Moving from residential to commercial flooring work

What actually changes when you move from residential to commercial?

The installation work is largely the same. What changes is everything around it — how the job reaches you, who decides, and when you get paid:

What do you need before your first commercial bid?

Most general contractors run a prequalification process, and until you're through it you generally won't receive invitations at all. Requirements vary by contractor, by state, and by whether the work is public, but a packet usually includes some combination of:

• Certificates of insurance — general liability, auto, and workers' compensation, often at higher limits than residential work requires, and frequently with an additional-insured endorsement naming the GC.
• Workers' comp experience modification rate (EMR) and recent safety records. Many GCs set a threshold here.
• Financial statements — sometimes reviewed or audited, depending on contract size.
• Bonding capacity or a letter from a surety. Bid, payment, and performance bonds are common on public work and on larger private jobs.
• Trade licenses, business registration, and a W-9.
• References from comparable completed projects — this is the one that's hardest to produce early, and the reason the first few commercial jobs are often smaller than you'd like.
• A written safety program, and on public work, the ability to run certified payroll at prevailing wage.

Requirements differ enough between contractors that it's worth confirming specifics with your insurance agent and with the GC directly rather than assuming a standard. The packet itself, though, is largely the same documents over and over — which makes it worth assembling once and keeping current.

How do you get on a general contractor's bid list?

1. 1
   Pick a short list of GCs, not all of them

   Target contractors who actually build the kind of work you install, at the size you can staff, in the area you can service. Ten well-chosen relationships beat a hundred cold registrations.
2. 2
   Register where they solicit

   Most GCs publish which platform they use. Create profiles on PlanHub, BuildingConnected, and ConstructConnect, and register directly on the GC's own subcontractor portal where one exists.
3. 3
   Get through prequalification

   Submit the packet before you need it, not when an invitation is already on a clock. This is the step that determines whether you get invited at all.
4. 4
   Bid the small ones properly

   The first invitations tend to be modest packages. Treat them as auditions: complete proposal, clear exclusions, addenda acknowledged, submitted on time. Estimators remember who made their bid tab easy.
5. 5
   Follow up, every time

   Confirm receipt, then check in with something useful, then ask directly whether it's been awarded. Most subs don't, which is precisely why it works. The bid follow-up playbook has the cadence and wording.
6. 6
   Watch for accounts going quiet

   A GC who stops inviting you produces no notification — just an absence. Reviewing invitation volume per contractor once a quarter catches it while it's still fixable, usually with a phone call or a lapsed prequal renewal.

What is an invitation to bid?

An invitation to bid — an ITB — is a general contractor asking you to price a defined scope on a project they are bidding or have been awarded. It typically names the project and location, states a bid due date, identifies the scope you're being asked to cover, and links to drawings, specifications, and any addenda issued so far.

Two things about ITBs surprise people coming from residential work. First, receiving one is not a commitment by anyone — GCs commonly invite several subs per package, and on public work they may be required to. Second, the invitation usually doesn't come from the general contractor's own email domain. It's relayed by whichever platform they use, often from a per-thread address like `728832@message.planhub.com`, with the GC's name only in the display name or the message body. That single detail breaks most home-made tracking systems — see managing bid invitations.

The software problem nobody warns you about

This is the part that catches people, and it happens at a predictable moment: the first commercial invitation lands, and the system running the business can't hold it.

Residential-first tools are built on one assumption — one customer, one price, one signature. There's nowhere to record an invitation to bid, no way to represent the same project priced to three different general contractors with independent outcomes, no concept of an addendum revising a scope you already priced, and no mechanism for a bid that has to be chased for six weeks before anyone says yes.

So the first commercial job goes into a spreadsheet. Then the second. Within a year the business is running two systems, the commercial history lives in a file on one person's laptop, and nobody can answer what the win rate is with any particular GC. The migration that follows is expensive precisely because it happens during growth, when nobody has time for it.

It also handles the prequalification side directly: keep your company document packet in one place, track prequal status and expiry per general contractor, and see which contractors have never invited you, invited you once, or gone quiet. That last view is usually the most actionable thing a growing sub can look at.