Construction
Your mod decides which jobs you're allowed to bid.
For general contractors and the trades. What you pay for insurance shapes the work you can go after, how you staff it, and what you end up owning when someone else makes a mistake.
Start a conversationThe Employer Success ProgramFive things that cost contractors work
A rising mod limits where you can bid
Plenty of owners and general contractors won't let you bid above a 1.00. Some cut you off at 0.90. The mod comes from your claims, but it's also a calculation, and we find errors in it more often than you'd think.
Once you're above the line, you're losing work you never get to price.
A rising mod kept them out of bids for large corporations that required 1.00 or lower. The mod analysis turned up an error. Two years later the mod was 0.93, and premium had dropped from $430,302 to $365,318.
The dashed line is 1.00, an average mod.
The same injuries keep leaving crews short
A hurt worker is a hole in the crew. The job slips, someone works overtime, and the new hire who fills the spot is the one most likely to get hurt next. Most contractors don't have a claims problem. They have a repeat problem.
New hires were getting hurt over and over, and the mod worksheet had mistakes in it. Supervisors got their own claims reports and a claims budget tied to their bonus. Annual claims went from $535,000 to $13,000.
Subcontractor paperwork turns into audit charges
At audit, a sub without a valid certificate gets treated as your payroll, at your rates. So does a sub whose certificate expired halfway through the job, or one whose policy doesn't carry what your contract requires. You find out a year later, on a bill.
We look at how certificates come in, who checks them, and what the audit is likely to pick up before the auditor does.
“David, I just can't thank you enough for finding and returning to us the $27,438 in overcharges from our last two years of audits.”
Ralph Kemp, President, Elk Air Conditioning
Contract language hands you someone else's risk
Indemnity clauses, additional insured wording, waivers of subrogation. The contract you sign can make you responsible for a loss you didn't cause, and your policy may not follow you there. The time to find that out is before you sign, while you can still push back on it.
We read the contract against your coverage and tell you where the two don't line up.
Who indemnifies whom, and for what. Which additional insured endorsement the contract calls for, and whether yours matches. Waivers, primary and noncontributory wording, and the limits the owner expects you to carry.
Without light duty, injured workers stay out longer
On a job site it can seem like there's nothing for a hurt worker to do. So they sit home, the indemnity piles up, and the claim stays open and on your mod for three years. Most contractors have more transitional duty work than they think. It just isn't written down.
Lingering claims with lost time were driving the mod up. We built a transitional job bank and a Zero Lost Time Program. The loss ratio fell from 80% to 9%, the mod from .98 to .66, and the company saved $177,840 a year.
No written policy for reporting injuries or bringing people back. We defined light duty jobs, like inventory work, and set up immediate injury reporting. No injury claims filed since.
What a contractor said
They saw that if I would have accepted that quote mid-policy year, my worst claim year would have been on my experience modifier for 4 years and not 3 years. Costing me almost $35,000.
More incredibly, they found that my experience modifier was wrong. David and John were able to get my experience modifier corrected, and my insurance companies had to return over $86,000 to me.
In a span of 4 months, they put almost $200,000 back in my pocket.
Mark S. Duda, President, Duda Cable & Construction
More from contractors: a new home contractor's reserves cut by $57,000, and what other clients have said.
Where the Employer Success Program comes in
It starts with a Diagnostic and Plan. We read your loss runs, your mod worksheet and your key contracts, and we talk with the people who run the work. You get the pattern behind your claims and a short list of what's worth fixing first.
From there our claims, HR, safety and fleet people work alongside yours, and you get a Score Card at the start and every year after, measured against your own starting point.
Start with a conversation
If your mod is keeping you off bid lists, a crew keeps losing people to the same injuries, or an audit bill came in high on your subs, tell me what's going on. I read these myself and reply within two business days.
Rather pick a time now? Book a 30-minute experience mod discussion. It's on Teams.