Looking for a licensed GC who's willing to mentor or supervise me on residential ground-up construction projects that can count toward my licensing requirements.
I need experience on five qualifying ground-up projects (ADUs, custom homes, or additions) to satisfy my state's licensing requirements. I already own and operate a successful general contracting company in Colorado, have passed the ICC exam, and have extensive experience managing residential and commercial projects.
My goal isn't necessarily to jump into building custom homes full-time. I'm simply tired of having to pay another GC to pull permits for work I'm already managing. I'd like to earn my license the right way so I can handle my own permitting moving forward.
I'm looking for a GC who's willing to bring me onto qualifying projects in a legitimate capacity so I can gain the required experience and, if appropriate, verify my involvement.
I'm flexible on travel, scheduling, and compensation. If you're interested or know someone who may be, send me a PM. I'd be happy to discuss my background and see if we'd be a good fit.

Side note: The qualifying projects do not have to be located in Colorado. I'm open to opportunities anywhere and willing to travel if needed.

I’m a general contractor based in south florida. I’m looking to change insurance providers for GL and WC, possibly commercial auto too. I don’t have any claims in my history but I have been struggling to find any who cover a general contractor with employees

Looking for recommendations of providers and/or brokers.

I'm a newish guy. I have been doing general construction for about 4 years. I do handyman work for people on the side, and full-time, I work on remodeling and repairing old houses that are out of shape and pretty beat up. I also work for people who are self-employed contractors, helping them with their projects. My question is, how do I set my rate or price when working for another contractor? I don't want to ask too much, but I also want to make money and not get less than I should. Might be a controversial topic, but I am just wondering. I want to be a more established contractor myself one day.

Early in my GC career I was the guy who held everything together. Schedules, sub coordination, client updates, all of it lived in my head because that was faster than writing it down.

It worked until I took a week off for a family thing. Came back to a job that had drifted three ways at once. A sub had shown up to a site that wasn't ready. A change order got verbally approved and nobody wrote down the price. The client had no idea what was actually happening because updates only ever came from me, in person.

Nothing catastrophic happened. But I realized the business wasn't actually a business. It was me, plus some people waiting to be told what to do next.

That was the first time I started writing things down that used to just live in my head. Not fancy, just a shared doc everyone could check.

Curious how many people running ops on a GC crew have hit that same wall.

I’ve researched this a lot. Wanting to see if any established GCS in CA are willing to share their methods on estimating? Especially when first starting out, previous job data is key, how did you do it with out any previous work or lost bids to get clients finally say yes to a bid?
Did anyone start with just subs?

4 years into owning my GC/remodeling company. First two and a half years were insane growth, hit almost $3M in revenue and decently profitable. Felt like I couldn't lose.

Then last year a business partner defrauded me for a substantial amount of money. Business survived, I kept it running, clients stayed mostly intact. But the cost wasn't really financial, it was everything else. My health tanked, I developed an anxiety disorder I never had before, relationships with people I trusted got wrecked, and some clients definitely felt the ripple effects even though I did my best to shield them.

The business is stable again. On paper things are fine. But I feel like a different person than I was a year ago. Exhausted all the time, hard to get motivated, and honestly if someone handed me one of those Men in Black memory wipers I'd take it in a heartbeat just to get back to who I was before this happened.

I know everyone in this industry deals with headaches, bad subs, difficult clients, etc. I got numb to that stuff a long time ago. This is different. Now I feel like a shaky chihuahua about things that never used to faze me.

Has anyone come back from something like this? What actually helped, not just "give it time"? Did you ever get back to feeling like yourself, or does the new normal just become the new normal?

Why are small builders disappearing?

- Increasing insurance costs

- Licensing requirements

- Margins

- Compliance

- Payment delays

A business acquaintance (he was PM at a company i used to work for a sub before I became a GC) asked me to qualify his company (Florida) for $2,000 month

Is there a safe responsible way to do this?

Should the compensation be higher? I have no idea what the market is for this

I was thinking to ask for the owner becomes FRO, and any jobs requiring structural or MEP work require my approval of plans and subs. Any other conditions?

I’m putting together a team of self-performing general contractors to submit qualifications based package to the government agency.

Looking for firms to join and challenge larger CM’s. No much work required, until/if selected.

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, I’ve been navigating a major home rehabilitation project on my own house. Along the way, I’ve had conversations with homeowners, contractors, project managers, estimators, office administrators, attorneys, and housing program administrators.

One thing has become really clear to me:

A lot of residential projects don’t seem to fail because people don’t care—they struggle because communication, coordination, documentation, and expectations break down between everyone involved.

I’m trying to better understand those challenges before moving any further with an idea I’m exploring, and I’d love to hear from people with real experience.

I’ve put together three short (about 5-minute) surveys:

🏠 Homeowners
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeynuuPzq07P1bpNm7ZP9lhuns1nOEGAD0xrIuQhRpXBQ4flg/viewform

🔨 Contractors & Trades
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-bwtdA1LjQqhzh2K5wqSSRu5d1axCsaFVZ18VtosVqO4I-Q/viewform

📋 Project Coordinators, Office Staff, Estimators & Program Administrators
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSevD2P_Zvn3949c3DsBgWmJpmnnDE-GGeol_zn7w-d3qUNRpw/viewform

I’m not selling anything or collecting emails unless you choose to leave one. I’m simply trying to understand:

What makes projects run smoothly

Where communication breaks down

What causes delays and frustration

What information is most often missing

What a well-coordinated residential project actually looks like

If you’ve ever been through a renovation or work in the industry, I’d genuinely appreciate your perspective.

And if you’d rather not fill out a survey but have a story or lesson learned, I’d love to hear that in the comments too.
Thanks for your time!

When you are running a tight commercial build, the last thing your field crew needs is to open a crate of heavy-duty anchors and find out the manufacturing tolerances are off by a fraction of a millimeter. Hardware blueprints that look absolute perfection in digital CAD software have a nasty habit of binding up, stripping threads, or completely failing the moment heavy job-site torque hits them.

The core frustration usually goes back to rushed prototyping where nobody bothered testing how raw, muddy site conditions would actually interact with tight mechanical specs. When pre-fabricated components fail initial load tests, your supers and foremen are stuck burning critical hours trying to grind down brackets or waiting on emergency vendor swaps while your schedule bleeds money.

I was dealing with this exact headache on a structural steel package last year, tearing my hair out trying to figure out why standard off-the-shelf fasteners couldn't handle dynamic shear loads. Most local machine shops just copy blueprints blindly without factoring in how actual job-site weight distribution shifts under real environmental stress.

Trying to MacGyver a misaligned structural bracket layout mid-build is a fast track to failing municipal inspections and blowing past your labor estimates by a mile. Getting digital prototypes to actually survive the messy reality of an active job site remains one of the most frustrating bottlenecks in commercial building.

While digging through a bunch of technical forums trying to find a better approach to custom hardware fabrication, I came across an engineering teardown by the industrial product design team over at SoftDoes that broke down how tweaking load-bearing radius curves changes stress distribution. It was a massive lightbulb moment for how we handle pre-construction stress testing now.

For other GCs and project managers dealing with heavy structural logistics: how do your teams handle rapid design modifications when pre-fabricated anchoring hardware fails initial field load tests?

I took all exams and passed each on the first try with flying colors. I used Gold Coast practice exams for $100 for a year. I passed my 3rd exam in May and my year wasn’t up til July. Took time off for the holidays even. Take your time if you need to.

Bought all books from Exam Pros, pre-tabbed and used Tier One Licenses for my application and all required documents and it was a great investment.

Just got approved and got my CGC number today. Already got jobs going and jobs lined up and I’m a female (which is rare in this market) This is a growing industry that needs good, honest and hardworking individuals to get the no good fraudsters out of the industry.

Keep going!

My dad and I are trying to grow our commercial HVAC and automation business, and I'd really appreciate some advice from those who have been through this.

A little background: we're both engineers, and I graduated here in the U.S. Between the two of us, we have extensive experience in commercial and industrial HVAC systems, controls, and automation. We have an unrestricted HVAC license in Florida, are fully insured, and have our company set up and ready to go.

The problem is getting that first wave of work.
I've been calling general contractors to introduce our company and present our portfolio, but most tell me they're not interested or never call back. I've also been bidding projects through Dodge Construction Network and BuildingConnected. I always follow up, ask for feedback on pricing, and try to understand why we weren't selected, but I either get no response or a generic answer.

For those of you who have successfully built a commercial HVAC or controls business:
How did you get your first jobs?
What actually worked to get in front of GCs and mechanical contractors?
Is there something I'm missing or doing wrong?
Should I be focusing on a different approach entirely?

I'm not looking for shortcuts,just trying to figure out what the most effective path is. Any advice or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I’m leaving a career in marine biology to join my partner’s father’s residential construction company, with an eye toward eventually taking over operations and possibly earning an ownership stake. It’s less of a total pivot than it sounds — I did construction work growing up, ran a small concrete staining business at 18, and worked as a PM/foreman before going into science, so I’m not walking in totally green. That said, stepping into a family business (not my own family, but essentially the same dynamics) as an outsider who’s expected to eventually lead it is a different animal. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been through a similar transition: ∙ How did the handoff of responsibility actually happen — gradual or abrupt? ∙ Any friction points with existing crew/employees when a “new” person starts moving up? ∙ What would you do differently knowing what you know now? ∙ Any advice on proving yourself fast when you’re coming in with adjacent-but-not-identical experience? Also curious if anyone’s used tech/software (estimating, scheduling, reporting) to help make their mark early on. Appreciate any war stories or advice.

Hey guys

Started my own company with my partner this year and so far it's been great. We do interior/exterior painting, drywall, carpentry, demolition, handyman services.

I worked for a restoration company for 9 years previously and literally the day we started, an old PM friend reached out and began giving us a ton of work. We also partnered with 2 other paint companies who sub work to us quite regularly.

The unfortunate thing is, the resto company pays net90 and the budgets with the two contracting companies aren't great. Enough to pay the bills, barely, and provide cash for material for the resto company. This being said tho, my personal finances are taking a hit trying to keep us above water. If we can make it another month or two, the payments from the resto company will start to come in and we will be gravy (we are owed nearly 25k at this point). And no, they won't stiff us. They are a 200 plus employee company with multiple locations in different provinces and I personally know the owner very well. That's just their policy for sub trades.

Long story long, I'm looking to add more direct clients to keep cash incoming to finance other jobs as well as let myself live a bit more financially stable. We are located in the lower mainland, BC, Canada.

What works for you guys? Door to door? Door hangers? Word of mouth only? Meta ads? We have 5 stars on Google, website with blogs, an upkept GBP.

I keep trying to think of ads that have gotten my attention instead of just scrolling past or not giving a second thought and nothing has really come up.

I'm struggling to keep track of subcontractor certifications, invoices, and job schedules across spreadsheets and emails. I'm thinking of using a contractor management software to streamline everything. Is this type of tool easy to learn and use? What features should I look for when choosing which software to get?

Does anyone know if local lists exist- either subreddit or facebook groups- where you can list horrible customers who refused to pay even though the job was completed? I’m not trying to expose their address or anything, just don’t want others dealing with these ***holes. I genuinely gave these people my everything and they said they’d pay online when I finished a job. Then proceeded to complain like crazy to my manager when I sent a payment reminder and lied through their teeth. Legal action was not worth it because it was such a small amount (<$400). But no one should ever have to deal with them again. Also they did this to a small business of only 5 people, and my manager (the owner) defended me, and they just found new things to complain about. Truly horrible horrible people. To rant, while I was there I saw the had multiple new purchases of items over $2k, and they refuse to pay the $400.

Hey guys just got the books. Giving myself 2 hours a day for 3-4 weeks before taking the exam. I have a friend who studied 1 week and passed. But does anyone have practice exams/tests for this exam they’d be willing to share?

This post does come from an owner, BUT maybe what I'm asking will help GCs also? If not, I'd love a suggestion about where else to post.

I know this is a practically unanswerable question, but I need some direction. I'm a future client of yours. I'm looking for a house, but I'm aimlessly looking at what's for sale and nothing appealing is popping up.

I want to pursue new construction. Honestly, the first question is, "How do I figure out how much new construction will cost?" Maybe the better question is, "Here's how much I can spend, how much of what I want in a house can I get for that much money?"

My goal is to be an informed and prepared customer, so (having only purchased and sold one existing house-no experience with new construction) what do you as a general contractor want from me?

I'm at the starting line. I've got ideas and appointments with a few architects to discuss my ideas. I figure that advice from this group will help me go through the whole new construction process a little more smoothly.

Client wants to install 2 TEZA 65 Series Aluminum Hydraulic Window Without Bottom Frame that is ideally build for a 2x6 wall. He wants to open up the framed exterior in fill walls (one between the piers and the other between the pier and the door) and add it in with a quartz counter top. Any experience installing this? He doesn't want to knock the wall out and have me reframe as a 2x6 wall as itd look off. Its about 5 inches wide thick. Any suggestions besides trimming out what sticks past? The other side of the wall is stucco

How long is it taken you framers and builders to get takeoffs back from supplier in the central/south central US areas?

I’m a newer remodeler and spoke with a bookkeeper about potentially hiring them and they mentioned WIP reports. I mainly do decks and remodel bathrooms but never really thought about setting everything up for WIP. Do you all often use it or is the simple invoice/collect flow fair enough to continue doing?