Ask ten business owners what a general contractor does and you’ll get ten versions of “they build stuff.” Close, but that misses the actual job.
A general contractor (GC) is the company that signs the prime contract with you, the owner, and takes responsibility for delivering the whole project: every trade, every permit, every inspection, on a date, for a price. The GC may swing a hammer. Most don’t. What they sell is coordination and accountability.
That distinction matters more in Texas than almost anywhere else, because the state doesn’t license general contractors at all. More on that below.
The GC’s real job is risk, not swinging hammers
Picture a 2,000 square foot restaurant build-out. Framing, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, fire sprinkler, hood and grease duct, tile, millwork, paint, signage, low voltage. Eleven or twelve companies, each with its own schedule, its own inspector, and its own opinion about who goes first.
Somebody has to own that sequence. If the plumber’s underground rough-in isn’t inspected before the slab pour, the pour waits. If it doesn’t wait, you’re cutting concrete later. The GC is the party who eats that mistake, contractually and financially.
A general contractor sells one thing: the promise that a hundred small decisions get made in the right order.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the parallel role of construction managers as people who “plan, coordinate, budget, and supervise construction projects from start to finish”, and it counted 609,100 of those jobs in 2025 at a median pay of $114,990. That’s the skill set you’re buying, whatever title the person carries.
Scale check: the Associated General Contractors of America counts more than 919,000 construction establishments in the U.S. employing about 8.0 million people. Most are small, and plenty are one person with a truck and a network of subs. Which is exactly why vetting matters.
Eight things you’re actually paying a GC to do
1. Scope definition. Turning “we want a salon here” into a written list of work by trade: what’s demolished, what’s built, what the owner furnishes, what the landlord provides. Vague scope is where budgets die.
2. Estimating. Pricing that scope with real subcontractor bids, not square-foot guesses. A good estimate also names what isn’t priced yet (an allowance) so nobody is surprised in week six.
3. Subcontractor procurement. Choosing the electrician, plumber, and HVAC contractor, checking their licenses, and holding their contracts. You never contract with the subs directly. The GC does, and carries the liability for their work.
4. Scheduling. Building the sequence and holding people to it. Inspections have lead times. Long-lead items (switchgear, custom millwork, hood systems) have to be ordered weeks before they’re needed.
5. Permits and inspections. Preparing and submitting drawings, answering plan review comments, scheduling rough and final inspections, and closing the permit. In Plano, for example, the city’s permit guide says the plan review fee is 65 percent of the commercial permit fee and first commercial comments target 10 working days. Food businesses submit three sets of plans instead of two. Small details. They move your opening date.
6. Safety. Job site rules, fall protection, hot work permits when someone’s welding near a sprinkler line, and dust and air control when a building is occupied.
7. Quality. Checking that what got built matches the drawings and the code edition the city adopted. Cities pick from model codes such as the International Code Council’s 15 international codes and add their own amendments.
8. Close-out. As-built drawings, permit and inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, warranty letters, and operation manuals. Try subleasing a space without them.
GC, sub, construction manager, design-build: pick one
People use these terms loosely, and the differences decide who’s accountable when something goes wrong.
A subcontractor performs one trade under contract to the GC. A licensed electrician is a sub. Great at electrical, not responsible for your schedule.
A construction manager (CM) advises the owner for a fee. Depending on the contract, the owner may hold the trade contracts directly (“CM as agent”) or the CM firm may hold them and guarantee a price (“CM at risk”). The second version behaves almost exactly like a GC.
Design-build means one entity handles both design and construction under a single contract. It collapses the finger-pointing between architect and builder. It also puts a lot of trust in one company.
A general contractor in the traditional sense holds the trade contracts, owns the schedule, and carries the price risk for a defined scope. For a restaurant, salon, clinic, or office build-out, it’s the model you’ll see most often.
If you can’t name the single company that owes you a finished, inspected space on a date, you don’t have a GC yet.
Texas has no GC license, and that changes how you vet
Here’s the part that surprises owners moving in from California or Florida.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation publishes the full list of programs it regulates: electricians, air conditioning and refrigeration contractors, elevators, boilers, dozens more. General contractors aren’t on it. No state exam, no state bond, no state license number to look up.
Instead, two things are regulated.
The trades. TDLR’s rule is that “anyone who performs, or offers to perform, non-exempt electrical work in the state of Texas must be licensed and perform that work through a licensed electrical contractor”. Same agency, same idea for HVAC: contractors who install, repair, or maintain air conditioning, refrigeration, or heating systems must hold a TDLR license. Plumbing sits with a separate agency, the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, which has regulated the trade since 1947 and issues Tradesman, Journeyman, Master, and Responsible Master Plumber licenses.
City registration. Cities require contractors to register before they can pull permits. The City of Dallas registration application covers commercial general contractors at an annual fee of $120. Plano’s requirements sheet lists a general contractor annual fee of $100, with a current driver’s license as the only listed requirement. The electrical contractor on the same sheet has to hold a Texas Master Electrician license. The GC needs a driver’s license.
So when someone asks how to become a general contractor in Texas, the honest answer is: register with the city, carry insurance, find clients. That’s the whole legal barrier, which is why a license question tells you almost nothing about competence.
Commercial build-outs are a different animal
Commercial construction is any building work on property used for business: restaurants, retail, offices, clinics, warehouses, and the interiors inside them. A residential GC and a commercial GC are the same legal creature, so “general contractor vs. commercial contractor” is a false split. The projects, though, are nothing alike.
The landlord is a second client. Your lease includes a work letter spelling out what the landlord delivers, what you build, what approvals they need, and how any tenant improvement allowance gets paid. A GC who hasn’t read it will price the wrong scope. There’s a separate guide here on how tenant improvement allowances actually work.
You can’t open without a certificate of occupancy. Dallas puts it plainly: “except for single family and duplex uses, a person shall not use or change the use of a building, a portion of a building, or land without obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy”, and a change of tenant on an existing CO triggers a new one. Every suburb has its own version, and the CO inspection comes after every trade’s final passes, so it’s the last domino.
Accessibility is reviewed by the state. Under the Texas Architectural Barriers Act, a project with an estimated cost of $50,000 or more must be registered with TDLR for accessibility plan review and inspection, and smaller projects still have to comply with the Texas Accessibility Standards. Door clearances, counter heights, restroom turning radii. A residential remodeler rarely thinks about any of it.
The building is usually occupied. Your neighbors are open for business. Dust barriers, negative air, after-hours demolition, freight elevator reservations. Scheduling becomes a customer-service problem.
Quick reality check: commercial work isn’t harder than a custom home so much as it has more parties who can say no. That’s why owners hire a commercial construction contractor rather than the remodeler who did their kitchen.
How a good GC prices: fixed scope, allowances, change orders
Back to money, because this is where trust is won or lost.
There are two honest ways to price a build-out. Fixed price for a fixed scope means the GC commits to a number for a written list of work. Cost plus a fee means you pay actual trade costs plus a percentage or flat fee. Both work. What fails is a fixed price against a vague scope, because the gap gets filled with change orders.
Three terms to learn before you sign anything:
- An allowance is a placeholder for something not yet selected, like tile or light fixtures. Ask what it’s based on. An allowance set at builder-grade prices will get blown by your designer’s picks.
- A change order is a signed adjustment to scope, price, or schedule. It should be written, priced, and approved before the work happens. If a GC says “we’ll sort it out at the end,” that’s a pass.
- Exclusions are the listed items the price doesn’t cover. Read them twice. Permit fees, utility connections, and low-voltage cabling hide here.
The cheapest proposal is usually the one with the shortest exclusions list. Or the one that didn’t read the work letter.
Insurance and bonding: ask before you’re impressed
Since Texas won’t verify a GC for you, insurance is your first real filter. Ask for certificates naming you (and your landlord, who’ll require it anyway) as additional insured on general liability, and confirm workers’ compensation coverage. Ask that the certificate come straight from the agent, not as a PDF forwarded by the contractor.
Bonding is separate. A performance bond guarantees the work gets finished; a payment bond guarantees subs and suppliers get paid so they can’t lien your space. Landlords and lenders sometimes require them on larger jobs. A GC who can’t get bonded hasn’t necessarily done anything wrong, but a GC who can has passed a surety’s underwriting, which is more than the state ever asked of them.
Seven questions I’d ask any contractor, including us
I’ll switch to first person here, because I’ve sat on both sides of this table: 15 years in sales, customer service, and construction supply, then years running crews across Dallas-Fort Worth. These are the questions I’d want answered before signing anything, and we’re glad to answer them about ourselves.
- Can I see the last three commercial COs you obtained, with the cities and dates?
- Who is my single point of contact, and how often will I get a written update?
- Which trades do you self-perform, and which do you sub? Who are the subs?
- Show me a sample proposal. Where are the allowances and exclusions?
- How do change orders get priced and approved?
- What’s in your close-out package?
- Can my landlord’s property manager call you?
None of those are about price. Price comes last, once you know the scopes match.
How we run a build-out at MASACO
The projects I watched go sideways over those years almost always went sideways on communication and sequence, not craft. So Sara and I built MASACO’s six-step process around those two things.
Understand. We walk the space with you and, where we can, the building engineer. We read the work letter before we talk numbers.
Visualize. You get 3D renderings of the finished space before anything is priced. Moving a counter in a rendering costs nothing. Moving it after the plumber’s rough-in costs a change order and a week.
Plan. A fixed-scope proposal organized by trade, with every allowance named and the basis for it written down, so you can compare it line by line against anyone else’s.
Execute. One project manager. A written photo update every week, whether or not anything dramatic happened, because silence is what makes owners nervous.
Deliver. A close-out package with as-builts, permits, inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, and warranties, handed over the day you open.
Support. We’re still reachable after the ribbon.
Here’s what that looks like on real jobs.
At Fade & Style in Allen, we took a 1,500 square foot shell to an open barber shop in six weeks. Midway through, the fire marshal wanted documentation on the PVC station walls. We pulled the product data, submitted it, and resolved the question without moving the opening date. That’s the permits-and-inspections job, done quietly.
At Calibration Brain & Body in Frisco, a 4,250 square foot conversion into a wellness and media studio ran on an expedited five-week schedule. Electrical, acoustic, millwork, and plumbing trades were sequenced to work in the space at the same time. That only works when the GC owns the calendar and the subs trust it.
At Pizza Twist in Irving, a 2,000 square foot franchise restaurant was built out in six to eight weeks while the restaurant stayed open. Occupied-building work, with a kitchen serving customers a few feet from the dust barrier.
Cielo Beauty Bar in Celina, a 2,600 square foot luxury salon, took eight weeks. We’re a woman- and minority-owned firm and a Goldman Sachs Preferred Vendor, headquartered in Plano and working across DFW.
When you need a commercial GC (and when you don’t)
You need a commercial general contractor when your project requires a building permit, touches licensed trades, comes with a landlord work letter, or has to pass a CO inspection before you can open. In practice that’s nearly every restaurant, salon, medical, office, or retail build-out.
You probably don’t need one for paint, a flooring swap, or furniture in a space that already holds a CO for your use. Hire the trade directly and save the fee.
If you’re somewhere in between, ask us. We’ll tell you if the job is too small for a GC, and we’ll usually tell you who to call instead.
Ready to talk through a space? Book a consultation and bring the lease. We’ll start with the work letter.
