What You Know About Your GCs Shouldn't Retire With You

When Martin Press and Dick Roberts joined me on Billing & Chilling earlier this season, we spent a good portion of the conversation on how they decide which general contractors (GCs) are worth working for. 

Between the two of them, they have close to 90 years in the business. Martin told me he knows every GC in his market, so the ones he has to research are the out-of-state contractors who come in for a single project, and for those he leans on other subs and his association contacts. Dick runs through what he called a mental checklist, starting with whether a GC pays on time, then their safety record, and then how they handles change orders.

It’s good advice, and I’ve given versions of it in plenty of my own presentations. But partway through that conversation, I caught myself getting frustrated with the industry they were describing. If the most dependable way to know whether a GC will pay you is to spend decades building relationships, then a sub who came up through the trades and started a company five years ago is at a real disadvantage. So is any established company whose knowledge of its customers lives mostly in the head of an owner who will eventually retire.

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and I’ve come to believe the answer has less to do with relationships than with record-keeping.

GCs keep a file on you.

I spent my early career on the GC side, so I know the prequalification process from the asking end of the table. Before a GC awards a subcontract, it typically reviews the sub’s financial statements, bonding capacity, safety record, workforce, and experience on similar scopes, and more of that work now runs through third-party platforms that score subs—and sometimes charge them for the privilege. 

Whatever you think of how those scores get built, though, it’s worth noting that the process is written down. The GC asks every sub the same questions and keeps the answers on file, so the next time you bid, they can look back at what you submitted instead of relying on whoever happened to review your paperwork.

Subs, meanwhile, carry more of the financial exposure on a project than anyone else in the payment chain, because they’re the ones fronting labor, materials, and overhead while they wait to get paid. Yet the way most subs vet a GC looks a lot like what Dick and Martin described, which is a few phone calls, a general sense of the company’s reputation, and the owner’s personal experience. 

That approach works reasonably well for a sub with deep roots in a local market and very little for anyone without them, and even for the veterans it depends on something less reliable than how it feels.

Memory is a generous bookkeeper.

Later in that episode, Martin mentioned that he’d always believed his company got paid in 35 to 45 days, until billing through Siteline showed him the turnaround was longer than he’d thought. With 35 years in the industry and a habit of reading his contracts closely, Martin isn’t someone who loses track of his numbers, so if his sense of how fast he gets paid could be off, he’s almost certainly not the only one.

I see it all the time with contractors who feel they have a great relationship with a GC and are sure “they always take care of us,” only to look at the actual numbers and find that the client is one of their slowest payers. It’s easy to remember the project executive who picks up the phone and the superintendent who was easy to work with, while a slow payment cycle builds up a few days at a time over the project’s duration, so no single month may feel like the problem.

Memory also tends to blur the difference between a GC and the owners it works for. A GC might pay you in 55 days on one project and well past 90 on another because one owner takes three months to review a pay app, and unless you’re tracking each job separately, both experiences fold into a vague sense of how that GC pays. That distinction matters a great deal when the same GC calls you about a new project with a different owner.

Track how every job actually went.

The good news is that a sub’s own job history is the best prequalification data it will ever have on a GC, and often more telling than a credit report or a reference, because it reflects how that GC actually treated your company. The catch is that it only becomes useful once it lives somewhere other than people’s heads, in one place where you can look back at every job you’ve done with a GC and see how they compare.

At the end of each job, I’d want to know:

• what margin we actually earned compared with what we bid;
• how long each payment took, and what that wait cost in profit;
• how much work it took to get paid each month, from portal uploads to compliance paperwork;
• how long retainage took to come back, and whether it was released with our scope or held until the project closed out; and
• how the field experienced the job, including how the GC’s team communicated when problems came up and how seriously it took safety.

Your PMs and superintendents see things accounting never will, so their feedback belongs in the record alongside the numbers. 

The prime contract fills in what your history can’t.

A record only helps with GCs you’ve worked for, and even a familiar GC can bring you a project with an owner you know nothing about, which is where the prime contract comes in. Your subcontract usually incorporates its terms, which means you can end up bound to payment timing, retainage, and schedule obligations you’ve never read. The clearest view you’ll get of the conditions the GC itself is working under.

That’s why I encourage every sub to ask for it, even if a redacted copy is all that comes back, because a refusal tells you something too. A GC that won’t show you the terms it expects you to inherit is asking you to take on risk you can’t measure, and that belongs in your decision about the job.

Information doesn’t require leverage.

Walking away from a job on bad terms is easier said than done, and plenty of subs aren’t in a position to do it. A company with two big customers in a slow market has far less room to turn down work than one with a full backlog and a dozen GCs calling.

A good record changes how you take the work. If you know a GC has averaged well over 90 days on your last three jobs, you can price the carrying cost into your bid, push harder on retainage, clear the extra exposure with your suppliers, or take a smaller piece of the project. And when you bring those numbers into a negotiation, they tend to land very differently with a GC than a general complaint about slow pay.

Start the file with your next job.

At one point in our conversation, Martin said the question he hears often is what happens when his generation and Dick’s retire. The relationships they've built can't simply be handed to whoever runs the company next, but the knowledge those relationships produced can, provided it's been documented.

The same goes for newer subcontractors who don't have decades of experience or industry connections to draw on. Every completed job is an opportunity to build a more reliable picture of which GCs are worth working for. The sooner that knowledge becomes part of a company's records, the less its ability to make informed decisions depends on any one person's experience.

That’s a big part of why we started Siteline. Our goal has always been to help subcontractors get off the cash-flow tightrope. And one of the things that keeps them on it is how little they often know about a GC’s payment behavior compared to how much of the financial risk they take on. We’re working to close that gap by turning what we see across Siteline’s billing data into GC-level benchmarks, so subs have more than word of mouth to go on before signing anything—whether they’re just starting out, bidding in a new market, or taking over a business from the generation that built it.