A long stretch in residential contracting.
For eleven years, Maya ran a 22-person residential contracting firm in the Midwest — three crews, a dispatcher, an office manager who quit twice, and a bookkeeper she hired too late. The business was profitable most of those years. In year seven, it was also the year she almost missed an August payroll — on a Thursday, which is when payroll runs in contracting. Best revenue quarter of her career. Worst cash position. She spent the next four years turning what she learned from that single Thursday into a weekly rhythm the whole firm could run without her in the room. Eventually she sold the firm, and now coaches other owners through the same stretch of ground.
What Maya coaches now.
Maya leads the cashflow pillar and the delegation pillar — two pillars that share the same root cause. Most of the owners she works with arrive with the same symptom: everything runs through them. The bank balance, the schedule, the customer calls that only the owner can take. Her work is moving the picture out of the owner’s head and onto pages the team can actually run.
She will not tell you to just raise your prices. She will not hand you a framework you can’t sketch on a napkin. If she can’t draw it in twelve minutes, it isn’t ready yet.