The Situation
When a private equity firm acquired a $7M construction subcontractor, they inherited more than a business. They inherited a broken culture. A profit-sharing program employees had counted on was cut immediately. Eighteen months later, morale had cratered. The lead superintendent threatened to retire — almost daily. Finger-pointing had replaced accountability. And the financials reflected exactly what the culture felt like: nearly break-even, with no clear path forward.
What We Found
John walked in and saw what the data couldn’t fully capture: a team that had stopped trusting each other — and a leadership structure that had never been built for this environment. The operations leader had come up through sales. He was capable, but he had never managed a field crew. The superintendent who knew how to run jobs felt unheard.
The stated problem was low morale. The real problem was that the systems had failed the people — not the other way around.
We came down and said it was more of the systems than the people. Most of the people are still there and they’re doing really great.
How We Solved It
John built a profit-sharing model designed to do one thing above all else: get everyone working toward the same goals. That sounds simple. The execution was not. He went through twelve iterations of the model before both the parent company and local management reached agreement — walking through the real numbers until both sides could see what the program would actually look like once it was running.
The model was anchored to net income. But net income alone is too abstract for a field crew. So John identified the specific KPIs each team could directly influence — labor efficiency, material costs, schedule adherence. Every line item on the income statement had an owner. Once a month, after the books closed, the whole team gathered to walk through the actual numbers together.
The employees understand what they did that month to impact net income — which then impacted their profit sharing.
The Results
Revenue grew from $7M to over $15M — more than doubling in roughly three and a half years. Profits moved from nearly break-even to almost $4M annually. But the numbers only capture part of what changed. The superintendent who threatened to retire every other week is still there. The finger-pointing stopped. Employees show up differently when they understand that their daily decisions show up in their own paycheck at the end of the month.