Strategy Meets Finance

Epizode

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  Your Best Customers Might Be Your Worst Financial Decision | Ep 251 23.07.2026 16min

  Know your numbers, fix your cash flow, and build a business that works for you. Start free with myColtivar. Most business owners know their best customers by name. Longest relationships, biggest contracts, most consistent work. But in this episode Steve shows why looking at revenue per customer and profitability per customer are two completely different things and why the gap between them might be the most important number you are not tracking. He walks through exactly how to run a customer p...
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  What Buyers Actually Pay For When They Buy a Business | Ep 250 20.07.2026 18min

  Know your numbers, grow your cash flow, and build a business that works for you. Start free with myColtivar. Two businesses, same revenue, same profit. One sells for three times EBITDA. The other sells for eight times. On a $2 million EBITDA business that gap is $10 million. In this episode Steve breaks down exactly what creates that difference and why sophisticated buyers are not just looking at the size of your earnings but the quality and the risk underneath them. Whether you ever pl...
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  Why Your Pricing Has Nothing to Do With What You Charge | Ep 249 14.07.2026 21min

  Know your numbers, grow your cash flow, and build a business that works for you. Start free with myColtivar. Most business owners set their prices based on what competitors charge, what feels right, or what they think customers will pay. None of those approaches have anything to do with the value your business actually delivers or what your business needs to be financially healthy. In this episode Steve breaks down how pricing actually works, the three most common pricing mistakes he se...
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  Business Lessons I Had to Learn the Hard Way | Ep 248 09.07.2026 14min

  Know your numbers, grow your cash flow, and build a business that works for you. Start free with myColtivar. Steve started his first business at 16 out of his sister's garage with no money, no financial background, and no idea what he was doing. He made every mistake you can make. In this episode he shares the five lessons that would have saved him millions of dollars and thousands of hours if someone had told him earlier. Not motivational fluff. The real stuff that actually changes how...
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  What Your WIP Schedule Is Trying to Tell You | Ep 247 06.07.2026 13min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most specialty contractors either do not have a WIP schedule or do not treat it with the attention it deserves. And if your WIP is wrong, Steve will tell you straight: your financials are wrong too. In this episode he breaks down exactly what the WIP schedule is tracking, why billings are not the same thing as revenue, and how to use it to catch problems on...
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  Profitable But No Cash? This Is Why | Ep 246 02.07.2026 15min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Revenue is up. The team is celebrating. And the business owner is quietly pulling on the line of credit because cash is constantly tight. In this episode Steve breaks down exactly why profitable businesses run out of cash, what is actually happening between the income statement and the bank account, and the three things you can measure to find where the mon...
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  Listen to This if You're Using AI to Optimize Your Business | Ep 245 29.06.2026 14min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Everyone is talking about AI right now. Which tools to use, how to automate, how to stay ahead. Steve thinks AI is important too. But in this episode he wants to have the conversation almost nobody is having. Not which tools to use, but whether those tools are actually helping or quietly making things worse in your business. If you are using AI to manage yo...
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  Why Most Contractors Price to Win Instead of Price to Profit | Ep 244 25.06.2026 20min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Winning work and profiting from work are two completely different things. Most contractors are only doing one of them. In this episode Steve breaks down why pricing to be competitive and pricing to actually make money require fundamentally different thinking, where the gap almost always starts, and what to do about it before the next bid goes out the door. ...
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  The #1 Thing I Fix First When a Business Is Struggling | Ep 243 22.06.2026 17min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit When Steve walks into a struggling business, people expect him to start with leadership, culture, or strategy. He never does. In this episode he walks through the one thing he fixes first in every struggling business, why everything else is pointless without it, and what it actually looks like when a business finally has real financial visibility versus jus...
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  If I Were Running a Construction Business, Here's Exactly What I'd Do | Ep 242 18.06.2026 14min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Steve gets asked this question all the time. If you were running my business, where would you start? In this episode he answers it directly. He walks through exactly what he would do in the first 90 days running a $10 million specialty contracting business, the specific sequence of moves, and why the order matters as much as the moves themselves. If you hav...
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  Why Contractors Run Out of Cash (And the Four Levers That Fix It) | Ep 241 15.06.2026 17min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most specialty contractors know cash flow is important. What they do not know is what actually controls it. In this episode Steve walks through the four levers that determine whether a contracting business has cash or not. They are not complicated, but if you do not know what they are, you cannot pull them. And if you are busy and still broke, at least one ...
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  The 3 Biggest Strategy Mistakes Business Owners Make | Ep 240 11.06.2026 13min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most business owners have sat through a strategy session that felt productive in the room and changed nothing back at the office. In this episode Steve breaks down the three biggest mistakes he sees business leaders make when doing strategy. Not because they are not smart or ambitious, but because nobody ever showed them what strategy actually requires befo...
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  Your Gross Margin Is Probably Wrong. Here's Why. | Ep 239 08.06.2026 14min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most contractors who track their gross margin are still getting it wrong. Not because they are doing anything dishonest. Because the way their accounting is set up does not match the economic reality of their business. In this episode Steve walks through exactly how this happens, which costs are consistently misclassified and why it matters way beyond just ...
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  3 Things I Learned as CFO That Every Contractor Gets Wrong | Ep 238 04.06.2026 16min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit When Steve became CFO of a billion-dollar construction company, he thought he had seen it all. But sitting inside a business at that scale taught him things no classroom or accounting firm ever could. In this episode he walks through the three financial mistakes he sees contractors make consistently, regardless of trade or company size. They are not complic...
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  Your Balance Sheet Is Deceiving You | Ep 237 01.06.2026 13min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most business owners feel pretty comfortable with their income statement. Revenue, costs, profit. Simple enough. But the balance sheet is where the real story lives and where most of the damage hides. If your balance sheet is a mess and you ever have to clean it up, those corrections will hit your profit directly and could affect your taxes going back years...
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  Why Your Business Gets Harder to Run as It Grows (And What to Do About It) | Ep 236 28.05.2026 18min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Revenue is up. The team is growing. There is no shortage of work. And somehow the business feels harder to run than when it was half the size. More stress, more decisions, more fires, and at the same time less margin, less cash, less clarity. In this episode Steve breaks down exactly why this happens and why it is almost never an operations problem. It is a...
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  5 Warning Signs Your Business is Heading Towards a Crisis | Ep 235 26.05.2026 16min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Businesses almost never collapse without warning. The signs are usually there months before things get critical, sometimes even longer. The problem is most owners either do not know what to look for or they see the signs and convince themselves things will turn around. In this episode Steve walks through the five warning signs he looks for when he walks int...
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  The Conversation Most Business Partners Never Have | Ep 234 21.05.2026 17min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most business partnerships do not fall apart because of personality conflicts. They fall apart because two people building something together never got aligned on the financial fundamentals. How much do we pay ourselves? How fast do we grow? What do we reinvest? What does a good exit actually look like? In this episode Steve walks through the financial conv...
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  The Number That Tells You If Your Business Is Worth Buying | Ep 233 18.05.2026 19min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Most business owners have a rough idea of what their business is worth. Usually it is based on what a friend sold theirs for or what feels right. But what a business is actually worth and what an owner thinks it is worth are almost never the same number. In this episode Steve breaks down exactly how a sophisticated buyer looks at a business, what the calcul...
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  3 Things Every Successful Business Turnaround Has in Common | Ep 232 11.05.2026 14min

  How much cash is hiding in your business? See if you qualify for a Free Financial Health Check Financial Intelligence Toolkit Steve has been inside a lot of businesses that were in trouble. Some were losing cash. Some were profitable on paper but couldn't make payroll. Some had great teams and great customers and still couldn't figure out why nothing was working. In this episode he breaks down the three things he has seen in almost every business that actually turns around and mor...