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Over the Past 30+ Years – I’ve accumulated a plethora of terms to describe the construction industry. Some of them are intended to be comical, some are serious and the rest are quite entertaining. Feel free to share them with your friends, relatives, and most importantly contractors, as they will certainly appreciate the humor and perhaps find value in the wise words we are sharing. If you have any other terms you’d like to add, please leave a comment on the right.

80/20 Rule – A contractor’s wealth and wellbeing come from 20% of their activities.

24 Hour Bookkeeper – A bookkeeper that quietly sits in your office, no watering, no feeding, available to work around the clock, never wasting company time surfing the web or chatting on their cell phone.

Aggravation Box – A computer with construction accounting software operated by a trainee, causing endless frustration.

Auction – The end result of working in the business, focusing on the wrong stuff and receiving bad financial reports.

Auditor – A person who goes in after the war is lost and bayonets the wounded.

Assets of Company – Cash / Receivables – Payables / Trucks / Tools / Equipment / Material.

Assets of Firm – Cash / Business Process / Sales Process / Client List / Predictable Cash Flow.

Bad Bookkeeper – A wealth prevention tool that keeps contractors from earning more than bookkeepers.

Bad Bookkeeper Thinking Patterns – Some of the reasons they do what they do to drive contractors crazy.

Bad Bookkeeping – Saving money in the wrong place and making decisions based on garbage reports.

Bad Numbers – They lead to bad decisions, shrinking cash flow, unstable business, bankruptcy, or failure.

Bankruptcy – The unfortunate result of saving money on bookkeeping and making decisions based on garbage reports.

BCA Business Coach – Someone who helps you raise your level of thinking and income.

BCA Staff Member – A cheerful, well-paid, thinking, responsible adult and mastermind team member.

BCG Matrix – A graphical representation of Cash Cows / Rising Stars / Question Marks / Dogs.

Belly Button Accountability – The one person who is responsible for a deliverable on a construction project.

Bid – A wild guess carried out to two decimal places.

Bid Collector – A customer looking for a cheap contractor.

Bid Opening – A poker game in which the losing hand wins.

Black Box – A computer with construction accounting software operated by a trainee.

Bookkeeper Training Contractor – Bookkeepers who train the boss to let them come in late, leave early, call friends and relatives, take long breaks, get paid more, and do less and less.

BPM – Business Process Management for construction company owners to grow passive income streams.

Budget Bookkeeping – Listing all deposits from the bank statement as sales income, leading contractors to pay too much in taxes.

Business Failure – No meaningful financial and project management records in the calendar quarter preceding the failure.

Business Life Cycle – Starts small, grows big, loses shirt, shrinks back to a small business.

Business Plan – A plan to have accurate financial reports to base long and short-term decisions on.

Business Process Management – Developing a construction business that generates passive income.

Business Roundtable – A small round table in a tavern with a pitcher of beer and four contractors strategizing.

C.P.A. – Someone who is qualified to do tax returns, and we refer a lot of business to the ones that only do tax returns.

C.P.A. Construction Consultant – Someone who has seen a bunch of tax returns and thinks they know how to run a construction business. They are generally more dangerous to the contractor’s financial health than a drunken car salesman on a backhoe at a gas station, in the dark, digging up live fuel lines.

C.P.A. Involved In Construction Bookkeeping – QuickBooks setup to make doing tax returns easy while greasing the rails for the contractor to go down the tube and go broke by focusing only on making the C.P.A’s job easier and not on increasing cash flow and profitable jobs.

Change – The only people who want change are wet babies! Everyone else hates change!

Cheap – Not enough time or money to do it right the first time, but plenty of time and money to do it over.

Chaos – Always focused on the dollars coming in, never on the money going out.

Client – Someone who buys construction services and is more concerned about quality than price.

Comfort Zone – The success you have now since that is what you feel you deserve, no more, no less.

Company Bookkeeper – An expensive luxury for construction companies that do not know about outsourced contractor bookkeeping.

Completion Date – The point at which liquidated damages begin.

Contractor Not A Banker – A student of Business Consulting And Accounting who has mastered the art of managing cash flow properly.

Contractors – The people who make civilization possible by building and maintaining structures.

Contractor Gambling – One project away from making it big or going broke.

Contractor Chaos – A contractor netting less than $100K, doing everything their way, especially the bookkeeping.

Contractor Cheap – An amateur with customers from Hell and the host of the game show “Low Price Leader”.

Contractor Income – The average income of the six people they spend the most time with.

Contractor Rich – A BCA client earning $100K-$200K by building a client base to sell and service.

Contractor Student – A BCA client netting less than $100K, learning how to get rich, then wealthy.

Contractor Successful – A contractor using timely accurate financial reports to base their decisions upon.

Contractor Volume – Loses money on every sale and tries to make it up with a volume of new work.

Contractor Wealthy – A BCA client earning $200K+ and investing $50K with 100 clients to service.

Construction Accountant – Someone who turns piles of numbers into meaningful trends.

Construction Accounting – A system that combines construction bookkeeping with quarterly tax preparation and payroll processing, providing the annual tax preparer with the necessary information to prepare the annual income tax return. Construction accounting does not prepare annual tax returns, as that is a profession and specialty of its own.

Construction Bookkeeping – A system for setting up and maintaining construction bookkeeping.

Construction Bookkeeping And Accounting – A system for setting up and maintaining construction bookkeeping and accounting together in order to develop and maintain Key Performance Indicators that, when viewed daily and understood, lead contractors to accumulate wealth.

Construction Worker Thinking Patterns – Insights into the mind of a typical construction worker.

Construction Worker Fully Burdened Labor Cost – The cost of having construction workers on your payroll.

Critical Path Method – A management technique for losing your shirt under perfect control.

Customer – Someone who buys construction services and is more concerned about price than quality.

Delayed Payment – A tourniquet applied to the bank balance of any contractor who allows it.

Delusional – A contractor thinking they can effectively use QuickBooks in just a few months.

Developer – A company looking for a few good, low-priced, high-volume contractors they can school.

Displaced Aggression – Being angry at someone because of past events or circumstances that are resulting in ongoing issues. In some cases, contractors have hired cheap or bad bookkeepers without realizing the consequences of not having useful financial and job cost reports.

Dog And Pickup Truck – A contractor with a dog and a pickup truck, one of the four types of contractors.

Emergency Accounting – When taxes, payroll, or paperwork pile up, causing a contractor to seek help to get the “books” caught up, tax reports prepared, payroll processed, or other issues resolved.

Emergency Bookkeeping – When taxes, payroll, or paperwork pile up, causing a contractor to seek help to get the “books” caught up, tax reports prepared, payroll processed, or other issues resolved.

Emerging Contractor – Someone who is moving to a slightly less hands-on role in their contracting company.

Engineer’s Estimate – The cost of construction in heaven.

Expensive – Goods or services that, no matter how cheap they are, simply do not work.

Experience – What you get when you get what you don’t want.

Failure – A few errors in judgment repeated every day.

Fear – What initiates change or stops progress.

Five For Five At Five – The five reports at five o’clock for five minutes that tell you how your business is doing.

Fifteen Minutes Too Late – If you think you should fire somebody, you’re already 15 minutes too late.

Fully Burdened Rate – Includes all the costs of keeping an employee on the payroll, not just wages.

Hard Work – The expressway to retirement.

Hustle – The expectation of getting 40 hours of work done in 20 hours.

Income – Working for daily money.

Insanity – Hiring and firing cheap in-house bookkeepers over and over and over, expecting useful reports.

Inexpensive – Cost-effective solutions that actually work.
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