BUILDING A SURETY RELATIONSHIP.
Your surety relationship is worth more than your credit score. A surety who knows your business, trusts your financial management, and believes in your track record will support your growth through difficult projects and tight markets. Most subcontractors treat bonding as a transaction. The ones who grow treat it as a relationship.
The bonding program you get is sized off what the surety can verify, not off how good the year felt. That's why the contractor who sends a WIP every month and sits down once a year with no ask on the table gets a larger program than the one who calls in April needing a bond by Friday. An underwriter is buying predictability. Every month of clean, reconciled reporting is another month of evidence, and the evidence is what the program gets built on.
WHAT IT MEANS.
A surety relationship is the ongoing information relationship between a contractor and the surety behind its bonds, built on financial statements the surety trusts and a completion record it can verify.
WHERE IT GOES WRONG.
You only call your surety when you need a bond
The worst time to apply for a larger bonding program is the week you urgently need one for a specific project. By then you're asking a surety who barely knows your business to approve a significant increase off financials they're seeing for the first time. Sureties support contractors they know and trust, not contractors they're meeting.
Your financial presentation doesn't tell the right story
Construction financial statements confuse sureties when the submission is poorly organized. Overbillings read like liabilities nobody can explain. Underbillings read like questionable assets. A WIP schedule that doesn't reconcile to the balance sheet raises an immediate concern. If you don't explain your financials up front, the surety fills the space with risk.
You don't have a WIP schedule
A WIP schedule is the single most important document in a surety review. A contractor who can't produce a current WIP schedule, or who produces one that doesn't reconcile to the balance sheet, has told the surety something important about the quality of financial management in the business. That something isn't good.
WHAT THE UNDERWRITER NEEDS TO SEE.
Meet with your surety agent annually, even when you don't need a bond. Bring your financial statements, your WIP, your backlog, and a short narrative on the business. Walk them through your projects, your GC relationships, and your financial trajectory. Sureties approve bonds for contractors they know, and an annual relationship meeting is how you get known.
Every surety review should include current financial statements with a construction specific narrative, a monthly WIP reconciled to the balance sheet, AR aging with no problematic concentration, a backlog summary showing future revenue, and a one page business narrative. SPM builds that package whenever a bonding review is scheduled, formatted for surety review rather than for tax preparation.
The financial profile that grows a bonding program, meaning working capital, current ratio, and equity, is what SPM builds and maintains for every client, with monthly tracking of the ratios sureties use to size a program. When working capital is growing toward a bonding capacity target, you see the trajectory. When a distribution would push working capital below a bonding threshold, we flag it before it happens rather than after your surety declines an application.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
