Somebody asked in another thread how you vet a contractor when reviews can be bought and references are hand-picked. It's the right question, and most of the answers to it come down to vibes. Here's the version built on records instead, specific to Memphis and Shelby County, because a record can't be curated for you.

Full disclosure so you know where I'm standing: I run a construction company here. What follows is a list of ways to check people like me, and I'd rather be checked than talked about.

THE LICENSE, AND ITS LIMIT

Tennessee licenses contractors at the state level, and the important part isn't whether a license exists. It's what's on it. A state contractor's license carries a classification and a monetary limit, which is the largest single project that license is good for. Somebody can be completely legitimate and still be licensed for a number well below your job. Shelby is also one of the Tennessee counties where a Home Improvement License is required for smaller residential work, so a shop doing modest turns should still have something on file. Verify it yourself on the state board's site rather than accepting a photo of a card, and look at the classification and the limit, not just whether the status says active.

LIENS, IN BOTH DIRECTIONS

Shelby County records are public and searchable, and there are two different things to look for.

Liens the contractor has filed against owners. Some of that is normal across a long career. A pattern of it tells you something about how their disputes tend to end.

Liens filed against the contractor by suppliers. This is the check almost nobody runs and it's the loudest signal available. If a lumber yard or a plumbing supply house has filed against them, then the deposit you're about to write is buying material for somebody else's job that finished last spring. That is the actual mechanism behind most of the horror stories on this forum, and it's visible in advance, for free, before you've paid anybody anything.

PERMITS

Memphis and Shelby County issue permits and inspections, and the history is lookup-able. What you learn from it: whether they pull permits at all, what kind of work they actually do versus what their website claims, and roughly how much of it. A company with years of history and no permit record is going to tell you that your job doesn't need one. Sometimes that's even true. Sometimes it's how you end up owning unpermitted work that your refinance appraiser finds later.

INSURANCE, FROM THE CARRIER

Ask for the certificate to come directly from their agent with you named on it. A PDF forwarded by the contractor tells you a policy existed on the day it was issued and nothing about today. Ask specifically about workers' compensation too, because a lot of small residential construction in Tennessee operates under an exemption, and that exemption has real consequences for whose problem it is when somebody gets hurt standing in your house.

THE ONE THAT ISN'T A RECORD BUT IS A NUMBER

Ask for the last five jobs' original contract amount and final contract amount. Not references. The numbers. A shop that can produce that within a day has an office and a system, and on a project of any size that's most of what you're actually paying for. A history that lands consistently eight or ten percent over is more believable than one claiming zero, because on stock this old, zero means they either padded the front end or aren't counting the change orders.

WHAT NONE OF THIS TELLS YOU

Worth being honest about the limits. Records tell you about money and paperwork. They tell you nothing about whether somebody communicates, whether the finish work is any good, or whether they'll be there in week three. The best predictor I know for that last one isn't a record at all. It's how many jobs they're running right now within about twenty minutes of your house. Crews stay where the work is dense. A shop with four jobs in your zip code will be at yours on Tuesday. A shop with one job near you and three across the county gets to you when the route makes sense, and no contract language changes that.

And the part that cuts against my own industry: the reason any of this is necessary is that construction has almost no barrier to entry and almost no public record of quality. Anybody can order a truck magnet. The records above are the closest thing to an audit trail that exists in this business, they're free, and hardly anyone looks at them.

Curious what other people check. Especially anybody who has actually pulled supplier liens before hiring somebody and found something. And I'd like to hear from people outside Memphis about what their county does and doesn't make public, because how much of this is available varies a lot by jurisdiction.