Don’t Let Weak Process Stop Your Growth
Archibald McLellan spent 33 and a half years in the Marine Corps. He flew the CH-53E (53,000 pounds of aircraft), and eventually ran special operations programs across multiple theaters. He is not a person who struggles with discipline.
And yet, when he started his construction company CBIS, his books were a mess.
“We didn’t have processes. We didn’t have bookkeeping. I was doing things on QuickBooks Online because it’s not that hard. They’ve got that little button you can push.”
Arch joined Reece on Builders Budgets and Beers to talk about how he built CBIS, what went wrong early, and what it actually looks like to run a construction company with the kind of operational rigor that makes growth possible without everything falling apart. His story is specific, honest, and worth paying attention to.
The dog that caught the car
CBIS landed a significant storm remediation contract early. It was exactly the kind of break a new company needs, except they weren’t ready for it.
Documentation was loose. Change orders were casual. When a client decided they wanted an upgraded backsplash or a different countertop, the team just made it happen and figured the paperwork would sort itself out. They were good at the work. They assumed that was enough.
It wasn’t. When the project wrapped, the client disputed a significant portion of the invoice. The documentation wasn’t there to back it up. CBIS went to mediation and technically won, but in practical terms, they lost.
“It was all due to lack of systems, lack of process, and really lack of being dialed into what our numbers were,” Arch said. “It was a horrible lesson. But it was a great lesson.”
The reason it was a great lesson: it happened on a small project. The same breakdown at ten times the scale would have been a different story.
The bookkeeper who retired — and what came next
After that early experience, Arch found a bookkeeper who became indispensable. In Arch’s words, he was the navigator: “You just have to tell me where we are, and I’ll tell you if there’s a mountain in front of you.”
Then, in October of last year, the bookkeeper called. He was in his late seventies. He and his wife had been on their usual walk. She’d asked how the business was going, reminded him that the early years had nearly broken them, and he’d decided it was time to be done.
He gave Arch until end of November.
“I didn’t know how to tell my wife this,” Arch said. “I almost quit tomorrow.”
Instead of spiraling, he did what he’s done his whole career: made a plan. He found a note he’d kept about Apparatus, a firm specializing in construction accounting, reached out that night, and had a call booked for 9 the next morning. A month into November, CBIS was onboarding. By the last week of December, they were stabilized — including the integration with Adaptive for AP automation, compliance tracking, and real-time financials.
“I didn’t even know Adaptive came with this,” he said. “And then I saw all the green check marks.”
The goal wasn’t just to replace his bookkeeper. It was to build financial infrastructure that didn’t depend on any single person — and that could scale with the company.
What good process actually looks like
Arch frames CBIS’s operating model around a simple principle: the budget and the schedule have to be inextricably linked, and both have to be tied to a communication plan that keeps clients, subs, and the team aligned throughout the project.
That might sound obvious. In practice, most contractors manage each of those pieces separately, which means gaps open up and nobody catches them until it’s too late.
The communication piece is particularly important to Arch, and he defines it in a specific way. Communication isn’t just keeping people informed about what’s happening now. It’s foreshadowing — letting clients know six weeks in advance what’s coming, why it matters, and what it will require from them. By the time you need a draw, the client shouldn’t be surprised. They should have seen it coming for weeks.
“That’s tied into your budget, so that the communications are strategic steps to get you to the point of going — Mr. Client, I need you to give me the check, because over the next period of time we’re going to be doing these seven things you’ve agreed to have us do.”
The curse of slow pay
One of the most useful things Arch said in the whole episode was about what happens when a contractor misses a pay window.
You start a job with the A team. Everyone shows up. The energy is right. Then you miss the first payment to your subs. The next week, the B team shows up. Longer lunches. Less hustle. Miss another payment, and you’re looking at the C team — sometimes literally the same people who were standing in front of Home Depot looking for day work.
“Your production slows down. The quality is out the window. And you will never get that back.”
This isn’t a metaphor for bad culture. It’s a direct financial consequence of not knowing your cash position in real time. You don’t miss sub payments because you’re irresponsible. You miss them because you didn’t know what was coming, didn’t have a cash flow forecast tied to your project schedule, and got caught flat-footed.
The fix isn’t being more diligent. It’s having a financial system that shows you the mountain before you fly into it.
Knowing your numbers isn’t a finance thing — it’s everything
By the end of the conversation, Arch and Reece had worked through something that sounds simple but most contractors don’t actually do: build the financial plan before the project starts, tie it to the schedule, communicate it proactively to the client, and then track it in real time as the job runs.
That’s not a sophisticated CFO function. It’s table stakes. But it requires having books that stay current automatically, not ones that need two weeks of reconciliation at month-end to tell you what happened 45 days ago.
“Every Sunday night, Monday morning, we get our reports from Apparatus and Adaptive,” Arch said. “It lets us go back through and see what credit card transactions don’t have receipts, which ones aren’t properly cost coded. As of Sunday, we know exactly where we are going into the week.”
That’s the version of construction finance that makes growth possible. Not because it’s fancy, but because it removes the uncertainty that causes everything else to go wrong.
Growing a 30-year-old organization in five years
Arch’s stated goal for CBIS is to build something that looks like a mature, established organization in a fraction of the time it typically takes. He’s not naive about how hard that is. He spent the first part of his time in construction learning the hard lessons that most owners learn — loose documentation, cash flow surprises, over-reliance on one person for something critical.
The difference now is that he’s approached the rebuild the way he approached the rest of his career: with a process, a checklist, and the humility to admit what he doesn’t know and find people who do.
“We are really spending the time to make sure we’ve got the right process in place,” he said. “And the process is strategic partnerships.”
For CBIS, that means Apparatus for accounting, Adaptive for financial operations, Job Tread for project management, and a communication rhythm that keeps everyone aligned from kickoff to final draw.
It’s not complicated. It’s just intentional. And for contractors who want to grow without growing into chaos, intention is where it starts.
Archibald McLellan is the founder ofCBIS, based in St. Petersburg, Florida. This episode of Builders Budgets and Beers is available wherever you listen to podcasts.