Scope creep, the 90-day holdback, and the clients your website should be filtering out.

By Kevin Hansen · Candid Creative · 8 min read
Field report № 05 · sources ↓

Standfirst

Most contractor blogs cast the builder as the villain — slow quote, lost deposit, no call back. Some of that is real. The other half is real too: what builders take on the chin from clients. This is about both, and about what a website can do to stop the bad clients before they sign.

65%

Share of new home-services revenue that comes from referrals. Most small Ontario builders I audit run 80–100% referral. The website is mostly defending that pipeline.

Source — BuildBook · State of Residential Construction · 2024–2025

10%

The basic holdback every owner keeps from every payment under Ontario's Construction Act. Released 60 days after substantial performance, after a 14-day lien window. About 75 days, in the legal base case.

Source — Construction Act, RSO 1990, c. C.30 · In force, May 2026

5%

Posted design fee at Pioneer Craftsmen (Kitchener, 70+ years). The site says 'we don't offer free quotes; the design fee is 5% of project budget.' A public price is a filter.

Source — pioneercraftsmen.com · May 2026

What I hear from builders.

Most months I sit down with a builder coming off a bad job. The story is almost always the same. The client added work after framing. The deposit got held over a paint touch-up that wasn't on the punch list. The kitchen selections took five weeks. The loan interest ate the margin.

Contractor blogs don't tell that story. They tell the homeowner's story — the slow quote, the missing call back, the dodgy warranty. Both stories are real. This one usually gets left out.

Most of what you need to handle clients like this is already in a standard contract. You just have to write under one that has the right clauses. The other piece is your website. Your website is what filters out the worst clients before they ever sign a deposit cheque.

Four things clients do to a build.

Four patterns. They show up on every bad job I see. Worth naming so you can spot them in week one, not week sixteen.

[Visual placeholder — 2×2 risk grid, component not built yet]

None of these is rare. All of them are preventable in writing, before the crew mobilizes.

The contract you should be writing under.

Most builders I meet write under their own one-page contract. That works on small jobs with clients you already know. On a $400K renovation, it doesn't.

The Canadian standard is CCDC 2-2020 — the stipulated-price contract from the Canadian Construction Documents Committee. It runs every serious commercial build in the country, and a growing share of high-end residential. Three clauses do most of the work against client-side trouble:

GC 6.2 — Change Order. Anything that changes the price or the schedule is signed by the owner before the work starts. Price fixed. Time fixed. No signature, no change.
GC 6.3 — Change Directive. The owner wants work to start before the price is settled. They issue a directive. You proceed at cost-plus until you agree the number. This is the clause for "just go ahead and do it" — and it puts the cost risk on the owner, where it belongs.
GC 6.4 — Concealed Conditions. Rot behind drywall. A foundation on fill. The undocumented junction box. You give written notice before disturbing it. The owner accepts or rejects. The price adjusts.

None of it is exotic. A construction lawyer can put your contract on CCDC 2 in a week. The website job is small: say which contract you write under, name the clauses, link the source. The prospect who hates that self-routes out.

The 10% holdback, and what "reasonable" looks like.

Under Ontario's Construction Act, the owner holds back 10% of every payment to you. You hold back 10% from every sub. It's security against lien claims, and it's the law.

The legal default is clear.

[Visual placeholder — holdback timeline, legal vs. weaponized, component not built yet]

Some owners stretch it. They raise new deficiency items at day 75 to push payment past 90 days. Some items are real — a back-ordered fixture, a door that swelled in the humidity. Some aren't. The pattern is the same either way: you fund the next mobilization out of your own line of credit while the client sits on yours.

Two things protect you. The first is a signed pre-delivery inspection list. Date it. Assign each item a fix-by window. Get a sign-off as each one closes. Items raised after substantial performance go to a one-year workmanship review, not an open complaint window.

The second is the prompt-payment regime under the same Construction Act. In force since October 1, 2019. If a client sits on a proper invoice past 28 days, you can take them to ODACC — the Ontario Dispute Adjudication for Construction Contracts — for fast, binding adjudication. About 46 days. Comparatively cheap. Enforceable on an interim basis while any further dispute plays out.

Most builders I sit with don't know they have it. You're allowed to put a line on your website that says you use it.

The selection-paralysis tax.

This one never shows up on a change order. It shows up on your field cost report.

The client takes three weeks to pick a pendant. Your PM is on the phone twice a week. Same showroom. Same lighting plan. Meanwhile the rough-in trade is done. The next call-in is two weeks out. The schedule slips. It's not on a change order. You eat it.

[Visual placeholder — selection-paralysis stat calculator, component not built yet]

The fix is in the contract. CCDC 2-2020 GC 6.5 covers delays. Attach a schedule of selection deadlines as a contract exhibit. Each category gets a decision-by date, tied to the build schedule. A decision missed by more than five business days is a billed delay at a published rate. Now the cost lands on the person causing it.

What Pioneer Craftsmen puts on their website.

One Kitchener builder has been doing this in public for years. They are not a client of mine. I'm naming them because the work is already on their site and the choices are worth copying.

[Visual placeholder — Pioneer Craftsmen three-up callout, component not built yet]

Each of those is a filter. The prospect who needs a free quote, who wants a one-year warranty, who wants the first meeting to be a sales pitch — they all route themselves out of Pioneer's inbox before anyone wastes time on a meeting. Pioneer has been at it for seventy years. They didn't build the model as a strategy. They built it by doing what they thought was reasonable. Anyone can copy it.

A filtering site vs. one that isn't.

Most contractor sites are built for volume of inquiries. The good ones are built for quality of inquiries. Here's what each looks like, side by side.

[Visual placeholder — filtering vs. non-filtering 2-column comparison, component not built yet]

The left column does more of your estimator's job. The right column makes more of it. Pick which one you're running.

What it costs if you skip this.

Run the math yourself. Pull the last twelve months of estimate work. Count the estimates that didn't close. Multiply by your hours per estimate and your loaded estimator rate. On a residential builder doing $3M a year, the unbilled estimating cost lands between $18K and $40K. The variance comes down to whether your site pre-qualifies, or just sends everyone to the same contact form.

The harder cost is the one you don't invoice. The bad job you took because the pipeline was thin, that ran fourteen months with a client whose payment timing turned the gross margin to dust. The deficiency fight at substantial performance. The designer fight that cost you the supplier you spent eight years cultivating.

The Better Business Bureau ranked general contractors third in US complaint volume in 2022. About 53% of those complaints went unsettled [BBB · 2022 Top Complaint Categories]. Builders earned that rank from two directions, not one. The contract handles the clients who slip past the filter. The website handles the rest. Both cost less than one bad job.

The audit.

I run audits on Ontario builder websites. The discovery flow. The published price posture. The qualification questionnaire. The contract language surfaced on the site. The load speed on a real phone in Kitchener — not a Toronto data centre. The report is yours either way.

If your pipeline is full and your team is under five people, the audit usually says: don't rebuild. About one in three goes that way. I'd rather tell you that early than sell you something you don't need.

Request an audit →
$1,250 · about a week · report yours either way.

Receipts

Government of Ontario. Construction Act, RSO 1990, c. C.30 — Part IV (Holdbacks), s. 22 (basic holdback), s. 31 (expiry of liens). ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c30
Canadian Construction Documents Committee. CCDC 2-2020 — Stipulated Price Contract. General Conditions 6.2 (Change Order), 6.3 (Change Directive), 6.4 (Concealed or Unknown Conditions), 6.5 (Delays). ccdc.org
Ontario Dispute Adjudication for Construction Contracts. About adjudication — prompt-payment regime in force October 1, 2019; interim binding determinations in roughly 46 days. odacc.ca
Pioneer Craftsmen. Project Planning Questionnaire — published 5% project-budget design fee; "we do not offer free quotes"; 5-Year Aftercare Excellence Program. Kitchener, Ontario. pioneercraftsmen.com
BuildBook. State of Residential Construction — referral share of new home-services revenue. 2024–2025 industry survey. Single-source; directional.
Better Business Bureau. 2022 Top Complaint Categories — general contractors ranked third in the US by complaint count (4,084), with approximately 53% of complaints marked "not settled." bbb.org
Canadian Home Builders' Association. RenoMark Code of Conduct — 2-year minimum workmanship warranty for member renovators. renomark.ca

Author

Kevin Hansen is founder and lead developer at Candid Creative, a marketing and custom software development studio in Kitchener–Waterloo. He sits with Ontario builders most months going through the problems in this piece. The studio's public research knowledge base is at /kb.