Small businesses are infinitely diverse in nature. Even companies working in similar fields will differ from business to business and although they all have similar concerns, their individual needs from an insurance perspective can vary greatly.
With this in mind, constructing a business insurance policy needs to take a bespoke approach to ensure that individual companies are paying for the right cover. All businesses large and small have to make sure they are on top of their outgoings and there is nothing worse for paying something that isn’t doing anything or even for something that is doing far more than you need.
Most business will have a few common insurance needs too. The majority of business insurance policies start with a core of public liability and employers’ liability insurance. Beyond that however, policies can be customised to fit the individual business effective.
The additional features that you can select include things like business interruption, contents and stock cover, cover for your main windows, license cover for pubs, drugs cover for surgeries and so on. Some are specific to a particular type of business whilst others might be useful for several different professions.
Even with standard packages aimed at different types of businesses, there will be some elements to these that don’t make sense to you and some things that will be missing that you could benefit from. The needs of an office that operates as a call centre will have very different requirements to an office that deals with web development for example. Getting your insurance right for your business is not necessarily overly complicated, but it does require a bit of thought.
It’s a good idea to talk to a broker for your first policy as opposed to going through an online quote comparison site, just so that you can be sure that you have everything that you are likely to need and that you aren’t underinsured or even over insured. It’s not that it’s too difficult for someone who doesn’t work in insurance to understand, it’s just that having that conversation will mean you won’t worry quite so much about whether your cover is appropriate or not.
Written by David Hing, YOUR Insurance blog editor. YOUR Insurance specialises in for small businesses and tradesmen.