The job start-up checklist: what to settle before the first crew shows up

A lot of jobs that lose money start losing it in the first two weeks, and nobody notices for months.

Not because anybody did anything wrong in those two weeks. Because of what did not get settled: the submittal that was approved with a substitution nobody read, the gap between your scope and the next trade’s, the fixture the owner was going to furnish and now expects you to. Each one is a conversation that costs nothing in week one and costs a change order argument in month four — if you can still win it.

A start-up checklist is how you stop relying on whichever PM happens to remember. And the reason most of them fail is that they try to be one list when the work is really two.

Two lists, and most subs keep neither

List one is external. It is the set of questions you have to settle with the general contractor, the owner or the adjacent trade before you mobilize. These are not your tasks; they are agreements. Each one has somebody else’s name on it and each one, left open, becomes money.

List two is internal. It is the set of things your own office has to do in the first week so the job can be built and billed: submittals out, buyout done, the schedule of values accepted, the billing calendar known, the crew assigned, the budget frozen.

Mixing them produces the checklist everybody has seen: twenty-two rows, half of them blocked on somebody who does not know they are on it, and the whole thing abandoned by week three. Keep them separate and each one gets short enough to finish.

List one: the four questions to settle before you mobilize

Across every commercial trade, the pre-construction conversation reduces to the same four questions. The answers are entirely different per trade; the questions are not.

1. What exactly is approved, and is it what we priced? The submittal, the shop drawing, the equipment package, the specified product. The failure mode here is a substitution approved somewhere upstream that changes your labor, your lead time or both. For electrical that is the fixture, panel and device schedule. For HVAC it is the equipment submittal and its lead time against the schedule. For fire sprinkler it is the hydraulic calculations and the shop drawings. Get the approved version in writing and compare it to the version you bid.

2. Where exactly does our scope stop? The gap with the adjacent trade is where the money is lost, because both subs priced it as the other guy’s. Who insulates the pipe. Who firestops the penetration. Who provides the roof curb and who does the rigging. Where the controls scope hands off from mechanical to electrical to low voltage. Who furnishes versus who installs owner-supplied equipment. Ask it as a question with a name attached, not as an assumption.

3. What has to be true before we start? The predecessor work, the inspection, the turnover. Framing and in-wall inspections signed off before anything gets closed in. Slab and underground inspections in the right sequence. The area actually released to you. This is the question that decides whether your first two weeks are production or standby, and standby that was not flagged in advance is usually standby you absorb.

4. What are the logistics, and who pays for them? Access, hoist and elevator time, work hours, laydown and storage, temporary power and who provides it, the delivery window, the tap and meter fees, the inspection and utility milestone dates. Boring, and the most reliable source of unpriced cost on a tight urban site.

Four questions. Two to five lines each in your own trade’s words. Settled by email, so there is a record, before the crew is scheduled.

List two: the internal start-up tasks

This one is yours, and it is the one that makes the job billable. Nine items cover most commercial subs:

1. Executed subcontract read against your proposal. Specifically: are your exclusions and clarifications in the executed document, or did they get left behind in the bid? Also the retainage percentage, the payment terms and the change order markup cap. All three are read once and relied on for a year.
2. Submittals and shop drawings out, with the date they went and the date you need them back.
3. Schedule of values submitted and accepted. Before the first billing, not during it — and with the line structure you want to bill from, because that structure is hard to change later.
4. Billing calendar recorded. This GC’s billing cutoff date, the lien waiver requirements, and who has to sign what. Different GCs, different dates; see construction billing deadlines.
5. Buyout and purchase orders issued, with the quote validity dates written down, because a quote that expires before you release the order is a price increase waiting to happen. See the purchase order process.
6. Budget set up and frozen as-sold, against the cost codes you actually report on — your code structure, not the estimate’s spreadsheet tabs.
7. Crew and foreman assigned, with the roster in whatever system the field uses, so day one gets logged like any other day.
8. Change order authority in writing. Who at the GC can authorize extra work, and who at your company is allowed to accept a verbal. This is a one-line answer that heads off one of the most common billing disputes. See the change order process.
9. Notice and waiver requirements checked for the state and the project type, as a date on a calendar rather than a thing you will look up later, and confirmed with your attorney, because notice rules vary by state and project type. Lien waiver tracking in Texas is one example of how specific this gets.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Retainage, payment terms, markup caps, change order authority and notice deadlines are set by your contract and your state; have an attorney read the subcontract.

The list changes by job type, and that is the point

A tenant improvement, a ground-up building and a service or small-cap job do not deserve the same checklist, and forcing one list on all three is why people stop using it.

A TI has an existing-conditions walk, a building-management and after-hours access question, and usually a brutal schedule with no float. A ground-up job has a long-lead equipment list, a mobilization and laydown problem, and a submittal log that matters for months. A small-cap or service job needs a list of four items, because a list of twenty-two on a two-week job is theater.

So keep one checklist per job type you actually run. Three is usually enough. The test is whether a PM could delete a row without the next PM wondering if it mattered.

Three items almost every start-up list is missing

The quote validity date. Buyout happens in week two and the job runs eighteen months. Every material quote has an expiration on it, and nobody writes those dates anywhere. This is the quiet origin of a lot of material escalation arguments that could have been avoided by releasing a PO three weeks earlier.

The as-sold budget, frozen. Not the current budget. The one you bid. If you let the budget drift as the field reports in, you lose the only baseline that can tell you whether you estimated wrong or executed wrong — and those two problems have completely different fixes.

Who signs a T&M tag. Not who approves a change order; who signs the ticket in the field, at the end of the shift, with a name you can read. A signature from somebody without authority can be worth very little in month six, and the right time to find out who has it is the day before you need it. See T&M tickets in commercial construction.

Make it the same list every time, or it is not a checklist

A checklist that gets retyped per job is a document, not a process. Three rules keep it a process.

Same list, same order, every job. Variation defeats the purpose. The value of a checklist is that a gap is visible to somebody who was not on the job.

One owner per row. Not a department. A person. Rows owned by “the office” are the rows that are still open at closeout.

Reviewed once, out loud, at the end of week one. Ten minutes. Every row gets a yes, a date, or a name. The point is not the list — it is the meeting the list forces, and the four or five things that surface in it.

How SubMark handles it

SubMark has two separate surfaces for this, matching the two lists above.

A project checklist you curate once and get on every job. You build the template — in setup or later in Settings — and every new project is created with those items on it, each with a done flag. It is one template for the company, not one per job type, so if you run TI and ground-up work differently, add the type-specific rows on the job itself. Your trade’s pack ships a starting list, in your trade’s words, which you are expected to edit rather than inherit.

A pre-construction review list, with your answers kept per job. This is list one, and it is an opt-in module you switch on in Settings. The list of items is company-wide, so the questions are the same on every job, and each job carries its own state against them: done or not, plus notes that are specific to that job. When you pick your trade at setup, the pack seeds four starter items phrased in your own terms — the approved package, the scope boundary, the predecessor condition, the logistics — and every note ships empty on purpose. The note is your answer, and pre-filling it would be putting somebody else’s shop knowledge in your mouth.

Three honest limits, so you can plan around them.

• A checklist item is a name and a done flag. No owner field, no due date, no attachment. Put the owner’s initials in the item name if you want rule two above enforced by the tool rather than by the meeting.
• The pre-construction starter list is four items, not a complete scope checklist. It is a frame to build on, and the list that matters will be the one you add to it over the next three jobs.
• There is no closeout-package checklist module. The start-up side is covered; see closing out a commercial job for what the other end of the job looks like and what you keep yourself.

The rest of the start-up list lands in the modules it belongs to: the schedule of values with its draw tracking, a per-job draw calendar that records the GC’s cutoff and how the pay app is submitted, purchase orders in job costing, crew scheduling, and change orders for everything that comes after. Field users are free and unlimited, so the foreman is on the job from day one.

Your first week, in order

1. Read the executed subcontract against your proposal. Write down retainage, payment terms, the markup cap and whether your exclusions survived.
2. Send the four questions to the GC in one email. Yours, in your trade’s words. Ask for a written answer.
3. Submittals out, with the date you need them back.
4. SOV in and accepted, structured the way you want to bill.
5. Buyout, with the quote dates recorded.
6. Budget frozen as-sold, against your real cost codes.
7. Crew and foreman assigned, roster loaded, first log on day one.
8. Friday: run the list out loud. Every row gets a yes, a date, or a name.

Eight steps, most of them already happening somewhere in your office. The difference between a sub who does this from a list and a sub who does it from memory does not show up in week one. It shows up in the change order you can still prove in month six.