The Players' Roles

• Solid relationships with subs- S/he should have a long term relationship with (at least): a plumber, electrician, HVAC, roofer, and plasterer. You don't want him calling strangers from the yellow pages to work on your house.
• A business structure that matches your project's requirements. If you're just having a deck built, the front seat of his truck is an adequate office. For anything larger, you'll want a contractor that can be reached at any time (cell, beeper, etc), fax machine, computer with email address, and the ability to track jobs and print out current expenses on a day's notice. Even better is critical path scheduling or project management software that lets the contractor monitor, update, and adjust the project schedule, and to share that information with you.
• An experienced and loyal crew: While there are exceptions of contractors that have no direct employees and subcontract all work, we feel that the best contractors have direct employees in addition to their subcontractors. For residential construction, most crews consist of supervisors, carpenters and helpers. A crew is needed to attend to all the tasks that fit in-between the job descriptions of the various subs. For example, if a plumber needs a floor reframed to run his pipes, the contractor can have one of his carpenters do it. If s/he has no crew, s/he'd have to do it himself (s/he's probably too busy) or schedule a sub to do it sometime in the future, thereby slowing down the whole project. Also, contractors can exert more direct control over employees than subs, enabling the contractor to get something built exactly the way s/he wants it. And finally, employees are more reliable than subs, who must serve many different masters. Carpentry is too important an ingredient in most residential projects to be subject to the scheduling vagaries and varying quality standards of subcontractors (with the exception of rough carpentry or framing, which usually is subbed out to framing specialists).
• Lots of experience: There really is no substitute for it. Your contractor should be able to demonstrate that s/he has successfully completed projects of comparable scope and complexity to your own.