Two quick wins from the platform this quarter, and one new development behind them. Cornerstone just posted its strongest quarter on record. Nationwide is stringing together record months back to back with most of its runway still ahead. And we are under LOI on our fourth acquisition, a concrete company in Dallas. Here is the detail on each, plus what we are building to fund the next leg.
Cornerstone Paving
Q1 revenue came in at $9.21M against $6.86M in the same quarter last year. That is 34% growth, on audited books. We added a fifth crew and grew headcount to get there, which compresses margin for a quarter while new capacity ramps.
The new sales team changes what that capacity can chase. Cornerstone's backlog is heavy in DOT work, which is steady but lower margin. As the sales hires open up more commercial opportunities, we can be more selective, working through the DOT backlog while layering in higher-margin commercial jobs when they are available. Same crews, more profitable revenue. That is margin expansion without adding a dollar of fixed cost.
Nationwide Corporate
Nationwide keeps setting records. May came in around $2M, a record month at the time. June is tracking to $2.8M, another record. July is set up for $4.5M and higher if the weather holds. That is more than 2x in ninety days.
What makes that climb matter is how little of our runway it uses. Nationwide books about two weeks out, so these records are coming off near-term work, not a long backlog we are grinding through. The calendar ahead is still open, and we are already setting records against it. To press that, we hired four additional salespeople, two of them in Texas ahead of our growth there. We doubled capacity to get this far, and the anchor of the platform is producing like the anchor.
The Cost of Growth, and What We Are Building For It
Here is what those record months do not show on their own. We paid for all of it up front. The crews, the materials, and the fuel behind May's record, June's bigger record, and July's bigger-still record all went out the door before a single invoice from those months came back.
Our terms run net 90. We finish the work, send the bill, and wait three months for the cash. That is the mechanic behind everything above. Each record costs more than the last to produce, at roughly the same ratio of expenses, so the faster we grow, the more we are fronting and the longer it sits out before it comes back. We have grown more than 2x in ninety days and have not collected a dollar from those record months yet. That is not a problem with the business. That is the business working exactly as designed. It is also the single biggest call on our cash.
So what are we doing about it?
We are standing up a structured finance division to fund our receivables. Rather than wait out that net 90 to collect, we finance those receivables and put the cash back to work on the next job. It turns the cost of growth into a managed line instead of letting working capital set our speed limit.
The division is built to be conservative by design. It only advances against work that is already complete and accepted, and every advance is secured on both sides:
The receivables themselves, acquired at a discount to face value, and only once the jobs are completed and signed off on by the client
The mechanics liens behind the completed work
The added liquidity does something else worth naming. When we can pay our vendors early, we earn early-payment discounts on materials, which lowers our cost on every job. The facility does not just close the timing gap. It makes the underlying work cheaper to produce.
This is the next piece of the platform we are building, and it is built to do two things at once: keep our own growth fully funded, and create a place for investors to put capital to work alongside us against real, completed receivables. We are finalizing the structure now and will share the details soon.
— Sam Silverman
Silverman Capital
