At some point, someone on the team asks for a hire, and the owner says not yet. Take a $3 million residential remodeler with 14 employees, three crews in the field, and a backlog of kitchens and additions booked months out. The office manager asks for a project coordinator at about $52,000 in salary. Cash is tighter than it was a year ago and the jobs are getting done, so the owner holds off.
That is a reasonable call. A coordinator costs more than the salary. Payroll taxes and workers’ compensation add to it, and small-group insurers are proposing a median premium increase of 14% for 2027, so this role runs about $66,000 a year. Holding off protects that cash, and owners who have carried a slow quarter know what that protection is worth. The work the coordinator would have done still has to happen. Someone has to schedule the subcontractors, order the materials, update the homeowners, and send the draw requests, and the cost of the role moves into places nobody files under hiring.
Where the Work Went
In this example, coordination falls to the owner, the office manager, and the lead carpenter. The owner’s extra hours do not show up as a cost. The office manager is hourly, and taking on scheduling and homeowner calls adds about six hours of overtime a week at time and a half on a $28 wage, roughly $13,100 a year.
The lead carpenter takes the rest. Between tasks on site, he confirms subcontractor dates and chases material orders. When an order slips or a subcontractor shows up on the wrong day, his crew of three waits. Two lost days a month for that crew, at $32 an hour each, costs about $18,400 a year in wages for hours with no work to do.
On the books, none of this reads as a coordinator. The CPA records the overtime and the idle crew time as wages, which is where those costs belong. Read together, those lines are a hiring decision the owner has already made and is already paying for.
What Slowed Down
The larger cost is the work the owner stops doing. His evenings, which went to writing estimates and following up with homeowners who were still deciding, now go to schedules and phone calls. Estimates go out a week later, and some homeowners sign with someone else. If that delay costs the company three $50,000 kitchen remodels a year, the business gives up $150,000 in revenue, or $45,000 in gross profit at a 30% margin.
Billing slows too. A remodeler gets paid in draws, each one requested when a phase of the job is complete, and when nobody owns the paperwork, completed phases wait to be billed. If draw requests go out a week late on average, homeowners are holding about $57,500 of the company’s cash at any given time. Covering that gap with a line of credit near 8% costs about $4,600 a year in interest, paid out of the cash the owner held off to protect.
The Person Carrying the Gap
Add it up and, at this pace, the business is giving up about $81,000 a year to avoid a $66,000 hire: $13,100 in overtime, $18,400 in idle crew time, $45,000 in lost gross profit, and $4,600 in interest. The total leaves out the largest risk, which is the lead carpenter doing two jobs.
He runs the best crew in the company and knows the subcontractors, and homeowners refer their neighbors because of his work. Skilled tradespeople are among the hardest roles for a contractor to fill. If the load pushes him to leave, the company faces months of recruiting while his crew works without its lead and jobs run long under a replacement who is still learning the work. Replacing him would cost about $25,000 directly, before counting the schedule slips during the transition. None of it appears in the numbers until he gives notice.
Decide the Yes in Advance
Putting off a hire is a sound decision when the numbers support it. The numbers that matter here (the overtime trend, the idle crew days, the estimate backlog, and the days it takes to bill a draw) rarely arrive together, and connecting them to a hiring decision falls outside what the CPA was engaged to do.
At Stratovus, we work with owners to set those trigger points before the pressure builds: the levels of overtime, backlog, billing delay, and revenue per employee that tell you the business is ready to carry the next role. When the numbers cross the line, the decision is already made, and the hire happens on a schedule you set. With health renewals arriving and next year’s budget taking shape, it is a good time to find out what “not yet” is already costing your business.
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