When it comes to growing your small business construction company, you may think you’re ready to take on any new opportunities that come your way. But how can you know you’re ready?
It starts with asking the right questions.
For this reason, ACTIVBonding has developed an assessment tool that helps small businesses evaluate their readiness for growth. It asks the same types of questions surety companies ask when deciding whether to increase a contractor’s surety bonding program — which small businesses need if they want to pursue larger contracts, especially in the Federal market.
The results from the assessment provide an objective picture of your business strengths and pain points. From there, ACTIVBonding can identify and connect you to the right resources and methods for adopting surety best practices. These practices will ultimately position you to grow a more sustainable business and qualify for a larger bonding program. This involves helping you satisfy the surety industry’s “Three Cs”:
- Capital (appropriate finances to support the bond)
- Capacity (appropriate staff and resources to complete the work)
- Character (trustworthiness and consistency)
The Challenge: Companies Fail When They Grow Too Fast
Ironically, it’s not a lack of opportunity that causes most firms to fail. It’s chasing opportunities they’re not really ready for. Often, a small business will attempt to expand too quickly without the resources or personnel to support that growth. In other words, growing too fast increases the risk of growing beyond the capacity to manage, ultimately leading to failure.
Surety companies know this, and that’s why conventional bonding programs are restricted to allow only for reasonable rates of growth. When considering whether to increase a contractor’s surety bonding program, they need assurance that a contractor has the appropriate practices, systems, policies, and reporting tools to manage higher capacity and complexity.
So, if you want the bonding program levels of a $10 million contractor, be prepared to act like one.
The Solution: A Platform for Evaluation and Improvement
So how can you tell if you measure up? And once you know where you fall short, how do you make the necessary improvements?
Your surety broker might be able to share the performance metrics surety companies use, but they probably can’t offer any guidance or recommendations for implementation.
What the small business contracting community needs is a single platform for evaluating preparedness and accessing the resources necessary to facilitate change — whether that’s adopting a new accounting platform, HR policy, reporting protocols and/or cybersecurity program.
ACTIVBonding Business Assessment Tool
This is precisely what ACTIVBonding provides. Our guidance starts with a quick online assessment that lets you “score” your readiness and set benchmarks for improvement.
This 5-to-10-minute questionnaire is free to take and available to any business. It asks simple questions about your business processes — covering areas like compliance, access to capital, leadership, supply chain, and other factors of the “Three Cs.”
Afterwards, we’ll email you a report highlighting where your business operations appear strongest, and where there are opportunities to improve. One of our experts will contact you within two business days to discuss the results and recommend resources that can help you implement the right practices to grow your bonding capacity.
This offering was assembled by our team of top-level professionals in the surety, accounting and construction services industry. Why? To ensure small business contractors have free access to the knowledge they need to meet industry expectations and grow strategically.
In the end, our aim is to provide accessible guidance that helps the overall small business community maximize its potential.
