Where 15–20% of Your Profit Disappears | Jerry Aliberti

JERRY ALIBERTI SPENT close to three decades inside New York’s construction system, a career that put him behind roughly twelve billion dollars in bids and three hundred million dollars in field projects. Watching money move at that scale, on both the estimating and field sides, gave him a clear read on where a project’s margin goes.

Aliberti calls it profit bleed: the gap between what a job is estimated to cost in the office and what it costs to deliver in the field. It isn’t the result of bad luck, and it isn’t traceable to a single mistake on a single job. It’s a communication problem that repeats itself across the industry, one that happens in the same place almost every time, in the handoff between the people who priced the work and the people who build it.

Where the Money Disappears

The gap starts the moment an estimate leaves the office.

Aliberti traces profit bleed back to how, and how completely, an estimate travels from the office to the field. “It’s really about getting all the assumptions of the estimate, and all the risk and documentation created during the estimating and pre-construction process, out to the field properly,” he said.

At larger companies especially, he’s seen this create a consistent friction point. The office prices a task at one number, and the field, working from its own read of how the job should be built, executes it differently. “The majority of the profit gets lost between not getting the message of what was bid out to the field, and the field taking it upon themselves to approach and execute the work in a way that doesn’t align with the budgets.”

The way Aliberti frames it, this isn’t about field teams cutting corners or estimators missing details. Both sides are doing their jobs as they understand them. The problem is that the budget itself, the specific number the job was sold on, doesn’t always make the full trip between departments intact.

Asked to size the impact, Aliberti gave a direct figure drawn from what he’s tracked across larger companies. “If somebody’s putting 20% profit on a project, anywhere between 15 to 20% of that profit is getting lost with a bad bid handoff.” He was specific about scope, noting that this pattern shows up differently depending on company size. “A lot of small companies will pump out 15 bids a week, but large companies aren’t pumping out 15 bids a week. They’re pumping out a couple of bids a month, if that.”

That distinction matters operationally. A smaller shop that bids constantly absorbs a bad handoff differently than a larger company that might only price a handful of jobs in a month, where every one of those bids carries more weight and less room for the number to drift once it reaches the field.

Why Growing Companies Bleed More, Not Less

Bigger companies don’t outgrow this problem; they build it into their org chart.

Aliberti described how the roles connected to a bid change as a company grows. “When a company is smaller, the estimator is the project manager, is the superintendent,” he said. As companies grow, those roles separate into their own departments. “As companies grow, those departments get built out and developed,” he explained, noting that the project manager role and field supervision each become their own department, and that an estimator in many companies becomes a dedicated, career position rather than someone who also works in the field.

Aliberti connected that departmental growth directly to increased risk. “As those departments grow, so does the risk of making a bad decision,” he said. “Managers become more territorial over their department as well.” He added that when a company lacks a culture of collaboration, “friction is going to continue to grow.”

He has also seen this dynamic show up with less experienced staff. “I’ve also seen companies where there’s bureaucratic red tape, where a younger, unseasoned person is being nurtured and developed to protect themselves rather than make a decision that’s in the best interest of the company,” Aliberti said.

For Aliberti, the source of this pattern sits with leadership, not with any individual department. “It all boils down to, and starts with, upper leadership,” he said. “If upper leadership isn’t in tune with what’s happening, this becomes more of a cultural dysfunction than a culture of synergy, proper collaboration, and communication, where making decisions and making mistakes is embraced.”

The Fix Isn’t Tighter Bids, It’s Structured Touch Points

Aliberti’s answer to profit bleed isn’t a more careful estimate. It’s building real contact points between the office and the field before, during, and after a bid goes out. He starts with a pushback he hears often. “When I tell a contractor, hey, you need to get some field involvement in estimating, they respond, well, then who’s going to be building the project?” Aliberti said that more successful companies are moving past that objection by giving project managers dedicated time to feed insight back to estimators, while estimators spend time in the field each month building their own record of how work goes. He pointed to a concrete pour as an example of the kind of operation an estimator benefits from watching firsthand.

The reason that field exposure matters comes down to how a bid gets built in the first place. “A good estimate is not a best-case scenario all the time,” Aliberti said. “A good estimator knows you can’t completely bid a project on best-case productions on a per-day basis.” That isn’t a flaw in the estimator’s work. It’s the nature of competitive bidding. The gap between that best-case number and what a crew runs into on a given day is exactly what field data needs to close.

For self-performed contractors, Aliberti pointed to one input as the highest leverage available: accurate production rate data. “The best way to really close this gap is collecting your production rates through someone who’s well trained, because garbage in results in garbage out,” he said. “If someone who’s not trained is putting garbage in and creating garbage data, that data gets back to the estimators, which is a major risk for the company.” He called labor a contractor’s greatest variable, and in the same breath, its greatest opportunity.

That same visibility matters just as much for the people running the job day to day. Aliberti said one complaint comes up constantly among the superintendents he works with. “I wish I knew how we estimated the job a little bit better, so I’d know if I’m winning or losing and could execute better out in the field.” He framed the stakes plainly. “A project manager is essentially being handed off a new business. When you start a new project, you’re starting a new business.” A project manager in that position needs to know whether the work is making money, and Aliberti said that conversation often just isn’t happening.

Structured meetings are how he closes that loop. Working largely within the EOS framework, Aliberti builds accountability around short, specific check-ins rather than open-ended status updates. A project manager’s meeting should center on project-specific items such as schedule, budget, risk mitigation, change orders, safety, and client needs, with the superintendent, foremen, and possibly the estimator if budget is way off, each prepared to speak to their part of that picture. The discipline, he said, is in keeping those meetings tight and on task, and in what he expects from the people in the room. “You come to this weekly meeting and you need to speak to those expectations, not excuses. If you weren’t able to get something accomplished for whatever reason, you better come with a solution, not an excuse.”

Why This Discipline Has to Exist Before You Chase Bigger Contracts

Asked whether fixing profit bleed opens the door to bigger contracts or is simply a matter of protecting profitability, Aliberti pointed first to financial visibility. You can’t scale a leak; you have to close it first. “You need to have a really good accounting system in play,” he said. He described a pattern he sees often, where a contractor’s finances are handled by a spouse acting as a self-proclaimed CFO, or by a CFO without construction-specific experience. A fractional CFO, or even a solid controller or accountant, gives an owner a clear read on what’s making money and what isn’t.

That clarity has to come before a company chases larger pursuits, not after. Aliberti was direct about what happens without it. “It’s an old-school mindset to say let’s just take on more work and figure it out as we go. That’s a sure way to go into bankruptcy.” Getting clear on what a good project pursuit looks like, rather than what feels exciting to take on, comes first. Scaling up follows from there.

Hiring carries the same risk when it’s treated casually. Aliberti pushed back on a common assumption he hears from contractors, that hiring a superintendent away from a competitor means that person will already know exactly what to do. “It’s not just taking someone’s resume, without understanding that what’s on there is probably enhanced,” he said. He recommended testing candidates against their resume and their answers in the interview, since a superintendent’s experience at another company doesn’t automatically translate to how a new employer runs its business.

Onboarding is where that discipline continues. Aliberti lays out 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals for a new superintendent, project manager, or estimator, with defined check-in points to measure whether those goals are being met. If they aren’t, after 120 days for most roles or up to six months for a larger one, he said the right move is to acknowledge the fit isn’t there. “Too many contractors hold on to the wrong person for too long, and it messes up operations and everybody else who’s answering to those roles.”

Protect the Handoff, Protect the Margin

Profit bleed isn’t solved by bidding tighter, working longer hours, or hiring people who are simply better in some general sense. Aliberti’s experience points to something more specific. The gap closes when a company builds the connection between estimating and the field into how it actually operates, through real touch points between departments, structured meetings where people report on defined outcomes, and hiring practices that hold new employees to measurable goals rather than assumptions based on a resume.

Aliberti sees the scale of what’s at stake across the industry. “It’s a multi-trillion-dollar business, so there are billions of dollars being lost just on that one handoff process that could be done better.”

Every project handed to a project manager comes with the same stakes as handing someone a company to run. Companies that protect their margin make sure that handoff happens and that the person running the job knows, in real numbers, whether they’re winning or losing.

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Jerry Aliberti is the founder of Pro-Accel, a consulting and executive coaching firm that helps mid-sized and upper-market contractors across the country accelerate growth, strengthen leadership, and build high-performing teams. With over 23 years of boots-on-the-ground construction experience, Jerry has managed hundreds of millions of dollars in projects and estimated more than $12 billion in work, holding roles from estimator to superintendent to project manager. Today, through Pro-Accel, he works directly with contractors nationwide and their leadership teams to create structure, accountability, and clarity through role-specific workforce performance training, helping them develop stronger estimators, project managers, superintendents, and field engineers who execute at a higher level, win more bids, improve communication, and scale without chaos.

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About the author:

Robert Puharich is the founder of IsleFlow Content Studio and author of Building Brilliance. He helps construction firms build the trust, authority, and credibility that makes them the first call, not just another bid.