When you think of a construction company, you probably imagine a custom home builder or a remodeling outfit. Maybe there’s an excavation crew, or even a rental side hustle. But what if you rolled all of those—and more—into one organization? And what if every one of those arms had its own books, employees, and operations, but still worked together seamlessly?

That’s exactly what the team at Shrock has done.

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Under the leadership of Joseph Shrock, what started as a traditional Amish-owned construction company has grown into a multi-entity machine, encompassing custom homebuilding, prefab steel, restoration work, rentals, excavation, real estate development, and even Airbnb property management. It’s a rare (and impressive) example of business diversification done right—without sacrificing control or visibility into the financials.

The Hidden Complexity of Construction Conglomerates

Shayne Glass, the Controller at Shrock, gave us a front-row seat to how it all works—and why so many builders struggle to do something even half as complex.

The reality is: running one construction company is hard. Running ten? That’s a masterclass in operational clarity.

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Each Shrock entity is expected to stand on its own. There’s no co-mingling of costs or fuzzy internal “credits.” Payroll, financials, and job costing are independently tracked per entity. But despite the financial separation, they’re still able to share resources across the organization—which becomes a strategic advantage.

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If one company is slow, another can absorb the labor. If one project requires specialized equipment or services, they pull from their in-house excavation or prefab crews. And because the accounting systems are so well-integrated, that movement of labor, materials, or internal charges doesn’t lead to chaos—it’s all tracked, all billable, and all clean.

Cost Control as a Culture, Not Just a Process

Shrock’s growth didn’t come from chasing easy jobs—it came from tackling the ones no one else wanted. Complex projects, high-end custom homes, tricky commercial builds. This appetite for difficulty is baked into their DNA. But that only works when you know your numbers.

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Shayne emphasized that with fixed-price construction, tracking cost in real time isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s mission-critical. Once you sign a $2M contract, you’re not getting more money unless there’s a change order. So if costs aren’t tracked daily, margin disappears quietly in the background.

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This is where many builders get tripped up. They look at their budget at the start and the end of the project, but the in-between is often messy . Maybe an invoice was coded to the wrong job. Maybe someone forgot to mark a purchase as billable. Maybe labor from another entity wasn’t properly reimbursed. These errors don’t just waste time—they erode profitability.

How They Actually Do It

Here’s where it gets technical—and useful for anyone managing job costs or trying to clean up their books.

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Shrock uses Adaptive as their financial management system to stay on top of:

• Bills and receipts across multiple entities
• Inter-company labor and materials
• Real-time visibility into job cost variances
• Centralized cash flow management

One simple—but powerful—example Shayne shared: employees can make personal purchases through the company account to get contractor pricing, but it’s up to the accounting team to ensure those costs get billed back. Adaptive helps flag those transactions so they’re not missed in the monthly rush.

It’s little things like this that matter—because small errors repeated hundreds of times add up fast.

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And it’s not just about bills and receipts. Adaptive allows their team to:

• Maintain cost code consistency across entities
• Automatically flag items that don’t match the budget
• Identify variance at the PO level
• Track cost codes with enough granularity to answer, “Was that gravel for the driveway or the foundation?”

From 30 Hours to 18 Hours

One of the most telling stats Shayne dropped was that in a single smaller entity (~$500K in volume), Adaptive cut their accounting effort from 30 hours a month to 18—without removing anyone from the team. It simply let them shift time from data entry to data analysis.

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Multiply that across a company with ten entities, and you’re not just saving time—you’re unlocking better decision-making, cleaner books, and a stronger ability to grow.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to have ten companies under one roof to learn from Shrock. The principles apply whether you’re a one-truck operation or a $20M general contractor:

• Separation of costs (by job, by entity, by labor type) protects your margins.
• Real-time visibility enables smarter, faster decisions.
• Automation isn’t about eliminating jobs—it’s about eliminating waste.
• Cost control starts with consistency, not perfection—especially in how you categorize and track spend.

And maybe most importantly: complexity shouldn’t be avoided—it should be tamed.

The Shrock team didn’t shy away from the hard stuff. They leaned in. And with the right mindset, tools, and systems in place, they’ve built a business that can scale smartly—without losing sight of every dollar.