Running SOPs for a Growing Commercial GC: A Worked Example

The project manager needs the subcontractor's certificate of insurance, a signed subcontract, and a completed W-9 before that crew can step onto the site. Run this as a Process Street checklist: request the documents, verify coverage limits match your contract requirement, flag any gap, and block the site-access task until every document clears.

The insurance minimums your contracts require, and what counts as an acceptable certificate, are a standard that should not vary by which project manager is reviewing it. That standard lives in SweetProcess, so a newer PM applies the same coverage requirement a senior PM would.

Without that written standard, the two-week onboarding window is exactly where a gap gets missed: a subcontractor's certificate expires mid-project, or a coverage limit is quietly below what the contract requires, and nobody catches it until a claim forces the question.

An RFI that has been open three days is exactly the kind of thing a checklist should catch automatically: a Process Street task with a due date, an owner, the architect or engineer of record's contact, and an escalation step if it is not answered in time. Without that structure, a late RFI is invisible until it delays the schedule and someone asks why.

Your standard escalation procedure, who to contact and when, and what happens if the deadline passes without a response, belongs in SweetProcess so every superintendent handles a stalled RFI the same way instead of improvising.

A superintendent covering a second job temporarily is the scenario where this pays off most: they do not need to know the history of job three to know exactly what to do about a stalled RFI, because the escalation standard is written down rather than living in the usual superintendent's head.

Safety toolbox talks need to happen every week on every active site, documented with attendance, which is squarely a recurring checklist task. Process Street can generate that task automatically for each active job and require a superintendent to log who attended before the week closes.

The content of the talk itself, which topics rotate and what is mandatory after an incident, is a standard you write once in SweetProcess and reuse across every jobsite and every week, rather than reinventing the topic list each Monday.

A change order needs a documented approval chain: estimate the cost impact, get client sign-off in writing, update the schedule, and notify affected subcontractors, in that order, every time. That is a Process Street checklist with a clear sequence and a blocking step, do not start the changed work until the signed change order is on file.

What counts as sufficient documentation for a change order, and who has authority to approve one under what dollar threshold, is a policy that needs to be written down once in SweetProcess and followed by every project manager, not decided fresh on each job.

A change order should move through the same sequence every time:

1. Estimate the cost impact of the requested change before anything is promised to the client.
2. Get the client's sign-off on the change in writing, not through a verbal go-ahead.
3. Update the project schedule to reflect the approved change and its effect on other work.
4. Notify the affected subcontractors of the approved change so their crews work to the new scope.
5. Do not start the changed work until the signed change order is on file with the project record.

Closeout, punch list, final inspections, warranty documentation, retainage release, is its own checklist, distinct from the daily job tasks, and it is the step most likely to drag on for months if nobody owns it as a discrete process. Run it in Process Street with its own owner and due dates.

Paying the subcontractors and staff who worked that job, and handling retainage and final lien waivers correctly, is back-office and compliance work that a platform like Every is built to organize, particularly once you are managing a mix of W-2 crews and 1099 subcontractors across several active jobs at once.

Olivia, MeetMyCOO's AI COO, can help you sequence all four of these checklists against your actual jobsite count, since a four-job GC and a twelve-job GC will reasonably prioritize this rollout in a different order.