The exposure test

Six questions. Answer them from memory.

You should not need to open your books to know whether you have a problem worth paying someone to solve. Read the six below and count the ones that are true of you. Each one costs money in a different way, and the note underneath says how.

Nothing is collected. There is no email gate and no result to unlock. The answer is at the bottom of this page.

Tick the ones that are true

01 You are bonded, or you are trying to be. A surety decides how much work you can carry by reading your numbers. If your work-in-progress schedule is a year old, the answer comes back smaller than your business deserves, and you bid inside a ceiling you did not have to accept.
02 You carry a line of credit or equipment financing. Lenders set covenants against accrual figures. Books kept on a cash basis can put you in technical breach on a profitable year, and the conversation you then have with your bank is a much harder one than the one you could have had first.
03 You pay subs and are not certain every agreement and insurance certificate is current. A sub who cannot be documented as genuinely independent gets reclassified at audit, and his payments are added to your payroll base. On a contractor running several million through subs, that arrives as a single assessment, and it is not fixable once the auditor has scheduled.
04 You run enough jobs at once that you have found out one lost money after it closed. A job that fades does it gradually, and the drift is visible in the numbers long before closeout. Finding out afterwards means the information arrived when the only thing left to do was absorb it.
05 You have a timeline for selling or handing the business off. A buyer reads the same schedules a surety does, and diligence rewards several years of clean history rather than a tidy final year. Whatever you fix in the last twelve months before a sale is the part a buyer discounts hardest.
06 Something specific is stopping you from doing more work next year. Most contractors can name it: capacity, cash, crew, or bonding. If the constraint is financial rather than operational, it is usually measurable, and a constraint you can measure is one you can plan against.

Two or fewer

Your problem is visibility, not exposure.

You are most likely running service and replacement work, and the thing costing you money is not a bond or a covenant. It is that you cannot see which work pays. That is the trades engagement, and it is built around four numbers you probably have never seen for your own business.

See the trades engagement

Three or more

You have exposure that reporting can actually move.

Bonding, covenants, subcontractor documentation, and job fade are all problems that get decided by numbers someone else reads. Each one you ticked is a place where better reporting changes the outcome rather than just describing it. That is the commercial engagement.

See the commercial engagement

Either way the next step is a conversation rather than a form. If we are not the right fit for where you are, we will tell you that instead of selling you the larger engagement.

Why these six

Each one is a place where somebody else reads your numbers

A surety, a lender, an auditor, a buyer. In every case the document that decides the outcome is one you already produce, usually once a year, usually for their benefit rather than yours. The questions above are just the six most common versions of that.

If none of them are true, you probably do not need us yet, and that is a legitimate answer to a page like this.

For surety agents and advisors

Something you can hand a contractor

If you are an agent looking at a contractor whose books cannot support the capacity he is asking for, this page is built to be forwarded. It makes the case without a sales conversation, and it sorts him before anyone spends time on a call.