Carlson Projects is a residential remodeling company in Nebraska, run by the Carlson family. When we met them in December 2023, they were struggling to pay vendors, accounts payable looked far off and they couldn't tell why, and the family was working harder every year while taking home less.
They already had a fractional CFO. What they asked us for at first was small. In Mike's words, "they just wanted, initially, a second set of eyes on what their person was doing."
What we found
The books had been intermingled with another system, and the migration had gone badly. Old accounts and vendors carried over and generated duplicate bills. Accounts payable was inflated with money they didn't actually owe, so nobody could trust the number, and nobody could plan around it.
What we did together
We cleaned up the old accounts and vendors and eliminated the duplicate bills, so AP finally showed us something true. Then we called vendors directly and negotiated payment terms. This stopped cash going out the door the day a bill arrived.
With the picture clear, we built a list of ten first action items for a speedy course correct, and worked through it over the following year. A few of them:
- We got working capital in place so payables could be managed on purpose instead of in a scramble.
- We went through every transaction looking for small savings, getting as lean as possible while the company recovered.
- We mapped when their clients actually pay, so cash planning could work off real timing.
- We built a forecast, so they could see what was coming instead of finding out.
Where they are now
By the end of 2024, Carlson Projects had gone from cash strapped and unprofitable to profitable. In 2025, we were able to see a full year of costs associated with each job through accounting, every transaction tied to specific jobs. In 2026, we've been able to set up the financial and reporting backbone to support their growth into a new service offering as a custom home builder.
Something else changed along the way. The two sons, Stefan and Scott, moved into ownership, and their parents could see that the next generation knew how to run the company.
Today the family knows where to push: sales, staffing, payables, or receivables. Mike's read on what shifted for them: "they just felt better about where it was going and that someone was paying attention to it and looking at the numbers, and that they weren't the only ones that cared about how it was going."