The curriculum

Eight modules. Fifty lessons. And an honest mark on every one of them.

Nineteen lessons are written, from recordings already in hand. Thirty-one say being filmed, because the alternative is inventing them, and that is the one thing that would break this.

Modules
8
Lessons
50
Written
19From the recordings already made
Being filmed
31Marked on every page, never hidden
  • Written The lesson exists, built from Jay’s own recorded words.
  • Being filmed Scheduled. What it will cover is stated, nothing is taught yet.

How it runs

In the order a job actually happens.

You read the site, you cost it, you price it, you recover your overhead, you survive the contract, and you get on the list.

That order is deliberate. Module five will not help you if module three gave you a machine rate you invented. Work through it once in order, then go back to whichever module made you uncomfortable, because that is the one costing you money.

Every module is built from an actual Checkered Flag job, carried from the site walk to the signed contract to what it cost when it was done. Including the ones that lost money, because those are the ones that teach.

Jump to a module

Module 01

Read the Site Before You Price It

5 lessons, being filmed

Module 02

Swell, Shrink and the Real Yardage

4 lessons, being filmed

Module 03

What Your Machine Actually Costs You

5 lessons, being filmed

Module 04

Haul, Downtime and the Hours Nobody Bills

4 lessons, being filmed

Module 05

Hourly, By the Foot, or Lump Sum

6 of 8 lessons written

Module 06

Overhead Recovery and Where the Money Goes

5 lessons, being filmed

Module 07

The Contract Clauses That Eat the Profit

4 of 7 lessons written

Module 08

Getting on the List, and Walking Away From the Rest

9 of 12 lessons written

Before module one

Start Here

Three minutes on how to use the eight modules, and one warning you need before module one. It is written, and it is not one of the fifty.

00

2 lessons · written

What This Course Is, and What It Will Do To Your Win Rate

You know what you are about to learn, in what order, and what the first sign of it working looks like.

  1. 0.1

    How this course is built, and how to work through it Written

    Eight modules in the order a job happens, each built from a real job carried through to what it cost. Not a course about growing a company. A course about the next bid.

  2. 0.2

    Your win rate is going to fall. That is the course working. Written

    A man who wins nine out of ten is the cheapest man in the room nine times out of ten. Losing a bid costs you the hour you spent on it. Winning the wrong one costs you the month.

Modules one to four

Getting to a number you can defend.

The site, the yardage, the iron and the hours. Four modules of arithmetic, and every one of them waits on a real job file rather than a formula out of a book.

01

5 lessons · being filmed

Read the Site Before You Price It

You know what a man with twenty-five years in actually looks at when he walks a job, in the order he looks at it, and you can get from a set of plans to a yardage you trust.

No lesson here is written yet. This module is built on one real job file and a filmed site walk, and neither has been shot. It will not be written from a textbook, because a method with his name on it that he did not describe is the one thing that would destroy the offer.

  1. 1.1

    Walking the site in the order he walks it Being filmed

    Will cover the sequence of a site walk from stepping out of the truck to getting back in it: access and where the trucks turn around, water and where it goes, what is buried, what has to stay, the neighbour, the spoil, and where the machine sits.

  2. 1.2

    From plans to a number of yards Being filmed

    Will cover a takeoff done live on real plans, from reading the grades to a cut and fill yardage he would put a price against. Not pre-calculated, because watching him work it out is the product.

  3. 1.3

    What the plans never tell you Being filmed

    Will cover the gap between the drawing and the dirt on one real job: what was not in the plan set, how he found it before he priced the work, and what finding it afterwards would have cost.

  4. 1.4

    The one-page bid sheet, filled in from the top Being filmed

    Will cover his actual one-page sheet, line by line, with why each line sits where it does, which lines he fills in standing on the job, and which wait until he is back at the desk.

  5. 1.5

    If you got this one wrong, where would it have gone wrong Being filmed

    Will cover running a finished, profitable job backwards to find the line that came closest to hurting him, so you learn to find your own thin line before you submit.

02

4 lessons · being filmed

Swell, Shrink and the Real Yardage

You stop eating the difference between the dirt you dig and the dirt you haul, because you can put a number on it before you bid.

Nothing here is written yet, and it will not be filled in from a table. Published swell and shrink factors are in every estimating book in the trade. What is missing is his own rule of thumb for his own ground, said as a rule of thumb and not as a fact, and what he does with it.

  1. 2.1

    Bank, loose and compacted: three numbers for the same dirt Being filmed

    Will cover the three states the same cubic yard exists in, shown against a real hole and the pile that came out of it rather than defined on a slide, and which state each line of a bid is actually denominated in.

  2. 2.2

    His rule of thumb, and how far it bends Being filmed

    Will cover the percentage he carries for swell on his ground, how far it moves for clay, for sand and for rock, and what he does with the yardage when he genuinely does not know what is down there.

  3. 2.3

    Shrink, backfill and the dirt you end up buying Being filmed

    Will cover compaction on backfill and on engineered fill, how short a job comes out, and who pays for the imported material when it does.

  4. 2.4

    Where the difference gets eaten Being filmed

    Will cover truck counts, tipping fees and imported fill, which is where the gap between dug and hauled quietly disappears, and how to catch it on the bid sheet instead of on the invoice.

03

5 lessons · being filmed

What Your Machine Actually Costs You

You replace the machine rate you invented with one built from your own payment, your own fuel, your own wear and your own insurance.

Nothing here is written yet. He has never stated an hourly machine rate on tape, and the estimating spreadsheet that holds it has not been sent. Building a rate out of the two adjacent figures we do have would be arithmetic dressed up as authority.

  1. 3.1

    What it costs before it turns a track Being filmed

    Will cover the standing cost of a machine that has not done a minute of work: payment, insurance, personal property tax, and where it sits.

  2. 3.2

    Everything that comes off it in a year Being filmed

    Will cover fuel, filters, oil, undercarriage, tires and tracks, cutting edges and teeth, hoses, and the repair nobody budgets for.

  3. 3.3

    The truck and the trailer nobody costs Being filmed

    Will cover the tractor, the trailer, the plates, the fuel and the driver hour that move the machine and appear on nobody’s rate.

  4. 3.4

    The rate, and the arithmetic behind it Being filmed

    Will cover his hourly rate on one named machine and the calculation that produced it, done on screen with his own figures rather than round examples.

  5. 3.5

    Buying the iron: his winter rule Being filmed

    Will cover why the purchase decision is itself a cost per hour decision, and his own rule for when to buy. He has always bought machines in the winter, on purpose.

“I’ll tell you something that about got me was when i first started out is it was um personal property tax. I wasn’t prepared for that, that was a major blow.”

Jay Voisey, recorded 15 September 2026

That is the one thing already on tape for this module. It tells you the lesson belongs here. It does not tell you what goes in it, so the lesson stays marked.

04

4 lessons · being filmed

Haul, Downtime and the Hours Nobody Bills

You can put a price on a move, an idle hour and a forty minute haul instead of absorbing all three.

Nothing here is written yet. Haul rates, move charges, tipping fees and his downtime policy have never been recorded, and the truck tab of the estimating spreadsheet has not been sent.

  1. 4.1

    Pricing haul by distance, not by feel Being filmed

    Will cover cycle time, truck count and the arithmetic that turns a distance into a per yard haul cost, worked against a real dump he uses.

  2. 4.2

    The move, and whether the customer pays for it Being filmed

    Will cover what it costs to get iron onto a site and off it again, whether that sits as its own line or inside the rate, and what happens on a job that needs three moves instead of one.

  3. 4.3

    Downtime: the hours that leave the job and never come back Being filmed

    Will cover breakdown, weather and waiting on another trade, and which of the three the customer pays for under each pricing method.

  4. 4.4

    Why the man who ignores this wins the bid Being filmed

    Will cover the close of the module: the competitor who leaves moves, downtime and haul out of his number is not cheaper, he is wrong, and it comes out of somebody in the end.

Why thirty-one lessons are marked

None of this is written from a book.

Thirty-one of the fifty lessons are not written yet. They are marked rather than hidden, and the reason is the whole reason this course exists.

Every one of them waits on something only Jay has. A real job file with the number he submitted and what the job actually cost. His own one-page bid sheet, the real one. The estimating spreadsheet as it sits. A signed contract with the clause language left intact.

Formulas are not the missing part. Anybody can buy the Craftsman book for $21.75 and get 550 pages of them. What you are paying for here is a man who has lived with the consequences doing it against a real drawing, and saying out loud what it cost him the time he got it wrong.

So the lessons with his recorded words behind them are written. The rest are on the filming schedule and stay marked until they are shot.

“So i’m hoping to educate a lot of the people out there that are new to the game, so that, so that they can be fair with everybody else, um, and bring the prices up overall.”

Jay Voisey, recorded 15 September 2026

Modules five to eight

Winning it, and keeping what you won.

The pricing method, the overhead, the paperwork and the list. This is the half of the course with the most material already recorded: nineteen of these lessons are written from an eighty-one minute interview and one earlier conversation.

05

8 lessons · 6 written, 2 being filmed

Hourly, By the Foot, or Lump Sum

Three ways to price the same job, and how you tell which one this job wants.

Six lessons are written. The two that are not are the by the foot leg of the title, which he has never been asked about, and the side by side exercise, which needs a real job file priced three ways on screen.

“If i’m going to take on a job that is an extremely difficult job, then the only way i’m willing to do that is on a time and material basis. And again we’ll fairly charge for that time and material, but it’s um it’s the only way for me to mitigate my risk and to be fair with the customer.”

Jay Voisey, recorded 15 September 2026
  1. 5.1

    Most of what he prices is not a lump sum Written

    Lump sum accounts for ten to twenty percent of his year. The bulk of the work is time and material. That makes the argument the whole trade is having, about which method a real contractor uses, the wrong argument.

  2. 5.2

    The rule: if it is a hard job, it goes time and material Written

    A lump sum on a job you cannot see the bottom of is not confidence, it is a gamble you signed for. And loading it for the worst case means every customer who does not get the disaster paid for one anyway.

  3. 5.3

    Billing time and material so the customer would sign it again Written

    Time and material is a promise that the customer pays for work and not for learning. Which makes your crew’s speed a pricing input, not just a management problem, and the hours you write off a real number you should be tracking.

  4. 5.4

    Lump sum, and what he leaves on the table on purpose Written

    A loaded lump sum converts a customer into revenue once and takes him out of the referral pool. In a county sized market, where the same men bid against each other for twenty years, the referral pool is the business.

  5. 5.5

    Being the expensive one, and making it stick Written

    A defensible premium is not a claim about being good. It is a named material, a named spec and a reason the cheap alternative fails. When somebody asks why you are four thousand over, you point at the pipe.

  6. 5.6

    Losing seven out of ten, and the difference between two kinds of losing Written

    Losing because your number finally reflects your cost, and losing because other men are pricing under their own. From the outside they look identical. Only one of them is about you, and he is living in the other one right now.

  7. 5.7

    Unit pricing: by the foot, by the yard, by the pad Being filmed

    Will cover what work he unit prices, what his units are, how a unit rate gets built out of the machine rate from module three, and where unit pricing goes wrong on him.

  8. 5.8

    One job, priced three ways Being filmed

    Will cover one real job priced hourly, priced by the unit and priced lump sum, on screen, so the same work produces three different numbers and you hear which one he would actually have submitted.

06

5 lessons · being filmed

Overhead Recovery and Where the Money Goes

You can be busy all year, win everything you bid, and still finish with nothing. This is why.

Nothing here is written yet, and this is the module the whole course gets judged on, because it is the one where a losing job goes on screen. That job file has not been sent. A fabricated loss would be worse than no module at all, so it waits.

  1. 6.1

    Everything you pay for that is not on a job Being filmed

    Will cover the list, said out loud and untidied, for a small dirt outfit: the office, the phone, the premium, the accountant, the unbillable people, the yard, the licences, the personal property tax, and the owner’s own unbillable hours.

  2. 6.2

    How much comes off every hour you bill Being filmed

    Will cover turning that list into a recovery figure per billable hour and per job, and what happens to the figure when the billable hours fall short of the year you assumed.

  3. 6.3

    Margin versus markup Being filmed

    Will cover the difference between adding a percentage to cost and working back from a selling price, which of the two he uses, and whether the difference ever caught him out.

  4. 6.4

    Reading the losing job backwards Being filmed

    Will cover the job that lost money, from the bid sheet to the final cost, with the exact line where the gap opened, when he knew, whether he could have known sooner, and what he does differently now.

  5. 6.5

    The write-offs nobody puts in the overhead Being filmed

    Will cover the hours absorbed on time and material jobs when the crew was slower than the work was worth. He does it deliberately and repeatedly. The question is how much, and whether it is anywhere in the recovery figure.

07

7 lessons · 4 written, 3 being filmed

The Contract Clauses That Eat the Profit

You priced it right, you won it, and you still lost. Nobody teaches this part.

Four lessons are written, from what he has already said about the commercial behaviour around a contract. The three that are not are the clauses themselves, and they will be read out from a real contract rather than summarised out of construction law.

“So they’re going to pay what it’s going to cost no matter what. It’s just how the contractor packages the way they sell it.”

Jay Voisey, recorded 15 September 2026
  1. 7.1

    The other man’s number was lower because he only priced half the job Written

    Most of the money taken off a contractor after the bid is won does not come from a paragraph he failed to read. It comes from a competitor who structured the job so the rest of it would arrive later, as a change order.

  2. 7.2

    What being the honest number costs you, and what it pays Written

    Over twenty-five years, showing people the whole price won him more work than it lost. Over any given quarter it can be brutal. Anyone selling you the first half without the second is selling you a story.

  3. 7.3

    When the customer finances the job on you Written

    An unpaid balance on a job you are still building is a loan you made, at zero percent, with no security. The trap that caught him after twenty-five years was not greed. It was prestige.

  4. 7.4

    What a promise to finish is actually worth Written

    Completion is the thing you cannot fail at. Liquidated damages is the meter running while you try not to. Both of them convert your crew, the weather and the trade ahead of you into a daily charge you signed for.

  5. 7.5

    Retainage and pay-when-paid Being filmed

    Will cover what retainage runs in his market, how long it is held, what it does to the cash of a small outfit running several jobs, and what a pay-when-paid clause means the month the general contractor has not been paid.

  6. 7.6

    Differing site conditions: the sentence that decides who pays Being filmed

    Will cover that paragraph read out on screen from a real contract and put into plain words, because whoever it favours is the one paying when the ground is not what the plans said. For an excavator it is the most consequential sentence he signs.

  7. 7.7

    Change orders, and the five clauses that cost a man $47,000 Being filmed

    Will cover running a change order so it is agreed in writing before the work happens, and a plain words teardown of a clause stack. The $47,000 belongs to a poster on ContractorTalk who wrote it up in November 2025. He won the job and the paperwork took it back off him. It is not Jay’s loss and is never presented as one.

08

12 lessons · 9 written, 3 being filmed

Getting on the List, and Walking Away From the Rest

How you stop bidding against six guys in a driveway and start bidding work worth having.

Nine lessons are written, and this is the richest material in the whole course: insurance, bonding and the rules he uses to refuse work. The three that are not are the bid list half of the title, the licence stack, and the close of the whole course.

“You’ve got to have you know a lot of net worth to get into larger bonding. There’s kind of a um a happy medium of of net worth versus completed jobs. The completed jobs will carry you further than the net worth, but one is no good without the other.”

Jay Voisey, recorded 15 September 2026
  1. 8.1

    Be real or be out Written

    The day his CPA asked about his insurance and he worked out he was not in business yet. Every door in this module, the bid lists, the prequalification packets, the bonding companies, is locked by that same key.

  2. 8.2

    What general liability actually costs, and how they bill it Written

    The premium moves with your gross, which means it belongs in your pricing as a percentage and not as a flat annual figure divided by hoped for hours. And it is ten months of premium, then renewal, not an even twelfth.

  3. 8.3

    The audit at the end of the year is the one that gets people Written

    Set on estimated sales, trued up on actual, audited against your tax return. The better the year, the bigger the bill. And a refund is not a win, it is the insurer telling you the year came in short.

  4. 8.4

    Workers comp, one claim, and three years of paying for it Written

    Workers comp has memory. One pulled bicep, one claim in his whole career, and the experience modifier held him above the standard rate for three years. His own figures, from memory and unaudited, and the shape of them is the lesson.

  5. 8.5

    Insurance is a game. Learn to play it. Written

    Before you file, weigh what the policy pays against what the claim costs you in premium for years afterwards. Self-insuring the small stuff without a reserve is not a strategy, it is a hole.

  6. 8.6

    Who to buy it from Written

    A specialist commercial contractor market, not a personal lines agency that writes your house. And shop it on a schedule, well ahead of renewal, so you are not comparing quotes in the week the policy lapses.

  7. 8.7

    Bonding, from a man who stayed out of the bonded lane on purpose Written

    What a surety looks at, why a documented record of finished jobs moves you further than a balance sheet, and why bonded commercial work is a different business rather than the next level up.

  8. 8.8

    Getting on the list Being filmed

    Will cover how a commercial or public bid list actually works, who he called to get on his first one, what a prequalification packet asks for, and what is in the folder he keeps ready before anybody asks for it.

  9. 8.9

    The licence stack, and what each one opened up Being filmed

    Will cover each licence one at a time: what it cost in time and money, what work it let him bid that he could not bid before, and whether it has paid for itself. The licences themselves are public record. What they opened up is not.

  10. 8.10

    The jobs he will not bid Written

    Four headings: the risk shape he will not take, the work he will not put his name on, the work that costs more in iron than it pays, and the work that cannot meet his standard. Including the lagoon he refused to put in a front yard.

  11. 8.11

    The last walk-away is walking away from volume Written

    The quality that justifies his price depends on him seeing every job himself, and that capacity is fixed. Past that point, volume does not scale the profit, it degrades the thing the profit was built on.

  12. 8.12

    What to do on Monday Being filmed

    Will cover the close of the whole course. Eight modules are behind you. What do you actually do on Monday morning, in order, in the first week. It has to come from him, not from an editor stitching the other modules together.

The founding cohort gets all fifty as they land.

Price one job with it. If it does not change your number, ask for your money back and keep the spreadsheet.

Reserve Your Spot

$397 for the founding cohort, $597 after it closes. No card required to reserve.