The Expert Podcast

commercial lines insurance coverage is extremely important for a business owner. no matter what type of business you have a small mom and pop even a work from home business versus a large commercial enterprise you wanna make sure you have proper risk protection and coverage so that your business is not vulnerable to having a large financial loss that could put you out of business. and these are things like general liability if somebody gets hurt at you're premises. maybe you provide products to clients that you want to make sure those products are protected from harming them. you wanna be protected from lawsuits. if you are some type of licensed professional like an attorney or real estate agent you might want to have what's called e & o insurance errors and omissions insurance so if you make a mistake that you're covered. the most common type of sure insurance is being requested this year is cyber liability insurance. quite frankly the biggest risk that most businesses have are cyber risks. risk of their servers being wiped out ransomware hackers getting into your company and deleting or locking up all your data. what would be like if you wanted to log into your systems and you couldn't get in are all your records are removed. things like accounts receivable things like customer data that's all extremely valuable those might be the most valuable assets your business has. so having good coverage for those cyber assets is extremely important. of course if you have physical assets real estate fixtures even things like desks or manufacture equipment you would have coverage for that. you know if god forbid you're building catches on fire even if you don't own the building all of your facilities are gonna be wiped out. and there's another type of coverage that's important to consider and that is lost income or business interruption. so if you're out of business for some period of time while you're repairing after a fire or even getting back to business after cyber event you want to look into coverage for that lost income that you would have earned during that time period. after you've had all the placement of coverages and of course if you have autos or vehicles in your business you want have a commercial auto policy those are usually excluded from normal coverage so you want to make sure commercial auto is considered. but once you have all that coverage placed you may also want to look at what's called a commercial umbrella policy. this is extra coverage on top of everything else and it's very very inexpensive for what you get if you already have a million or two million coverage on your business policies adding an umbrella that adds up another five or ten million on top of it may only cost you a few hundred dollars a year. so ask your agent or broker about a commercial umbrella policy to see if the coverage amount is very very robust compared to the small amount that it might cost. commercial insurance is extremely important because not only are you depending on on it but all your customers your employees your vendors everybody associated with your business is counting on you to be there for them to do to depend on for income for payroll for products and services and you want to make sure that your secure so that all the people that are stakeholders in your business don't have anything to worry about.