | Burdened Labor Rate calculator |
| "I won't know if this job made money until it's long over." | Three-column job analysis: what you charged vs. what you should have. | Cash Flow MRI · Bidding Tool |
| "I don't know how much to charge to actually hit my profit goal." | Work backward from your personal income target to the price per job. | Reverse-Engineer Your Cash Flow |
| "I'm doing more jobs but not making more money." | Find the bottleneck that actually caps your profit — and the right job mix. | Throughput Scenarios simulator |
| "Every winter I wonder if I'll make it to spring." | Build a seasonal reserve sized to your real off-season gap. | Seasonality Profile + Reserve planner |
| "There's six figures of my money trapped in retention." | Track retainage, job deposits, and the cash gap you're financing. | Contractor Cash Gap Analyzer |
| "Everything I own is personally guaranteed." | A debt-payoff plan and growth guardrails that get you off the edge. | Debt Snowball + Growth Rate |
8 modules. Your actual numbers.
A working system by the end.
"I don't know if a job made money — sometimes I never find out." Module 2 fixes that. Every module below targets a specific pain on the list you just recognized yourself in.
Every module includes a structured deliverable — not a worksheet you file away, but a working document you run your business from. The course is self-paced: watch on your schedule, bring questions to weekly live office hours with Wade. Sessions are recorded.
What This Would Cost You
to Assemble Elsewhere.
Everything included in this course is available in some form from other sources. Here's what you'd actually pay to piece it together.
| What You Get | What It Costs Elsewhere | In This Course |
|---|---|---|
| Construction Cash Flow MRI — one-on-one advisory session with a specialist CPA | $2,500–$5,000+ per session | ✓ Included |
| Capstone MRI re-run — before/after on your actual numbers at completion | $2,500–$5,000+ | ✓ Included |
| 8 modules of construction-specific cash management curriculum | $3,000–$8,000 (comparable courses) | ✓ Included |
| Weekly live office hours with an expert — bring your real questions | $300–$600/hr (consulting rates) | ✓ Included |
| 9 working deliverables with rubrics and instructor review | Part of any premium course | ✓ Included |
| 3 months of PFCOS — 200+ calculators, AI advisor, community, tracker | $447 standalone value | ✓ Included |
| Total if assembled separately | $8,447–$18,000+ | From $995 |
Most contractors who complete this program don't say "I learned a lot." They say "I finally understand what is happening to my money." One is awareness. The other is a system installed in a real business with real bank accounts and a real allocation running on the 10th and 24th of every month.
What the system actually changes
- Profitable on paper, broke in the bank
- Paying yourself last, when there's anything left
- Tax bills that wipe out the cushion
- Bidding from gut and memory
- No reserve — one bad job from the edge
- Carrying all the stress alone
- Taking every job because you can't say no
- Cash in the right accounts, on a rhythm
- A consistent owner paycheck, funded first
- Tax money set aside before it's due
- Pricing from real costs and real targets
- A buffer that absorbs the surprises
- A CPA and a community in your corner
- You say no to bad jobs — because you can
What Contractors Ask
Before Enrolling
Wade Carpenter,
CPA, CGMA
Wade has spent his career almost exclusively in commercial construction finance. He wrote Profit First for Commercial Construction, co-hosts the Contractor Success Forum podcast with Stephen Brown, and rebuilt the Profit First method from the ground up for the way construction cash actually moves — retainage, draws, WIP, bonds, seasonality, and all.
This isn't generic small-business advice with a hard hat glued on. It's a system designed for your industry, by someone who's sat across the table from contractors from $500K to $70M and run their actual numbers.
Wade built this course because the contractors who needed it most couldn't always get one-on-one time with him. Now they can — with the MRI sessions built directly into the program.
He genuinely cares whether your business makes it. That's not a sales line. It's why he's still in construction accounting after 30 years.