Commercial Insurance: If You Have to Ask, You Need It

Business insurance can be a tricky space to navigate, and it can be hard to know how much and what kind of coverage is needed. If your business needs more than one type of insurance, are they all available from the same insurer? How much will it affect your bottom line, and what types of insurance do different business types need?

If you are a small business owner asking yourself any of these questions, read on!

A Brief History of Commercial Insurance

Insurance exists for risk management. One of the earliest specialties was related to fire:Following the Great Fire of London in 1667, local businessmen saw the potential for their city to be laid to waste in a single disaster and decided to find a way to pool funds to mitigate any losses from any similar event in the future. Almost a century later, in what was soon to become the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin founded the first colonial insurance company, whose name says it all: The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire. 

Today, numerous commercial insurance policies exist to protect businesses from a wide variety of potential losses. Premiums vary depending on the type of coverage and the desired — or legally mandated — coverage level. Following are three essential forms of commercial insurance and why you need to consider them for your own business:

Property Insurance

If you run a business with assets in the company’s name, you have (or should have) property insurance on those assets. 

The need for property insurance may be more apparent to medium or large organizations, or those with equipment and inventory that they and their employees work with on a regular basis, than to smaller businesses such as drop shippers or other owners of small online businesses. However, if you fall into the latter category and you don’t have insurance on the inventory that you maintain in a warehouse, you risk losing everything if said warehouse goes up in flames or is destroyed in an earthquake. 

Liability Insurance

Perhaps even more important than property insurance is liability insurance. Why? Because it can protect you and your business from a third-party lawsuit which could force you to liquidate all your business assets to pay damages to a third party. As a business owner, you never truly know what could go wrong in a client transaction or encounter until it happens. Liability insurance exists to protect you from those unknowns.

(If you’ve never seen Sunshine Cleaning, rent it and then be sure to heed the cautionary tale at the end.) 

Workers’ Compensation

For small companies, such as single-member LLCs and other small businesses employing only a few people, worker’s compensation may not seem relevant. However, even office work can result in on-the-job injuries. Workers Compensation essentially protects you from liabilityto an injured employee by covering medical care they may need following a workplace incident, injury, or illness. 

In In most states, workers’ compensation insurance is MANDATORY. If you have employees in any capacity and you do not already have legally mandated coverage, research your options and get a policy in place today.

InsureYourCompany.com provides insurance coverage for businesses in New Jersey. For more information on policies best suited to your New Jersey-based business and to request a quote, contact us.