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I do minor excavation work on occasion, having spent several years in the seat early in my construction career, also having good skills, and knowledge of the work, it's hard to resist doing easy work that is mostly on the surface and away from utilities. You can make a decent buck on these smaller jobs in/out paid immediately. It's very tempting not to do, I have a great reputation with a rental house nearby and have a lot of experience in the earthwork field, and I've always enjoyed this kind of work or some reason, yet one wrong move, without general liability insurance, has the potential to ruin a small business. The last quote I got for excavation was $10,000/year, forget what the coverages were, probably $1 million each occurence or similar. Again it's tempting, what can go wrong..yikes I hate to think of things like that, but I still carefully do jobs that pose no risk, grading, clearing, a driveway or parking area, but that risk is always present no matter what. The problem I have with getting the insurance is that you need a solid backlog of work to even justify getting the policy, and you have to front the money for the insurance and apply the costs to the jobs your doing, so you really need to have that solid backlog of that kind of work to justify having the insurance for it, it's a general condition cost of this work and all your jobs, but can also be job specific as well, and when you are a contractor that engages in this work full time, you'd be foolish not to have the insurance for even just informal private work. Most private and public work require the insurances to be in place, the contract documents will specify the contractors insurance requirements and you will have to submit the certificates naming those who are to be held additionally insured, indemnified, and or held harmless per contract documents, which must be on file before you can execute the work you have contracted to do. I used to keep a binder of all the subcontractors insurance certificates on the big jobs, no subcontractor would be allowed on site without meeting these requirements or if a certificate expired, they were given a stop work order, no exceptions. I've been on my own for past few years, got away from working for the big companies and doing large jobs, not the easiest thing to work on your own, one man band so to speak, lot of things can limit the work you can do, so you have to find ways to make things work, and when insurances are required, you have to weigh the costs against the work you are doing, and find other ways to get the coverages in place if possible, or the owner must pay for it or go to a larger more legit contractor that has a larger annual backlog or work and has the insurance, which will cost an owner a lot more to do the same work, nothing is cheap in this business anymore. I've done some creative things to get by, nothing dishonest or of great risk, just having owners deal with things to reduce my risk or having to get additional insurance that may not be necessary if the owner gets the building permit, and you're kind of working for them informally. Fly by night outfits are always trying to get around things like insurances and licensing. If you want to become a legit contractor, it's a hurdle to get over, you have to get the work and be able to pay all the general conditions costs like insurances, some of these things are hard for a small business to overcome because of the cost. I did a fence job recently in the nearby city, called the one call hotline for utility layout just in case, nothing near the work area. I was going to do the post holes with the machine, but decided to do em by hand, not worth the risk without the insurance and the job was not worth a heck of a lot anyway, but I got the bull work done on the surface without any risk. I've got one starting the week after next with an aerial lift, for a business owner to fix masonry leaks and his agent can provide the owner with the general liability insurance to satisfy the rental house requirements, for under $300, I'd be classified as an employee of his business for this job. I'm not sure what the same policy will cost me, but it's a weeks worth of work, I will find out tomorrow, but I'll bet the owners agent will be the lowest cost. No way he'd pay a few thousand dollars through my company to get this insurance, it would be more than the job is worth, but could be reality if you could not get the policy written specific to the job, then you need to have enough jobs to spread out the costs evenly to the customers. I may be wrong, but everytime I call for quotes, they are really expensive, except the artisan type policy I use to cover myself, which is about $500/year
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