By Jesse Fowler, Founder of J&J Renovations and J&J Plumbing Services
I run a plumbing company and a renovation business in Canberra. Between the two, we handle everything from burst pipes to full knockdown rebuilds. And every single week, I watch money leave our account before it comes back in.
That gap between spending and getting paid is not a business inconvenience. It is the reason most construction businesses fail. Yet fintech keeps building for banks and enterprise clients while ignoring the people who need financial tools the most.
The numbers behind the gap
Construction carries an average Days Sales Outstanding of 83 days. That means from the moment we finish a job to the moment we see payment, nearly three months pass. Meanwhile, materials eat 50 to 70 percent of every job’s value upfront. Payroll runs weekly. Insurance, vehicle costs, and tool replacements never stop.
According to Rabbet’s 2024 Construction Payments Report, the US construction industry alone loses $280 billion annually to slow payments. That figure equals roughly 14 percent of total construction costs. In Australia, it is proportionally worse. More than 11,000 companies entered insolvency in FY2024, and construction accounted for 28 percent of all corporate collapses.
These are not businesses that lacked work. They had plenty of jobs on the books. They simply ran out of cash between completing the work and collecting the invoice.
How the cash flow trap works in practice
Here is what a typical month looks like for a trades business scaling past the solo operator stage.
Week one, you quote a $40,000 bathroom renovation. The client accepts. You order $22,000 in materials on your trade account, due in 30 days. You schedule two staff members for three weeks of work at roughly $1,800 each per week.
Week four, the job wraps up. You invoice the client on 14-day terms. However, the client sits on it. Their bank takes a few days. Their accountant processes it when they get around to it. Realistically, payment lands in week seven or eight.
By that point, your trade account is overdue. Your staff have been paid three times. Your next job’s materials need ordering. So you put it on a credit card, dip into personal savings, or simply delay paying your own suppliers. As a result, the cycle repeats and compounds.
This is not hypothetical. A Federal Reserve survey found 51 percent of US small firms cite uneven cash flows as a financial challenge. In Australia, 27 percent of small business owners went without a salary in the past year just to keep the doors open.
Fintech is chasing the wrong customers
Here is what frustrates me. Fintech venture capital hit $51.8 billion in 2025. Of that, 75.8 percent went to enterprise solutions. Enterprise. Certainly not the plumber floating $300,000 in receivables on a $1.5 million turnover. Or the steel distributor waiting 120 days for a government contractor to pay. And definitely not the swim school chasing failed direct debits every term.
The global SME finance gap sits at $5.7 trillion according to the World Bank. That is not a rounding error. It is a market larger than most countries’ GDP. Yet three quarters of fintech investment flows to serving companies that already have treasury departments and CFOs.
Consequently, the tools that do reach tradies tend to be afterthoughts. Generic invoicing apps that do not understand progress claims. Payment platforms designed for e-commerce checkout, not a $60,000 renovation quote. Lending products that require property as collateral because the algorithms were trained on retail credit data, not trade receivables.
The opportunity fintech keeps walking past
ServiceTitan’s IPO at a $9 billion valuation should have been the wake-up call. That company started because two founders watched their parents, a plumber and an electrician, struggle with manual scheduling and paper invoicing. Fintech products now represent roughly 25 percent of ServiceTitan’s revenue, and gross transaction volume runs at around $62 billion.
Similarly, Brighte has financed over $500 million across 75,000 Australian homes by paying tradespeople upfront while homeowners repay over time. Every one of those transactions flows through an installer. The tradesperson became the fintech distribution channel without anyone in fintech planning it that way.
The pattern is clear. Scheduling apps evolve into quoting tools. Quoting tools add invoicing. Invoicing layers on payment processing. Payments enable lending. Before long, a trades management platform is running the entire financial operation of a business. And the plumber using it has no idea they are a fintech customer.
Where this is heading
The trades businesses that survive the next decade will not be the ones working harder. They will be the ones whose financial tools eliminate the gap between doing the work and getting paid. Real-time payment rails, embedded invoice financing, and AI-driven cash flow forecasting are not luxury features. For a business where one late payment can trigger a chain of defaults, they are survival tools.
Fintech built the technology. It just has not pointed it at the right customers yet.
Jesse Fowler is the founder of J&J Plumbing Services and J&J Renovations, serving the ACT and surrounding NSW regions.