Charles Inokon: Welcome to Work to Cash, the show about the gap between finishing a job and actually getting paid for it. I'm Charles Inokon, founder of Breva®, and I've spent the last decade watching profitable subcontractors get squeezed — not because they did bad work, not because they were bad businesspeople, but because they were operating inside a payment system designed by someone else. Today I want to talk about why that system works the way it does, and what you can actually do about it. Let's start with a number: $280 billion. That's the annual cost of slow payment in US construction, according to a 2022 analysis by Levelset. That's not late payment. That's just slow. Payments that arrive, but arrive 60, 90, sometimes 120 days after the work was done. The question I get asked all the time is: why? Why does construction move so slowly? And the answer is uncomfortable: because the people who could fix it don't have to. General contractors sit between owners and subcontractors. They collect from owners — sometimes quickly. They pay subcontractors — sometimes slowly. That gap, that float, is worth something. And nobody gives up float voluntarily. Now I'm not saying GCs are villains. Most of them are operating inside their own constraints — owner payment cycles, retainage holds, lender draws. The system is slow at every level. But the slowness doesn't land evenly. It lands hardest on the smallest players. On the $3M mechanical sub. On the electrical contractor with twelve employees and a $400,000 payroll that runs every other Friday. So what can you actually do about it? There are three documents that determine how fast you get paid: your pay app, your Schedule of Values, and your lien rights. Most subcontractors get one of those three right. The fastest-paid contractors get all three right, every time. That's what we built Breva® to help with. We started with the pay app because it's the thing that triggers everything else — and it's the thing that's most often wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Just wrong enough to get kicked back. And every kickback costs you two weeks. I'll talk more about the specific mistakes in future episodes. But the one thing I'll leave you with today: treat your billing like a product. It should go out the same way every time, with the same checklist, the same review, the same documentation package. The contractors who get paid fastest aren't lucky. They're consistent. Thanks for listening to Work to Cash. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts, and I'll see you next week.
.svg)
.png)
.png)
.png)
