Concrete Business Plan

A concrete business plan built from what one flatwork crew buys per yard and sells per square foot: a lender-ready plan, an editable 36-month model, and the playbooks for driveways, slabs, patios and sidewalks.

A concrete business that pours flatwork sells a permanent product by the installed square foot and buys its largest input by the cubic yard. Plain broom-finish work runs about $7 to $12 per square foot, stamped work $12 to $22, and a tear-out adds $2 to $4, so the blended job in the model is around $4,500 (illustrative; verify against your market). How profitable a concrete company is has a specific answer here. A 700 square foot driveway at $9 per square foot bills $6,300, carries about $3,780 of ready-mix, reinforcement, base, forms and crew labor, and leaves $2,520 of gross profit, a 40% margin. Across a year, the base case takes one owner-led crew to about $409,500 of revenue, $163,800 of gross profit and $82,200 of net income, with a $6,000 monthly owner draw taken below that line as a distribution. Years two and three run near $542,600 and $569,300 of revenue, with net income of roughly $129,100 and $139,600.

How much money it takes to start a single-crew operation runs $45,000 to $120,000, depending on new or used iron and whether the truck is financed. The plan's base case capitalizes at about $115,000. A $75,000 equipment loan at 10.5% over 60 months (a level payment near $1,612 a month) finances the skid-steer loader (~$45,000) and the work truck (~$30,000). About $40,000 of owner equity covers the finishing package, power buggy and trailer (~$10,000), forms, small tools and PPE (~$6,000), first-year insurance, license and bond (~$6,000), launch marketing (~$3,000) and a $15,000 working-capital reserve.

The hard part of this trade is rarely finding work. It is the calendar and the cash. In a freeze region the model's seasonality runs from 0.5× in January and 0.6× in February and December up to 1.25× in June, and the loan payment does not move with it. Operating break-even sits near $14,000 of monthly revenue, roughly three average jobs, and the base case clears it by about the third month of the ramp on its way to a $45,000 steady-state month. Even so, the model's lowest cash point in Year 1 is about $20,800, in April, after the winter has drawn the $40,000 opening balance down. The cash playbook's rule is to hold at least one full month of fixed costs plus the owner's draw, on the order of $9,000 to $18,000, and to throttle the draw through the trough. A Sun Belt operator reads the same plan with a flatter curve.

Licensing is state-variable, and the bundle treats it that way. Many states license concrete or flatwork as a specialty trade above a dollar threshold that a typical residential job crosses; California's C-8 Concrete classification applies once labor and materials reach $1,000 (raised from $500 by AB 2622, effective 2025-01-01). License and permit bonds commonly run $5,000 to $25,000, aprons and sidewalks in the public right-of-way usually need a municipal permit, and workers' compensation for a concrete crew falls in a high-rate class (NCCI 5213), which the model carries as labor burden inside cost of goods. OSHA's respirable crystalline silica standard (29 CFR 1926.1153) requires Table 1 controls and a written exposure-control plan, regardless of crew size. Every regulatory item is dated, marked verify-locally, and laid out as a confirm-your-state decision tree.

The operating idea the playbooks share is that concrete is a clock, and the margin is set before the truck arrives. The price is built from the cost stack, never matched to the lowest bid: drop that 700 square foot driveway from $9.00 to $8.50 to win it and revenue falls $350 while costs stay at $3,780, so gross margin slides from 40% to 36.5%. Short loads under about 7 to 10 yards carry surcharges and standby charges start when the crew is not ready, which is why ordering, batching nearby pours and the ready-mix plant relationship each get their own treatment. A single crew runs two to three residential jobs a week in season, and the joint cut within 6 to 18 hours of the pour is the difference between a crack you placed and a crack the customer finds.