Handbook
One Contractor, or Three?
Hiring trades separately is usually cheaper on paper and only cheaper in practice if somebody sequences the work. Here is how to judge which you are actually buying.
A backyard project of any size involves more than one trade. A patio with a deck off it, a driveway with lighting, a slab for a structure somebody else builds. At that point there is a decision to make that has nothing to do with concrete, and it affects the outcome more than most of the technical choices do.
What you are choosing between
One contractor. Somebody takes the whole project, subcontracts what they do not do themselves, and hands you a finished result. You have one number, one point of contact, and one person to hold responsible.
Separate trades. You engage each specialist directly. You have several numbers that will total less, several points of contact, and the coordination is yours.
Neither is the right answer generally. What decides it is how many dependencies your particular project contains, and how much appetite you have for managing them.
Who carries the risk when something is wrong
Worth separating from coordination, because they are different things bought at the same time. Coordination is somebody making the dates work. Risk is somebody being answerable when the finished result is not right.
Under one contractor those sit together, which is the simplest position to be in. Hiring separately they separate: each trade is answerable for their own work and nobody is answerable for the interaction between two of them. Most disputes on multi-trade projects live exactly in that gap.
Which is a reason to be specific at the boundaries. Where one trade's work has to meet another's, agree in advance which of them owns the junction, and write it down. It is an awkward conversation to have at the start and a far worse one to have afterwards.
Count the handovers
This is the test, and it takes about two minutes.
Write down each trade in the order they have to work. Then mark every point where one has to finish before the next can start, and every point where one needs information from another.
A patio poured in a garden where nothing else is happening has no handovers. Hire the concrete crew directly, and a main contractor would be adding a layer for no benefit.
A slab, a structure on it, electrics through it and a surface around it has several, and each one is a place where the project can stall. That is the shape where coordination earns its money.
What separate hiring actually asks of you
- Sequencing. Knowing not just the order but the intervals. Concrete needs time before anything is built on it, and that gap has to be in the programme rather than discovered.
- Chasing. Dates move. Somebody has to notice early and tell the next trade, and if nobody does, a crew arrives to a site that is not ready.
- Adjudicating. The awkward one. When two trades disagree about whose problem something is, you decide.
- Holding the drawings. Making sure everybody is working from the same version, which sounds trivial and is the commonest single failure.
- Owning the gaps. Every project has an item nobody quoted for, because each trade reasonably assumed it belonged to another. Finding those before they arrive is the skill.
If reading that list was uncomfortable, that is useful information, and a main contractor is probably worth what they cost on your project.
Where the concrete sits, and why it matters
Flatwork and foundations come early. After the groundworks and any services, before almost everything that follows.
Which makes this trade a common source of knock-on delay, not because concrete work runs long but because everybody after it is waiting. A week lost here is a week lost by everyone downstream, and that is worth knowing when you decide who is holding the programme.
It also means we ask what else is planned before agreeing a date. That occasionally sounds like curiosity about work we are not quoting for. It is actually the only way to give you a date that survives contact with the rest of your project.
The questions that reveal which you are being sold
A contractor offering to handle everything is sometimes a main contractor and sometimes a specialist who will find somebody for the rest, and those are materially different purchases.
Three questions separate them. Which parts will your own people do, and which are subcontracted. Who holds the programme when a date moves. And who is responsible if a subcontractor's work is wrong.
Clear answers to all three describe a genuine main contractor, and their margin is buying you something real. Vagueness on the second and third usually means you have a specialist who will introduce you to others, which can be perfectly good value as long as you understand that the coordination has quietly landed back with you.
The middle option, done properly
Most people end up somewhere between the two, with one trade informally leading. That works, and it works considerably better when it is stated rather than assumed.
If a contractor is willing to hold the programme and speak directly to the others, agree it explicitly, write down who is doing it, and make sure the other trades know. An assumed leader has no authority the first time a date slips, which is precisely when you need one.
And whichever route you take, keep one thing yourself: the list of what nobody has quoted for. Reinstating a lawn, taking spoil away, the connection between two trades' work. Those are the items that become arguments, and a list you wrote at the start settles them cheaply.
Our own position is narrow and deliberate. We pour flatwork and foundations, we do not take on projects as a whole, and we would rather fit properly into somebody else's programme than pretend to run one. What that covers is on concrete patio and concrete driveway, and the foundations side is in our page on deck foundations.