Guides
Running The Business
Buying and financing pumps, insurance, admin, cash flow and the systems behind an owner-operator business.
- The bus test: could your pumping business run without you?
Two weeks off. No calls, no texts. Does the business run without you, or is it just you with a truck? Most owners already know the answer.
- Exiting the concrete pumping industry with money (not just a worn-out body)
Most blokes don't exit pumping — they get exited. Here's how to leave the industry with money, on your own terms, years before the last pour.
- Tracking machine hire and material orders: stop paying for gear you can't trace
Boys standing around because the mesh wasn't confirmed. A digger on hire two weeks after the job ended. Untracked orders are a tax you charge yourself.
- Adding a second concrete pump: growth, or just doubling the problems?
The second pump looks like growth. Sometimes it's just twice the costs, twice the headaches and the same money. Here's how to know before you buy.
- Job management for concrete pumpers: if it doesn't attach to a job, it doesn't exist
Floating hours, orphan orders, dockets with no home. One rule fixes job management: everything attaches to a job, or it didn't happen.
- The admin that kills owner-operators
It's not the pumping that breaks blokes. It's the second shift — quoting at 8pm, invoicing at 10, chasing money on Sunday.
- Depreciation and pistons: the two bills quietly eating your pump money
No invoice ever arrives for depreciation. The pistons don't send a warning either. Here's how to budget for the costs you can't see.
- Concrete pump insurance: what you're actually covered for when it goes wrong
Public liability gets you on site. It doesn't cover half the ways a pump day goes bad. Read this before you find the gaps the hard way.
- Timesheets for concrete crews: stop doing pays from memory
Thursday night, a beer, and a guess at who started when on Monday. Pays from memory dud someone every single week — and it's usually you.
- Concrete pump finance: the balloon payment nobody plans for
Low repayments feel great until year five. Here's how pump finance and balloon payments actually work — and how to stop the balloon landing on your head.
- One source of truth: how to organise a concrete pumping business
Quotes in texts. Hours on scraps. Dockets in the door pocket. If your business lives in six places and your head, this is how you drag it into one.
- Buying your first concrete boom pump: new vs used
New boom or used boom? The wrong answer costs you years. Here's how operators actually make the call — before the finance company makes it for them.