Working as a sub for general contractors

You have three homeowner jobs booked, a two-week hole after them, and the name of a general contractor in your phone from a house you finished in April. You call. The super says they already have a guy.

That is the normal answer, and it is not a no. It means their bench for your trade has one name on it. Getting onto that bench is a different job from bidding work, and it takes longer than most people plan for.

Where sub work actually comes from

Almost nobody gets on a GC's list through the contact form. The routes that work are sideways:

• The other subs on your current job. The electrician who watched you patch behind his rough-in is your best referral source: he knows what your work looks like and he stands next to the super twice a week.
• The counter at your supply house. Inside sales people know which GC is short a framer before the GC admits it out loud. Ask the person who writes your tickets, by name.
• Permit records. Your city or county building department publishes issued permits, each naming the contractor — a list of every GC with open work in your area, sorted by how busy they are.
• The jobsite, at 6:45 in the morning. Supers are on site early and buried by ten. Two minutes in the driveway beats four emails.
• Their plan room. Larger GCs send bid invites out of software — BuildingConnected, iSqFt, Procore, ConstructConnect. Ask the estimator to add you to the bid list for your scope, and ask which system it goes out from.

The fastest way in is the work nobody wants: a punch list two days before closing, a warranty callback, a Saturday patch after another sub caused damage. Say yes to one and you stop being a cold call.

The paperwork that has to clear before your name goes on the schedule

A super can like you and still not be able to use you, because the GC's own contract dictates who is allowed on site. Expect to produce most of this before the first work order:

Two of those trip people up. The additional insured endorsement is not a copy of your policy — the GC wants to be covered under yours for your work, often with specific wording about ongoing and completed operations. Commercial GCs commonly ask for general liability at $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate, but that figure comes from their contract, not a rule. Forward the request to your agent as written.

Workers' comp matters even if you work alone. In many states a GC can end up responsible for an injured worker on an uninsured sub's crew, and their comp auditor charges them premium for uninsured sub labor at year end. Hence the demand for a policy or the exemption form your state accepts. Which applies to a sole proprietor is a state question — ask your workers' comp board.

If you are not licensed for the scope, fix that first. See when you need a contractor license.

What the first job is really testing

Nobody is grading your finish work — that is assumed, or you would not be there. The first job tests how much of the super's day you cost:

• You are on site the day and hour you said, and if you cannot be, they hear it the night before, not at 9 a.m.
• You call the super the moment you find something — wrong rough-in, rot, a dimension that does not work — instead of fixing it yourself.
• You never discuss price or schedule with the homeowner. Extras go back to the GC in writing before you touch them.
• Your invoice carries their job number and cost code, on their cycle, in the format they asked for.

Supers trade names. The sub who costs nobody an afternoon gets handed to the next GC, and that is how a bench of one becomes a pipeline.

Sub margin against retail margin, on the same crew-week

Sub work trades money and control for volume and quiet. The figures below are illustrative — one crew-week of interior work, made up to show the shape:

The gap in the top row is the price of not selling. It buys a schedule somebody else fills, one point of contact instead of eight, and no 8 p.m. call about a color. What it costs beyond the money is the ability to walk away: the GC controls the sequence, and you stand behind the drywall crew whether they are on time or not.

Where the money sits, and for how long

Cash flow is what ends sub relationships. Three mechanisms stack on each other.

The pay application cycle. Most GCs bill the owner once a month on a pay application, with an internal cutoff somewhere in the last third of the month. Miss it by a day and your invoice waits a full cycle. Ask for the exact date on day one.

Pay-when-paid and pay-if-paid. Pay-when-paid delays your payment until the GC is paid. Pay-if-paid makes their getting paid a condition of your getting paid at all, moving the owner's credit risk onto you. Courts in some states refuse to enforce the second kind; others enforce it when the wording is explicit. Have a construction attorney in your state read that clause once on the master agreement — one reading covers every job under it.

Retainage and lien waivers. A slice of each payment, commonly 5 to 10 percent, is held until the project closes out, and many states cap the percentage by statute, especially on public work. Each payment also arrives with a lien waiver: check whether it is conditional or unconditional, and whether it reaches past the work being paid for. Mechanic's lien rights are your real leverage, and they run on state deadlines counted from your first or last day on the job. Look yours up while nothing is wrong.

A realistic ramp, and two guardrails

Plan on seasons, not weeks. The usual sequence is months of showing up and asking, then fill-in and punch work, then one scheduled scope, then a second GC who heard about you from the first. Short-handed trades move faster than crowded ones, and a slow market slower than a busy one.

Keep direct-to-customer work alive throughout: a GC's dry spell becomes yours the same week, and retail lead sources go cold if you stop feeding them. And watch concentration — once one GC is most of your revenue, their payment habits are your business plan. Start paying attention past a third.

Pricing two channels out of one set of numbers

Running both channels means producing two kinds of paper from the same head: a homeowner estimate that explains and reassures, and a scope sheet a super can drop into a bid that evening. What makes it sustainable is one set of unit prices you keep current and pull in both directions. That is where DoneQuote sits — your prices live in one place, you describe or paste the scope you were sent, and the numbers coming back out are the ones you calculated, whether the document ends up on a kitchen table or in a bid package.