How Arise Homes cut subcontractor onboarding from a month to days
A Kansas City production builder running 40 to 60 homes at a time, two trades per task, with nobody on staff who'd call themselves an insurance professional. Here's what changed when TradeGuard took over the paperwork.
Trades cleared for work 10x faster
A month to get a trade partner onboarded and on site became two or three days.
Colton Rice, Construction Manager
Saved 18+ hours of admin work per month
Four to five hours a week went into tracking COIs and chasing expirations, and more when coverage was about to lapse.
Joe Nelson, Staff Accountant
55% more trade partners
The approved roster went from 38 to 59 in just over six months. Arise recruits the trades; TradeGuard vets, onboards and keeps them compliant.
TradeGuard records, September 2026
Audit file ready in one click
What it takes to hand an auditor every current document for every sub.
Joe Nelson, Staff Accountant
At a glance
- Company
- Arise Homes
- Location
- Kansas City metro
- What they build
- Single-family and multifamily, about 150 homes a year
- Work in progress
- 40 to 60 homes at any time
- Trade partners
- Two trades and vendors per task
- Using
- TradeGuard Compliance
- Customer since
- January 2026
- On camera
- Joe Nelson, Staff Accountant; Anthony Brown, Purchasing Supervisor; Colton Rice, Construction Manager
The setup
Arise Homes grows by growing its trade partners. Some of the subs on their jobs today started with a single crew and now run businesses that work for other builders too. That's deliberate, and it means Arise is always bringing on new trades, many of them small and not yet set up for a production builder's paperwork.
Their standard is two trades or vendors for every task on every house. As Anthony Brown, who runs purchasing, puts it: the houses don't stop needing drywall, and they don't stop needing brick. If one trade has a bad week, the work doubles the next week. Keeping the bench full is not optional.
Every new trade partner has to clear the same bar before they can start: insurance that matches Arise's trade agreement, the right certificates, and the documents to prove it. Before TradeGuard, that bar was the bottleneck.
What it looked like before
The documents lived in folders. Certificates of insurance were tracked in spreadsheets. Somebody in accounting checked them every week, four or five hours of it, and more when a sub's coverage was about to expire.
“It was mostly all in folders. There wasn't really a check and balance on whether someone was putting it in there, or what it was for, or where to find it.”
The bigger problem was what nobody was checking. Arise's trade agreement spells out what their subs have to carry, but reading a certificate against that language is an insurance skill, and Arise is a homebuilder.
“There would be underwriters and insurance policies that we missed, things that I had no clue of. None of us are actually insurance professionals here.”
Asked how confident the team was that the subs on site carried what the agreement required, Anthony's answer was: not at all, not even remotely.
In the field, the gap looked different. A construction manager finding a good trade had to start the paperwork, wait, and hope nothing was missing. When something was, the house sat.
“There's been a lot of times where we found a guy and he may be missing one little piece of the paperwork or insurance, and we're not able to start the job. So the house will sit there, and we'll lose some money on interest.”
And unless Colton had personally talked to a sub, he had no way of knowing whether the crew on his site was insured without calling the office.
The audit
Then a workers comp audit found what the folders had missed. One vendor had canceled his coverage and kept working on Arise jobs. Nobody knew until the auditor did. Arise paid the bill for coverage they thought was in place.
“You never really think how much goes into a service agreement and what we tell our vendors we require until you see how much they're missing.”
What TradeGuard does for Arise
Arise's trade agreement had just been revised by their attorneys when they came on. TradeGuard read the new language and turned it into a specific set of requirements per trade, so “compliant” means compliant with what Arise's lawyers actually wrote, not with a generic checklist.
From there, the process for a new trade is short:
Arise submits the trade partner.
A form or an email with the company name and contact.
TradeGuard collects and verifies.
We reach out to the sub, gather certificates and documents, and check each one against Arise's requirements. Gaps go back to the sub, not to Arise.
The trade is cleared to start.
Arise sees status across every sub in one place, from the office or the field.
Nothing expires quietly.
TradeGuard tracks every expiration and chases renewals before they lapse.
The audit file is always ready.
Every document, current, in one place.
“I thought it was at first kind of like the same thing where we were tracking in another system. But it was a whole service.”
What changed, by role
Accounting
The weekly tracking is gone. When the next audit comes, the file is one click.
“If our auditor came into us tomorrow, it would be just one click of the button. We'd get everything in the file and send that to our auditor, and they would have everything.”
Purchasing
New trades get a handoff instead of a document hunt.
“When a new trade applies, I say, hey, I got guys, they'll help you out, and they'll take care of it. And you guys do. We have people in place that come in and handle a lot of that for us while everything else can be on fire.”
The field
A trade that used to take a month to get on site now takes days, and the construction manager knows who's supposed to be there.
“It is absolutely faster, at least ten times faster. We were lucky if it was a month before they were on board and working on site with us. Now we've seen trades turned around in two or three days.”
“It's built trust. I don't have to worry about if somebody out here is uninsured or missing their paperwork. I know that everybody out here working with us is supposed to be here.”
One place for new trades
Arise had multiple people sourcing trades, which meant double and triple calls to the same sub and good leads written on paper in a truck. TradeGuard built them a shared lead tracker so every new trade enters one system with visibility for the whole team, and the same workflow carries them through onboarding.
The short version
Arise set a standard for its trade partners, hired well, and still couldn't see whether the subs on its jobs met the standard, because checking is an insurance job and they're builders. TradeGuard does the checking. The result is faster onboarding, a cleaner bench, and an audit that's a file instead of a bill.
“Don't think, just do it. If you're even on the fence about TradeGuard, just jump in.”
See what your trade agreement actually requires
Send us your sub agreement and a few current COIs. We'll show you what's missing, on your own documents, in a 20-minute call.