Seed draft — replace with a real essay.
On a construction job the margin is decided before the first tool comes out. It’s in the quote, the material order, the sequence of trades. Once work starts you’re mostly protecting a number you already set, or losing it slowly to small overruns nobody flagged.
That reframed how I think about the other businesses. The interesting decisions are upstream — what you charge, what you promise, how the work is scoped. The daily hustle just executes against those. If the economics don’t work on paper, effort won’t save them.