Don’t Sign Another Job Until You Check These 6 Things

Nobody sues a plumber over the plumbing. They sue him over the paperwork.

If you run a trade business with crews, trucks, and payroll, the work is almost never the problem. You are good at the work. That is why you are still in business after all these years. But the disputes that hit plumbing, HVAC, and electrical companies almost never start on the truck. They start in six places, and every one of them is in a drawer somewhere. Or worse, it was never written down at all.

In the video above, business attorney Eric Jeppson walks through all six areas in plain English, with one thing you can check in each area this week, yourself, without paying anybody. Here is the short version.

Check one: stop saying yes to changes on the phone

The job runs long, the customer wants a change, and you say yes because six years of history says it is fine. Then the final invoice comes back short, and now you are arguing about a conversation nobody wrote down.

That is not a trust problem. It is a paperwork problem, and it is the single most common way a good customer relationship ends up in a dispute.

Your check: pull out your customer contract tonight and find the change order clause. If it is there and your crew actually uses it, you are solid. If the contract is silent on changes, you just found your first fix, and it is a one-line fix: changes go in writing and get signed before the work starts.

Check two: don’t hand a sub your customer’s house on a handshake

When a sub’s guy floods a finished basement, the customer does not call the sub. They call the name on the yard sign. Yours. If there is no subcontractor agreement, or there is one but it came off a template nobody read, the question of who pays gets decided after the damage. After the damage is the most expensive time to decide anything.

Your check: think of the sub you use most. Can you put your hands on their signed agreement and their current certificate of insurance in under five minutes? That is the whole test.

Check three: calling him a 1099 doesn’t make him one

He rides in your truck, uses your tools, works your schedule, maybe even wears your shirt. On paper he is an independent contractor. In every way a government agency looks at it, he is an employee. Misclassification is the trigger for back payroll taxes, workers comp exposure, and penalties, and it usually surfaces at the worst possible time.

The label you put on the relationship matters far less than how the relationship actually runs.

Your check: count who got a 1099 from you last year. For each one, ask honestly: do they control their own schedule, their own tools, and do they have other clients? If the answer is no, that is worth a real conversation. Not a panic. A conversation.

Check four: stop assuming your policy covers what your crews do on a Tuesday

You bought general liability when the business was smaller. Since then you added a crew, took on commercial work, maybe put a guy on a lift. The policy renewed on autopilot every year, and nobody checked whether it grew with you. The worst time to learn what your policy excludes is inside a claim.

Your check: find your declarations page and read just the exclusions section. Circle anything on that list your company actually does. Then bring the circles to your broker. That one exercise starts more useful conversations than almost anything else.

Check five: never treat the company account like your personal account

The truck payment comes out of the business account. Fine. The boat payment comes out of the same account. Not fine. An LLC separates you from your business only as long as you treat the two of you as separate. When the paperwork and the bank account both say there is no real line between you and the company, the other side’s lawyer will argue exactly that.

Your check: read your operating agreement this month with one question in mind. Does it describe the company you actually run today? Most owners find it describes the company from year one. That is normal, and now you know.

Check six: nothing you can’t find will help you in a dispute

The dispute lands, and the signed contract is in a text thread, a glovebox, or the email account of a guy who quit two years ago. In a dispute, the business with the better records usually has the stronger position, and that has nothing to do with who did better work.

The fix is not software. It is a habit: one digital place where every job’s contract, change orders, photos, and key messages live.

Your check: pick a job you finished last quarter and time yourself finding the signed contract. Over five minutes, and you know exactly what to fix. This is the cheapest fix on the entire list.

The good news: all six are fixable

Here is the part that should make you feel better, not worse. Every one of these is paperwork, and paperwork is fixable. It is just nobody’s job until someone makes it their job.

You do not need to fix six things this week. You need to know which ones are open. That is what the free Legal Health Checkup does. It takes 5 to 10 minutes, walks through these same six areas, and hands you a Legal Health Report showing exactly where you stand: red, yellow, or green on each one. Take the free checkup at checkup.cleanlegalbillofhealth.com.

This article from Jeppson Law, LLP is general information, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading or commenting. But the checkup is free, and it is a good place to start.