Before a subcontractor starts, put one or two pages in front of them covering six things: exactly what is included and excluded from the scope; the price and what triggers payment; the start date and what has to be ready for them to work; proof of insurance and workers' compensation registration; the rule that no change to scope, price or schedule counts unless it is written down first; and how deficiencies and back-charges get handled. That is the whole agreement, and it takes about ten minutes off a saved template. Every handshake dispute you have ever had was one of those six questions, and handshake deals do not fail because someone was dishonest. They fail because two honest people remember a phone call differently.
The tiling looked great. That was never the problem.
The problem surfaced two weeks after the sub's last day, when the vanity guys found the shower niche sitting an inch off the drawing, and someone had to pay for the fix. The sub's position: "Nobody gave me a drawing, I tiled what was there." Your position: "The drawing was on the windowsill the whole time." Both sentences are true. There is no agreement to consult, because the whole arrangement was a phone call, a price, and "start Tuesday." So the fix comes out of whoever blinks first, the sub stops answering your calls, and you have lost a good tiler and eight hundred dollars over a conversation that would have taken ten minutes to write down.
This is the handshake-sub pattern, and every contractor who uses subs has lived some version of it. Notice what it is not: it is not a story about a bad sub or a bad GC. Handshake deals do not fail because people are dishonest. They fail because two honest people can hold different versions of an agreement that was never pinned down, and construction generates a steady stream of moments that test exactly the parts nobody pinned.
The fix is not a forty-page contract. For small-crew work, it is one or two pages that answer the six questions every sub dispute is actually about. Write them down before day one, every time, including with subs you like. Especially with subs you like, because those are the relationships worth protecting from a memory contest.
One note before the list: this is general education, not legal advice. Contract and construction law varies by province and state, and lien rules especially so. For your standard template, spend the few hundred dollars to have a local construction lawyer look it over once. It is the cheapest insurance in this article.
What should the scope section say?
Scope is where most of the money leaks, and the leak is always at the edges. "Tile the bathroom" is not a scope. Does it include the substrate prep? The waterproofing, and to what standard? Moving the tile from the driveway upstairs? Silicone at the corners, or is that the painter's? Disposal of offcuts and buckets?
A workable scope has three parts:
- Included work, itemized. Not prose, a list. "Supply and install wall and floor tile per drawing A3; membrane waterproofing to local code; grout and silicone; substrate to be flat within tolerance before start."
- Exclusions, itemized. The nearby items that you are deliberately keeping, or that stay with another trade: "Excludes substrate repair beyond minor patching, tile supply, niche framing." Exclusions are not pessimism; they are the two of you agreeing where the edges are while the conversation is still friendly.
- The reference documents, named. Which drawing, which revision, which spec. "Per the drawing" is worthless when there are three versions of the drawing; "per drawing A3 rev 2, dated June 4" ends arguments before they exist. If the niche is on the drawing, the drawing decides who pays for the niche.
Write the exclusions with as much care as the inclusions. In the tiler story above, one line ("GC to confirm niche location on site before tiling starts") would have moved the whole dispute from a standoff to a checklist item.
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Money: rate, invoicing, and when payment actually happens
The second sentence to get in writing is the full shape of the money, not just the headline number:
- The price and its basis. Fixed price for the defined scope, or a rate. If it is a rate, state what is on the clock: travel? material pickup? A fixed price with a tight scope is usually cleaner for both sides; rates belong to genuinely open-ended work.
- What triggers payment. On completion? On stages? Define the stages physically ("rough-in passed inspection") rather than by percentage, because "60% done" is an opinion and "inspection passed" is a fact.
- When you pay, concretely. "Within 7 days of invoice" or "Fridays for work invoiced by Wednesday." Then honor it to the day, every time. Nothing you write in any agreement matters more to your reputation with subs than whether your money arrives when you said it would. The good subs quietly rank their GCs by exactly this, and the fast payers get the callbacks in busy months.
- Holdback if you use one. Some GCs hold a small percentage briefly against deficiencies; some jurisdictions also have statutory holdback rules that apply to construction payments regardless of what you agree, so know yours. If you hold anything, the agreement says how much, why, and precisely what releases it. A surprise holdback discovered on payday destroys trust faster than almost anything else on this page.
Schedule: dates, dependencies, and the cost of drift
Subs get scheduled into a sequence, which means their dates are load-bearing: the tiler's Thursday is the plumber's Friday. So the agreement states start date and expected duration. Critically, it also states the dependency in both directions: what must be ready for them to start (site access, substrate condition, material on site, power and water), and who they are holding up if they drift.
Then add the honest sentence most handshake deals omit: what happens when dates move. Your delay pushes their start; do they still owe you priority, or do you go to the back of their queue? Their delay stalls your job; is there a point where you can bring in someone else without burning the relationship? You do not need penalty clauses at small scale. You need the expectations said out loud and written down, because schedule drift is the single most common source of sub friction, and it is almost never anybody's fault. Weather, inspections and suppliers do most of it. The agreement cannot prevent drift; it prevents drift becoming a fight.
What insurance proof should you collect before day one?
This is the section small GCs skip most, and it carries the most catastrophic tail risk. If an uninsured sub is hurt on your site, or burns the client's house down, the liability walks up the chain to you. In most of Canada, if a sub is not registered with the provincial workers' compensation board (WCB/WSIB/WorkSafe, the name varies), you can be treated as their employer for premiums and claims. US states have their own versions of the same trap, and the details vary by jurisdiction, so check yours.
The agreement therefore requires, and you actually collect, before day one:
- Proof of liability insurance, with a certificate naming actual coverage and dates, not a verbal "yeah I'm covered."
- Workers' compensation registration or clearance, in whatever form your province or state issues it. A clearance letter is usually free and takes minutes to get; a sub who resists producing one is telling you something.
- License or ticket numbers for licensed trades, plus who is pulling any permit. Electrical and gas especially: unpermitted licensed-trade work can void the client's home insurance, and it is your name on the client contract.
File the documents with the job, note the expiry dates, and recheck annually for repeat subs. Ninety seconds of admin against a risk measured in six figures.
Changes: the same discipline you use with clients, pointed downstream
You already know scope creep from the client side. The sub relationship has its own version, running in both directions. The client adds a second bathroom; you relay it to the tiler with "while you're here, can you also…" and now the fixed price is quietly wrong. Or the sub discovers the substrate is worse than anyone thought, does the extra prep without a word, and adds it to the invoice as a surprise.
The agreement fixes both with one rule: no change to scope, price or schedule without written agreement before the changed work happens. A text message thread meets that bar at small scale: "Second bathroom, same spec, $2,100 extra, adds two days," answered with a thumbs-up, is a perfectly good change record. What is not a change record is a conversation in a stairwell, remembered differently by two busy people three weeks later.
The mirror rule protects the sub, and saying it builds trust: if the site is not ready, if another trade damages their work, if you change the plan, that written note is their price protection too. Subs who learn that your paperwork protects both directions stop resenting it.
Back-charges and deficiencies: the ugliest conversation, defused in advance
A back-charge is you deducting money from a sub's invoice to cover something they caused: the tub they chipped, the cleanup they skipped, the fix another trade had to do behind them. Sprung as a payday surprise, it is the single fastest way to convert a good sub into an enemy with a text-message grievance.
So the agreement handles it before it exists, in three sentences: deficiencies get raised in writing when found, with a photo. The sub gets first right to fix their own work within a stated window; nobody fixes it behind their back at inflated cost. Only if they decline or fail does the cost come off their invoice, at the documented actual amount, agreed before deduction.
That structure is fair enough that good subs will happily sign it, and it is the difference between "we had a deficiency, they fixed it Tuesday" and a burned relationship.
Make writing it down the easy path
None of the above survives contact with a busy season if producing the agreement takes an evening. The whole system stands on the one-pager being faster to issue than the handshake is to regret. Keep a saved template where the six sections are standing text, then fill in scope, price, dates and documents in ten minutes, send it, and get a signature before the first boot hits the site.
Your subs live in a directory you build once. A Zeus contract is assembled from a per-trade catalog of suggested scope lines and standing terms, covering tiling, drywall, electrical and ten other trades. The scope section starts as a list you tick and trim rather than a blank page. Rate, schedule and terms drop in, and the contract lives on the job next to the drawings it references. Two honest gaps, so you can plan around them. The included list is seeded for you, but the exclusions are yours to write. And a subcontractor contract is not e-signable in the app, so you send or print it for a signature the way you would any other one-pager. The ten-minute version is still the one you will actually do at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, and the one you actually do is the only one that ever prevents anything.
The one-page agreement will not make a bad sub good. What it does is let the good ones stay good, by making sure the two of you are always arguing with the document instead of with each other.
Frequently asked questions
Will asking a long-time sub to sign something insult them?
Frame it as protection for both sides, because it genuinely is: their price is locked, their payment terms are written, back-charges cannot be sprung on them, and their changes get paid. "I'm putting everything on paper with everyone now, it protects your invoice as much as my job" lands fine with professionals. A sub who is genuinely offended by a one-pager after hearing that is showing you how a future dispute will go.
Is a signed one-pager actually enforceable?
A written, signed agreement with clear terms is evidence of what was agreed, which is precisely what a handshake lacks, and in a small-claims setting that is usually what matters. Formal enforceability details vary by jurisdiction, which is why the once-over from a local construction lawyer on your template is worth the fee. But the deeper point: the document's main job is preventing the dispute, not winning it. Most fights die at "let's look at what we signed."
What about a sub who says "I don't do paperwork"?
Offer to do all of it: you write it, they read two pages and sign it. Resistance to signing a fair document that mostly protects them is a red flag with very good predictive power, and it is better information to have before they start than after. The subs you most want long-term relationships with are, almost without exception, comfortable with paper.
Do I need this for a half-day sub job?
Scale it down, never to zero. A text that states scope, price, date and "send me your WCB clearance and insurance cert" and gets a "yep" back is a miniature version of everything in this article, and takes three minutes. The insurance and compensation coverage checks are the part never to skip at any size, because the catastrophic risks do not care that the job was small.
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