Annual Surety Meeting Package Template
What this is
An agenda and a document list for the once-a-year, in-person meeting between you and the person who actually decides your bonding capacity. Not your producer — the underwriter.
Most contractors treat this meeting as a formality and send financials in advance with no narrative. It is the most valuable ninety minutes in your surety relationship, because capacity is set by judgment, and judgment is formed by people in rooms.
When you use it
- Annually, 30 to 60 days after your fiscal year-end statement is issued
- When you are asking for a capacity increase for the coming year
- After a bad year, when you need to explain it before the underwriter forms a view alone
- When a new underwriter takes over your account
- When your ownership, management, or type of work is changing
Rule of thumb. Ask for the meeting yourself, at your office, and offer a job site tour. Underwriters see spreadsheets all year. Very few of them get taken to a job. A contractor who invites the underwriter to the office and the field is read as one with nothing to hide.
How to prepare
Send the package a week ahead. The underwriter should arrive having already read the numbers. If they are seeing your WIP schedule for the first time across the table, you spend the meeting on arithmetic instead of on your capacity request.
Assign an owner to every document. The CFO or controller owns financials and WIP. Operations owns the completed-jobs and backlog sections. The owner presents the strategy and the capacity request. Three voices reads as a real management team; one voice reads as a one-person company.
Reconcile everything before it leaves the building. The bonded backlog in your bond register must match the WIP schedule. The WIP must tie to the financial statement. Any gap the underwriter finds costs you more credibility than the gap is worth.
Decide your capacity number before the meeting, and know the arithmetic behind it. Not "as much as you'll give us." A number, with the pipeline that justifies it.
Prepare the bad news first. Every contractor has a job that went sideways. Present it yourself, with the cause, the loss, and what changed in the process afterward. A loss you explain is a data point. A loss they discover is a pattern.
The document package
Send as one indexed PDF, in this order.
| # | Document | Owner | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cover memo — one page, what changed this year | Owner / CEO | Frames everything that follows |
| 2 | Year-end financial statements, current and two prior years | CFO | Same level of assurance as prior years, or explain why not |
| 3 | Current interim financial statement | CFO | Should be within 60 days of the meeting |
| 4 | Work-in-progress (WIP) schedule as of the interim date | CFO | Costs to date, estimated cost to complete, billings, earned revenue, gross profit by job |
| 5 | Completed jobs schedule, last 12 months, with bid gross profit vs actual gross profit by job | Operations | The most-read page in the package |
| 6 | Backlog schedule — signed contracts and cost to complete | Operations | Must tie to the WIP |
| 7 | Pipeline — bids outstanding and jobs expected | Operations | Supports the capacity request |
| 8 | Aged accounts receivable | CFO | Flag anything over 90 days with an explanation |
| 9 | Aged accounts payable | CFO | Including retention payable to subs |
| 10 | Bank line of credit — amount, drawn, covenants, expiry | CFO | Bring the covenant calculation, not just the number |
| 11 | Organization chart, with changes since last year marked | Owner | New hires, departures, promotions |
| 12 | Resumes for any new key personnel | Owner | Project executives, PMs, estimators, controller |
| 13 | Safety record — EMR for three years, OSHA 300 recordables, TRIR | Safety / Ops | Include the written safety program if it changed |
| 14 | Insurance schedule with limits, carriers, expiry dates | Office manager | Current certificates attached |
| 15 | Bond register summary — open bonds, closed bonds, premium paid | Office manager | From the bond register |
| 16 | Claims and litigation summary | Owner / counsel | Including anything threatened |
| 17 | Continuity and ownership update | Owner | Buy-sell, key-man life insurance, succession |
| 18 | Capacity request for the coming year | Owner | Single project limit and aggregate, with the reasoning |
| 19 | Personal financial statements for indemnitors, if refreshed | Owner | Handle securely — see the note below |
| 20 | Updated contractor questionnaire, if anything material changed | Office manager | Only if needed |
Watch out. Items 19 and 20 contain personal financial detail and, in the case of the questionnaire, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. Send those through a secure channel separately, not bundled into a PDF that gets forwarded around. Never as a plain email attachment.
The agenda
Ninety minutes is the right length. Two hours if you are adding a site visit.
| Time | Item | Who leads |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 – 0:10 | Welcome, introductions, the year in one paragraph | Owner |
| 0:10 – 0:25 | Year-end results: revenue, gross profit, net, working capital, equity | CFO |
| 0:25 – 0:40 | WIP walkthrough: open jobs, percent complete, gross profit fade or gain, any job in trouble | CFO + Ops |
| 0:40 – 0:55 | Completed jobs: bid gross profit vs actual, by job. What we learned | Ops |
| 0:55 – 1:05 | Backlog and pipeline: what is signed, what is bid, what market we are chasing | Ops |
| 1:05 – 1:15 | People, safety, and systems: org changes, EMR, any process changes | Owner |
| 1:15 – 1:25 | Capacity request for the coming year, with the reasoning | Owner |
| 1:25 – 1:30 | Underwriter's questions, next steps, who does what by when | All |
Two agenda items worth expanding
Bid gross profit versus actual gross profit, by job. This is the page an underwriter reads most carefully, because it measures your estimating accuracy, and estimating accuracy is the best available predictor of whether you will finish a job at a profit. Present it honestly, including the jobs where actual came in under bid, and say why in one sentence each. Consistent small fade is normal. Wild swings in both directions are the thing to explain.
The capacity request. Say the number, then the reasoning:
"We are asking for a $25M aggregate and a $9M single. Here is why: our largest completed job is $7.1M and it finished at 9.4% gross profit. We have $14M of signed backlog and $31M of bids outstanding, of which we expect to win $9M. Our working capital is $3.2M against $2.4M last year, and our equity is $5.1M. We added a project executive in March with fifteen years on jobs this size."
That is a request an underwriter can take to a committee. "We'd like more capacity" is not.
Ask your surety. What would it take to get to the next level of capacity — more working capital, a stronger bank line, a completed job at the target size, an audited rather than reviewed statement? Ask directly, write down the answer, and work on it for twelve months. Underwriters answer this question honestly and almost nobody asks it.
What not to do
Do not surprise them. Nothing in this meeting should be new information if it was known last quarter. A job loss, a covenant breach, a departure of a key person, a claim — call when it happens. Surprises in the annual meeting cost more capacity than the underlying problem does.
Do not present numbers your CFO has not seen. If the owner and the controller disagree about a figure in the room, the underwriter stops trusting both sets of numbers.
Do not hide the bad job. They will find it in the WIP schedule. Present it first.
Do not ask for a specific increase without the arithmetic. A number with no reasoning behind it invites a smaller number.
Do not oversell the pipeline. Bids outstanding are not backlog. An underwriter who has heard three years of "we're about to land a huge job" discounts everything you say. Report your historical win rate and apply it.
Do not let your producer run the meeting. Your producer arranges it and supports you. The underwriter came to hear from the contractor. A meeting where the owner speaks four times reads as an owner who is not close to their own numbers.
Do not treat it as a sales pitch. Underwriters are trained to find risk, not to be impressed. Plain, specific, and slightly conservative beats confident and vague every time.
Do not skip the follow-up. Send the answer to anything you could not answer in the room within one week, in writing, and confirm the capacity decision in an email so there is a record.
Follow-up log
| Item | Owner | Promised by | Sent | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Result |
|---|---|
| Capacity granted — single project | $ |
| Capacity granted — aggregate | $ |
| Rate tier changes | |
| Conditions attached | |
| Date confirmed in writing | |
| Next review date |
Notes and common mistakes
Holding it at the agency instead of your office. The office and the yard tell the underwriter more in ten minutes than a financial statement does in an hour.
Doing it once and then not again for two years. Annual means annual. Gaps get filled with assumptions, and assumptions are conservative.
Not updating the surety account profile afterwards. New capacity numbers, new letter of authority date, possibly a new underwriter. Update the profile the same week.
Forgetting that the underwriter is a person with a file. They have to justify your capacity internally to a committee that will never meet you. Everything you hand them is ammunition for that argument. Make it easy to make.
For the wider annual cycle these documents sit inside, see annual surety review and surety program management. For how the underwriter reads your statements, see surety financial analysis.