It's essential to get adequate insurance cover for your business to protect you from the unexpected and prevent circumstances beyond your control disrupting your source of income.
With the right insurance deal, you can cover your company against unwanted events such as fire, flood, theft, damage or injury. This is important both for practical reasons and for your own peace of mind – running a business is risky enough, so the fewer risks and uncertainties you have to worry about the better.
### Adequate cover
The first thing you need to do is work out exactly the kind of business insurance you need. Depending on the nature of your enterprise, you might need employer’s liability insurance, personal liability insurance, public liability insurance, business interruption insurance, product liability insurance, professional indemnity insurance and goods in transit cover, as well as cover for your contents and equipment. You need to research all these options and decide which will be necessary for your business. In some cases, you will be legally required to have insurance – if you have employees outside of family, for example, you need to have employer’s liability cover worth at least £5 million.
You don’t have to take all the policies out separately – insurers will be able to tailor a package for your business, including the different kinds of cover you need.
When you’re choosing things like contents cover, you need to think about the value of the items you are insuring and how much it would cost to replace them. While you obviously need to make sure you are covered properly, there’s no point in paying for more than you need. Do your best to get the right level of cover for your business.
### Best deal
While you need to make sure you’re adequately covered by your insurance package, you should also ensure you get the best value. Remember, though, the cheapest offer might not necessarily be the best. You need to look at what you’ll be getting for the price. You should also compare like-for-like packages to assess their true value to ensure you won’t be getting less for your money. The easiest way to do that is to use comparison websites such as GoCompare.com, MoneySupermarket.com or confused.com, where you will be able to compare business insurance policies and packages and find out the level of cover you’ll be getting for your money.
There are other considerations in choosing your insurer, however, such as trust and reputation. The level of service you receive from your provider could make a huge difference to how your business is affected by any unwanted and unforeseen circumstances. So if you’ve had a bad experience with a company in the past, you should be wary about using them in the future. If you don’t know much about an insurer, do your research before taking out a policy with them. Internet reviews and forums could be useful for this – you might be able to learn from the experiences of businesspeople just like you.
