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Get your file ready before you apply: check off each item, rename it, make it yours. The original stays unchanged.
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A RocketLevel checklist for restoration owners, sales managers, and sales ops, backed by decades of experience in the trade. Clone it and get your file ready before you apply.
Property management groups and large facility owners run a formal vendor application, and the application itself is a sales motion. What you put in it decides whether you land on the approved list. The reviewer is clearing a queue against a required-fields list and has no way to ask you about a gap. A missing endorsement form doesn't get you a phone call. It gets you a rejection you may never hear about.
[ ] General liability insurance at the limits the client requires, with a current certificate.
[ ] Workers' compensation coverage and certificate.
[ ] Auto and umbrella coverage if required.
[ ] Additional insured status ready to issue on request, as a carrier endorsement rather than a line typed on a certificate. A certificate creates nothing, and the ACORD 25 form says on its face that it confers no rights on the certificate holder. Ongoing operations runs on the Insurance Services Office (ISO) form CG 20 10, and completed operations needs a CG 20 37 on top of it. If the client also wants primary and non-contributory wording or a waiver of subrogation, those are endorsements too, and a waiver only helps if it is in force before the loss.
[ ] Safety record and program. Your written safety program, and your experience modification rate (EMR) if you have one. On the prequalification platforms the EMR is a scored field rather than a document somebody reads later, and it can gate you out before a human ever opens your file. Know your number before you apply, and know what the account gates at.
[ ] Certifications. Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and any vertical-specific credentials (especially for healthcare).
[ ] W-9 and current business and contractor licenses for every jurisdiction the application covers, with the numbers written where the reviewer can see them. Do not apply for a territory you cannot legally work in. California Business and Professions Code 7031(a) bars an unlicensed contractor from bringing or maintaining any action to collect, regardless of the merits, and 7031(b) lets the party who hired you recover everything already paid. Florida makes unlicensed contracting during a declared state of emergency a third-degree felony under Statutes 489.127(2)(c).
[ ] Screening system accounts current, and know which kind this group runs, because two different gates get called prequalification and they ask for different things. A property management group is screening insurance and document compliance, and runs a vendor credentialing service: RealPage Vendor Credentialing (which absorbed Compliance Depot and Notivus), Yardi VendorShield or VendorCafe, NetVendor, Jones, Docutrax, or VendorPM.
Those services publish their prices. RealPage charges $99 a year for an on-site vendor and $80 a year off-site, and its Vendor Quick Steps Guide states documents are processed within 24 to 48 hours as long as the annual enrollment fee is current, while noting that enrollment does not guarantee your approval. VendorShield runs $90 to $110 a year. Jones, NetVendor, and Docutrax are free to the vendor, because the property manager pays. Most of them also run closed enrollment, so the decision maker sends the invite and you cannot apply your way in ahead of it.
A hiring client carrying its own environmental, health and safety (EHS) and OSHA exposure is screening safety instead, through ISNetworld (ISN), Avetta, or Veriforce. Those carry annual fees that none of the three publishes as a dollar figure; ISN publishes only the structure, an annual fee plus a one-time setup charge scaled by your three-year average workforce. They collect your OSHA 300A summaries and EMR, and ISN and Avetta grade you against each hiring client's own thresholds rather than issuing one universal score. None of the three publishes a fixed lookback, because the hiring client sets it inside the platform. Three years is common and some accounts ask for more, so confirm the number with the client rather than the platform.
Under 29 CFR 1904.32 the annual summary is certified by a company executive and posted from February 1 through April 30, and 1904.33 makes you keep the log, the summary, and the 301 forms five years past the end of the year they cover. Keep all five years to hand and no lookback catches you short. The full document set is on Template: The Commercial Prequalification Readiness Packet.
[ ] References from comparable commercial accounts.
[ ] Capacity statement. Honest coverage area, crew size, and response capability. Do not claim what you cannot deliver.
[ ] Environmental, social and governance (ESG) or sustainability information if the application asks for it. Institutional owners, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and university systems are the ones most likely to ask, because they report it upward and your data becomes a line in their disclosure.