What to send us for a quote (and why we ask for it)

The honest answer is that the list is the quote. An underwriter prices what’s on the application, and what’s on the application is what you sent. Send a vague list and you get a vague number that gets corrected at audit or at claim time, which is the expensive place to be corrected. We insure excavation contractors, landscapers, and plow operators across Colorado, and the Get Insured page has the short version of this list in a sidebar. This is the long version: eight things, why each one moves the policy, and what happens when it’s missing. None of it has to be perfect. It has to be true.

Eight things, in the order they matter

Two of these do most of the work: the equipment list and the insurance exhibit from your biggest customer. If you only have an afternoon, do those two and call.

1. Your current declarations pages

If you have a policy now, the dec pages come first. Not the whole policy, just the pages that list the named insured, the policy period, the forms and endorsements, the limits, the classifications, and the rating basis. Those few pages tell us what you’re carrying, what it was written for, and what the last agent thought you did for a living.

We read them for three things. Whether the classifications match the work (a dec page that says lawn maintenance on an outfit running a mid-size excavator is a problem). Whether the endorsement list has anything that bites on a dig or a plow route. And whether the equipment schedule still reflects the yard. If you’d rather start there, the policy review takes the same pages and tells you what’s missing before anyone talks about moving.

2. Loss runs

A loss run is the carrier’s printout of every claim on your policies: date, description, what was paid, what’s still reserved. Five years is the common ask. Get them from your current agent or from the carrier in writing; carriers generally provide them on request, and the turnaround depends on the carrier.

Why it matters: the underwriter is going to pull them anyway. A claim we know about on the first call gets explained. A claim the underwriter finds after the quote is out gets re-priced, and the explanation lands worse. If you’ve never filed anything, the loss run still needs to exist, because a blank page from the carrier is the proof.

3. Payroll, split by what people actually do

Workers’ comp rates on payroll by class, and a crew is rarely one class. The operator in the seat of the John Deere 772GP, the laborer in the trench, the driver on the Mack dump truck, and the person doing invoices in the office rate differently. Give us an honest annual estimate for each, plus who the owners are and whether they want to be in or out of the policy.

Two things go wrong here. The first is lumping everyone under the highest class because it feels safe; the audit doesn’t refund optimism, it corrects the estimate against real records. The second is lumping everyone under the lowest class, which the audit corrects in the other direction with a bill attached. The workers’ comp audit article covers what the auditor asks for a year from now, and the workers’ compensation page covers the owner election and the one-employee rule.

4. The equipment list, with values

Every machine, attachment, and trailer, with year, make, model, hours, and what it would cost to replace today. The mid-size excavator and the $900 plate compactor both go on it. So does the 84” Bomag you haven’t run since the driveway job in Bailey, the bucket you bought used, the thumb, the hydraulic hammer, and the lowboy.

Values are the part people rush, and the part that decides the claim. A scheduled item pays what the schedule says, under most standard forms, not what the machine is worth the morning it burns. The equipment scheduling article is the long argument; the short version is that a number from three purchases ago is a number you’ll regret. Serial numbers come at binding. Photograph the plates now and you’re done with that part forever.

5. Vehicles, drivers, and radius

Every vehicle with a VIN, the gross vehicle weight rating, who drives it, and how far it goes. Include the pickups that pull trailers and the three-quarter-ton with the Boss blade on it in January, because those are business vehicles even if they feel personal. Include the Bell haul truck if it ever sees pavement between jobs.

Radius is the follow-up nobody expects. A Mack dump truck that hauls road base from a pit near Fairplay to a driveway in Bailey is one risk. The same truck running over Kenosha Pass to a Denver job site twice a week, through the freeze-thaw ruts on 285 in March, is a different one, and the commercial auto policy is priced on the difference. If a truck crosses a state line for anything, say so.

6. The contracts you bid

The insurance exhibit from your biggest customer. A GC, an HOA board, a property manager, a municipality, a national snow management firm. Not the whole contract, just the pages that say what limits you need, who has to be an additional insured, whether primary and non-contributory is required, whether they want a waiver of subrogation, and how much umbrella.

This is the item most people skip and the one that changes the most. A policy built without the exhibit gets built to a generic $1M/$2M, and then the certificate request arrives asking for a $5M umbrella and completed operations for the owner and the lender, and now the policy gets rebuilt under deadline. The GC insurance requirements article walks the clauses. For grading and site prep work, the GC’s exhibit is usually the longest document in the whole packet.

7. Subcontractors and their certificates

Who you sub to, what they do, roughly what you pay them a year, and a current certificate of insurance from each one. If a sub has no certificate, the underwriter reads it the way the auditor will: as your payroll and your exposure. The uninsured subcontractor article explains why the sub’s injury or utility strike comes to your policy. Collecting certificates before the quote is the fix, and it’s cheaper than the audit charge.

8. How you handle locates and trenches

For anyone who digs, the underwriter wants to know how you work, not just what you own. Who calls in the locate tickets, whether you keep the ticket numbers with the job file, whether you pothole near marked lines, how deep you trench, and what you use for protection in the hole. A trench box in the yard is worth mentioning. So is a written 811 habit, even a simple one. The utility trenching page covers why the answers to those questions decide whether a general liability form works on a dig, and the general liability page covers the XCU line the answers feed into.

What each item does to the policy

What you don’t need to send

Nobody needs your bank statements, your tax returns, or anyone’s Social Security number to build a quote. If you’re asked for those at the quote stage, ask why. You also don’t need a clean story. A machine that rolled on a wet cut, a truck that went in the ditch on County Road 43, a sub who turned out to have no comp: those go in the loss runs and the conversation, and they’re normal. Things break in this business. The policy exists because they do.

What we don’t control is how a given carrier reads a given loss run or a given radius. Two underwriters will look at the same Bell truck on the same lowboy and price it differently. Sending a complete list is how you get the reading that’s about your operation instead of the one that’s about the blank spaces.

Where to go from here

Pull the two heavy items, the equipment list and the biggest exhibit, and call. Get Insured has the callback form and the short list in the sidebar. Already insured and just want the dec pages read? The policy review is the faster path. If you’d like to see where you stand before you send anything, the insurance readiness checklist walks the same eight items as a self-check. And if you’re wondering why there’s a list at all instead of a form with a price at the bottom, the no online quote article is the reason, on purpose. Bentonite near Bailey doesn’t fit in a dropdown, and neither does your operation.

Serving businesses located in Colorado. Coverage is determined by the policy language and the carrier.