Why Your Website Is Making You Pay More For Your Insurance

By Cole Rarrick Founder, President | Mountain View Insurance Services

Most contractors assume their premium is driven by payroll, revenue, and claims history. Those things matter. But there is a fourth factor that almost nobody thinks about, and it is sitting right there on your website for anyone to see.
Your photos and service descriptions are underwriting documents. Your carrier treats them that way even if you don't.

What underwriters actually do

When your policy comes up for renewal, or when a new carrier quotes your account, someone reviews your business. They look at your website. They check your social media. They read your project descriptions, your service pages, your "what we do" page. If you have photos of a crew running an excavator next to an open trench, a social media post about a complex underground utility install, a before-and-after of a major grading project, or photos from a solar farm site prep job you did years ago, they see all of it.

Underwriters are not admiring your work. They are classifying your risk.
​
Every trade has a classification code, and those codes carry different rates. Concrete sidewalk is priced differently than tract development slabs. Grading a parking lot reads differently than grading around a live utility corridor. If your website suggests you're doing higher-complexity work, you'll be priced accordingly, whether or not that job represents your typical scope today.

The mismatch that creates problems

Here is a real scenario. You're a concrete contractor. Seven years ago you took on a tribal land project. It went well, you're proud of it, and the writeup is still on your website. What you may not realize is that tribal land work triggers a specific set of underwriter questions around jurisdiction, liability, and bonding requirements. They're not going to automatically call and ask for context. They're going to price for the exposure they see.

Maybe that's fine with you. Maybe that project accurately represents where you want to take the business. But if it doesn't reflect your actual current scope, you're being underwritten on work that's no longer part of your story, and underwriters are too busy to investigate.

The same thing happens with specialty work across the dirt trades. One photo of a crew working inside a confined space structure. A "Services" page including deep excavation. A project writeup that casually mentions blasting or dewatering. A photo of your crew working in an active lane with flaggers visible tells an underwriter there's a traffic control exposure, even if that was one job on one road three summers ago. Each of those is a data point that an underwriter uses to build a picture of who you are as a risk.

The other side of this coin

It is worth saying clearly: there is nothing wrong with doing complex, specialized, impressive work. If you run crews that can handle the jobs most contractors turn down, that is a competitive advantage worth marketing. The goal here isn't to tell you to hide your best work.

The goal is to make sure your broker knows your story before the underwriter starts writing their own version of it.

Underwriters deal with incomplete information all day. They make decisions based on what they can see, and they are appropriately skeptical because they've seen people misrepresent their operations plenty of times. If a broker presents a submission and proactively explains, "here's a tribal land job from seven years ago, that was outside their normal scope, here's what they actually run day to day," that lands very differently than an underwriter spotting it themselves and wondering what else they're not being told.

Getting ahead of the narrative is everything. Trying to change an underwriter's perception after they've already formed it is like turning the Titanic. It's not impossible, but it's slow, it's hard, and there's a real chance they stay suspicious regardless of what you say.

Before your next renewal
You don't need to audit your website and scrub it clean. That's not the point. Some of you should leave every photo exactly where it is, because the work you've done tells the right story for where your business is headed.

What you do need is a broker who knows the full picture before the submission goes out. Walk through your website with them. Point out the jobs that don't reflect your current mix. Explain the context behind the work that looks unusual. Let them build the narrative that matches reality.

A good broker can tell a great story about a complicated operation. But they can only do that if you give them the information before it becomes a question.