Fractional CFO for HVAC-R & Commercial Building Trades in Chicago
Mechanical, HVAC-R service, and overhead door and dock companies run on technicians, trucks, and service agreements. That's a lot of moving parts, producing a lot of data — but most of that data never turns into an actual decision.
We show which customers, contracts, and crews generate the best returns, and where billable time or margin gets lost between the dispatch board and the invoice.
The Pattern We See in Commercial Building Trades
Billable Time Leaks Between Dispatch and Invoice
Time gets logged in the field, entered by a tech, adjusted by dispatch, and invoiced by the office. Margin quietly disappears at every handoff along the way.
Service Agreements Are Priced Once and Never Revisited
Maintenance contracts get signed at a rate that made sense at the time. Labor and parts costs move. The contract rate usually doesn't, until it's underwater.
Crew and Truck Profitability Is Invisible
You know total revenue. You don't know which crews, trucks, or service lines are actually carrying the business and which are being subsidized by the rest.
The Three Pillars, Applied to Commercial Building Trades
Governance & Operational Design
Clear rules for quoting, change orders, and contract renewals, so consistent pricing holds up even on a busy dispatch day.
Financial Data Infrastructure
Field service software connected to financials that consolidate crews, trucks, and locations into one trustworthy view.
Reporting Operations
Contract-level profitability reporting that shows exactly which service agreements need repricing, backed by real cost data.
What Commercial Building Trades Operators Ask Us
We already use field service software — why do we need a fractional CFO too?
Field service software tells you what jobs happened. It rarely tells you whether they were profitable once labor, parts, and drive time are fully loaded. We connect that system to financials that answer the profitability question directly.
Can you help us reprice stale service agreements?
That's part of Reporting Operations — building the contract-level profitability view that shows exactly which agreements need repricing and by how much, backed by real cost data instead of a guess.
How long does an engagement take to show results?
The Read — our fixed-fee diagnostic — typically takes a few weeks and tells you plainly what's broken and what it's costing you. The build phase that follows is scoped and fixed-price, so you know the timeline before you commit.
Do you work with multi-location or multi-crew operations?
Yes. Financial Data Infrastructure is specifically built to consolidate data across crews, trucks, and locations into one trustworthy view instead of separate spreadsheets nobody reconciles.
Want a read on your own numbers first?
Take the Free Commercial Building Trades Mini Read →It doesn’t end with a deck. It ends with a system.
We Take a Small Number of Engagements at a Time.
Every engagement starts with a Read — a short, fixed-fee diagnostic that tells you plainly what’s broken and what it’s costing you.