Are you actually ready to start a contracting business?
Eight questions about your situation, not a personality quiz. You get a straight percentage and a named list of what is still missing before you take your first paid job. Nothing is emailed, nothing is stored, and you do not need an account.
Readiness questions
Your Contractor Readiness Score
What is missing
Each item below came from an answer you gave. They are grouped into four workstreams, in the order they have to happen. Finish a workstream before you start spending against the next one.
Already handled
About the experience question. Hands-on years tell you whether you can do the work. They do not tell you whether a licensing board will accept them. Boards set their own rules on how experience is documented, which classification it counts toward, whether it had to be under a licensed supervisor, and how far back they will look. Two people with identical time in the trade can get different answers. Treat your own count as a starting point and confirm it with the board that would licence you.
Point this at your state and trade
None of these five affect your score — it is already final above. They decide which free roadmap opens and which requirements are actually yours.
Pick your state above
Requirements, agencies, and the consequences of getting them wrong differ enormously by state and by trade. Naming yours opens the free roadmap that is actually about you.
The free tools that close the gaps above
Everything listed here is free, needs no account, and works today.
What the paid Startup Roadmap adds on top of the free one
The free roadmap tells you what your state requires. The paid Startup Roadmap is the guided version that walks you through doing it, in order, without having to work out what comes next.
- An ordered task sequence built for your state and your trade, rather than a requirements list you have to sequence yourself
- The entity and tax registration workflow, step by step, including the registrations that come after the filing
- Your credential path: which licence or registration applies to you, what it needs, and what to have ready before you apply
- The bond and insurance workflow, including what to ask a broker for and what a certificate has to show
- A pricing foundation built from your own costs, so your first quote is not a guess
- Job #1 preparation: what has to be in place before you take money from a customer
- Saved progress, so you can stop and pick it up where you left off
Find the Startup Roadmap for my state →
The Startup Roadmap is opening state by state and is not available everywhere yet. Name your state above and this will tell you whether it is open for you. This page never asks for payment and never asks for an email, and nothing here is a checkout link.
Nothing is emailed and nothing is stored. This runs entirely in your browser. If you want to keep this result, print the page or save it as a PDF from your browser's print dialog — there is no account to create and we are not asking for your address.
Why these eight things
Being good at the trade and being ready to run a company are different things, and the gap between them is usually made of the parts nobody gets trained on: pricing below cost without noticing, no cushion for a slow month, no cover when something goes wrong, and no answer to where the next job comes from. These eight questions are about those parts. We are not quoting a failure rate at you, because we have not measured one.
Your answers stay in your browser. There is no account, no email, and nothing is stored or sent anywhere.