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Archive for the ‘business insurance broker’ Category

Christmas special offers for business insurance?

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

There are certain industries, Christmas tree and cracker suppliers being two of the obvious ones, that are a bit busy at this time of year. Come January, they can breathe a small sigh of relief, hopefully have a bit of a holiday and then build up to 2012. Other industries, particularly financial services, tend to quieten down at this time of year. There are not many people looking for a business insurance quote at this time of year. But, this does not mean to say that there are not people out there looking.

For Businessinsure, we had rather humble beginnings back in 2001. Gradually, as we have grown we know which months are busier, for us. The least busy is December, which in a way is quite good because we can deal adequately with the weather related claims that we tend to get from December through to February/March time. But, even with this being a quieter month, we are still busy if you get my drift. With talk of exiting recessions, entering recessions, double dip recessions, flat growth, negative growth, no growth and some growth, everyone with an ounce of sense is looking to re-price every product and service they buy.

Staff are, and always will be the be all and end all of the financial services industry. As a business insurance broker, we rely on our staff. We have actually done well in the past few years, with continued year on year growth. We have read reports in the press of other brokers reducing pay for staff. This has to be the absolute last measure because, believe it or not, it is not the staffs fault that times are tough.

So, if you are following the model we have, which is to ensure that your staff are hopefully OK, then you may need to look at other areas where you can save money. If you have a business insurance renewal due in December, believe you me, now is the time to get this quoted. If you are profitable, on the insurance front, then there is a broker out there (why not try Businessinsure…..) who can get you an absolutely cracking deal. We are getting daily calls from the commercial insurance companies looking for new business as their year ends are fast approaching. Now is the time to bag yourself a bargain.

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Liability insurance – in isolation

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Commercial and business insurance companies will, very rarely, offer a single type of insurance on a separate contract. What normally happens is that the different types of cover are packaged together into single contracts. Think of your car policy, you do not buy a separate cover for your windscreen, for third party liability, for legal expenses or for damage to the car or it’s contents. Instead, the insurers wrap it all up and sell it as one policy.

It is the same with most types of business insurance, you can get packages for pubs, shops, hotels, restaurants, offices, salons, hairdressers and many others. But, there are some businesses that really do not want, or need, one of these packages. The package policy tends to include cover for stock and contents and goods in transit and money and business interruption and of course, many others! Some just need their basic liability covers, usually to comply with their legally required covers, such as employers liability insurance or to comply with a contract.

Nowadays, if you are supplying to, or working for, a larger firm, it is more and more likely that they will insist on you having, and indeed providing proof, of liability insurance. The reason behind this is, if there is a problem with the product that you supply to the supermarket, their product liability insurers, for example, want to be able to recoup any claims payments that they have made. Therefore, when you enter into a contract to supply, a supermarket for example, they will usually insist on you providing cover for employers, public and products liability. This is what the layman would call liability insurance on its own, the insurers call it the much more grand, combined liability insurance in isolation.

Although insurers like to package their products, you can still buy a combined liability insurance, which contains the three main covers. You have to be very careful about whether you choose liability cover on its own, or with a package. It may be tempting to take out the cheaper cover, especially in this day and age. But think about the last two winters and the destruction caused by burst pipes. Plenty of businesses lost all their stock and were very thankful that they had bought decent insurance cover. The common theme through all of the Businessinsure blogs continues, always, always speak to an independent business insurance broker about whether or not you need, or should have, basic or more comprehensive cover.

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Property owners insurance – full knowledge of the construction materials

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

With all the emphasis given to the Financial Services Authority and the pressure on business insurance brokers to act professionally and treat customers fairly, we are still amazed at how many businesses approach us for quotations without full details of the insurance they require.

As the owner of the property, it is their responsibility to provide us with a current rebuild cost for the property, as opposed to basing the quote on last years renewal premium and sums insured when looking for a property owners insurance quote. You would think, but it is not always the case, that a property owner would know the age of the property and also the type of the construction of the walls, floors and roofs.

A commercial insurance company, when providing a quote, will need to know if there is any element of flat concrete or flat felt on timber roof. Where there are flat roofs, terms and conditions will apply to claims and/or losses relating to the roof. These include annual inspection clauses and repairs and many will exclude storm or water damage arising from flat roofs, don’t get caught out. When you approach us for a property or business insurance quote with buildings, we will need to know if there is any element of flat roof. Even if this is just 10% of the overall roof area. We will always aim to obtain a range of property owners quotations to ensure the best terms are found for our clients.

Another point that insurers will need to be fully aware of is whether there are any composite panels in the building. This usually only applies to food processing and cold storage plant. However, modern buildings are now more likely to include pre-formed panels with insulation built in to try and reduce the heating costs. You need to know what the material is, whether polystyrene, Rockwool or similar or some other material. Every insurance policy is based on the principle of utmost good faith, you must declare the full facts of the risk to insurers. If you fail to declare composite panelling, which can represent a higher risk of fire, then your insurance policy may not pay out in the event of a claim for fire.

You should always speak to an independent business insurance broker who will go through steps to gain the required information from you, to present to a range of insurers to get you the best terms at the best price.

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Beauty salon insurance – with and without the treatment risk

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Over the years, any business insurance broker will start to develop an understanding of which parts of the economy they can concentrate their activities. Businessinsure know that we can offer an excellent service to the SME market and all kinds and types of property owner. We don’t pretend to be experts at placing cover for aviation, nuclear and offshore, for example. But property owners, shops, pubs, offices, restaurants, takeaways, hairdressers and beauty salons are bread and butter to us.

We deliberately set out to explain as much as possible to our customers over the phone about their quotes, rather than just emailing or posting the quote and leaving it at that. We sometimes get unstuck though, by doing a proper broking job. We try and understand what our customers need. The Financial Services Authority (who regulate us) call this “demands and needs”. We have had many occasions when we have quoted a customer a comprehensive policy, for a figure (lets say £1,000) and they then come back and say another broker has quoted £650. We try and ascertain what alternative cover they have and 9 times out of 10, it is lesser cover. In addition to less cover there are usually higher excesses and more onerous terms.

After the customer has a claim, usually somethign small such as a broken window or theft, they realise that the wider cover and lower excess was actually quite a good deal and come back. As far as beauty salon insurance is concerned, the major difference in cover is that we can quote with, and without treatment cover. This can usually make a 50% difference in the premium. We will always point out to the customer the differences and usually email the two separate quotes. It is then up to the customer to decide, based on the information we have provided, if they need to take out the wider cover, with full treatment risks included.

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Professional indemnity insurance – which limit to choose?

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

If we are approached for a commercial building insurance quote, one of the main questions we will ask is “how much is the sum insured”? Unlike cover for your house, where there may be a blanket limit of £400,000 or £500,000, for commercial properties you will declare the amount. Whilst it is not easy to get this figure, the policy is very clear, you are covered for x amount, as long as it represents the correct rebuilding cost.

But what has this to do with professional indemnity insurance? Not a lot, except to show that with building insurance, you can actually, see and feel the “thing” that is insured. You can pay a surveyor to give you that valuation to confirm exactly how much you should insure for.

Now, if you are looking for professional indemnity insurance, how do you know what amount to insure for? If you are undertaking a contract for a customer and they are insisting on the cover being in force, then your job may be easier if they put a limit in writing to you. But, if they don’t or you are just looking for a professional indemnity quote, how do you decide what limit to go for?

The main insurers we use, will quote from £100,000 up to £5,000,000 any one claim. One quote this afternoon went from £290.00 at £100k to £4,3970.00 at £5m. You can see that there is a big difference in premium because there is a big difference in the potential cost to the insurers.

What you do not want to do is over insure yourself, the insurers of course enjoy this, because they get more money. Our job, as a business insurance broker is to get you the best deal, price and cover wise, for the insurance you need. Our advice is that you have to sit down, maybe with your colleagues and work out the worst case scenario cost and the average case scenario loss. Then, speaking to your broker you have to work out whether you go for the higher or lower or somewhere in between. It will also depend on whether your quote or cover is any one claim (better) or in the aggregate (less better!). As ever, get advice from a professional independent business insurance broker.

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Business insurance – trusting a remote broker

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

As a business insurance broker, we receive many enquiries every week for quotes, based on a business receiving renewal notification from their current broker. Over the past 10 years there has been a growth in businesses choosing to deal with a broker that is not “around the corner”. The Internet has of course been the greatest driver and has allowed businesses based, for example in Cornwall, to deal with a broker, based in Perth (picking one at random, of course).

This is the whole raison d’etre of Businessinsure. We knew there was a gap in the market, and that the gap in the market was never going to get smaller. As more and more businesses are run by techno-savvy people, with less and less time on their hands, the will turn to the net to get a better price. This is what we do and this is what we do well, when we talk about a better price though, we also look for comparable, if not better, cover. Whilst we cannot provide exact stats, we can confidently state that in over 85% of cases we are able to get a better price for the same, or better, cover for all the businesses that contact us.

But, our skill and speed at doing this is sometimes our downfall. The reason being that some customers who still deal with a broker “around the corner” are sometimes dealing with a broker that can be complacent. When that broker comes under pressure, ie their customer says I am moving elsewhere at renewal, they hit “panic mode”. We quoted for an importer of scientific equipment. Their existing broker had offered a renewal at 16% more than the previous year, with the same commercial insurance company, and had said that there were no alternatives (at a better price). We managed to get a quote within 24 hours that shaved 12% of their premium last year, saving them around 27% on this offer.

But, when the customer spoke to their broker, he awoke from his slumber and lazily phoned the holding, or current insurer, to let them know they were going to lose a £9,000 insurance renewal. The holding insurer simply matched our quote. The broker then told the customer that because we were remote (the customer was in Southampton, we are in Perth and their broker was in Portsmouth) we would never get the same service. This is from a broker that couldn’t be bothered to look around for a decent renewal premium. Unfortunately, for us, the customer swallowed this and the broker retained the business.

You can now see where I am going to. A local broker is not always the best answer, some of them have just got very lazy and very complacent. We can offer a similar service, particularly in times of a loss. Most insurers will appoint an adjuster anyway, so the service the broker provides, “on the ground” is minimal anyway.

If you want to be one of the 85% of customers who save money, give us a call today!

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Businessinsure is back

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

It has been tough, changing website providers and not being able to access and update the website. But, after just one month we are back in action, on the blog front at least. As far as businessinsure is concerned, we have continued to trade as we are seeing more new business activity in November than we have seen for at least two years.

Being an independent business insurance broker is a pretty good barometer for what is going on, business wise, out there in UK plc. We speak to each and every person that we provide a quote for, this way we can get an understanding of what is really happening. The entrepreneurial spirit in the UK is, contrary to some opinions, thriving as well as it ever did. It may come across as harsh, but with the banks throwing money around 5 or 6 years ago, anyone could start a business. Some were started which really had no chance of success. This is not because of the people running the businesses necessarily, but the fact that banks were not lending subject to strict criteria. In 2011, if yo can get funding, the banks have actually gone the other way and are practically asking you to get blood from a stone before they will lend you any ready cash.

In a way this is forcing the standard good, sensible business procedures on people so they do not get into too much debt, too easily. One of our big, big sellers is pub insurance, we have seen many, many businesses go in the last 36 months. Nowadays though, instead of a bank lending £200,000 without blinking, they are now setting strict criteria which makes business owners absolutely concentrate on building businesses and growing turnover, income and profit. Five years ago if you had a bad year, the bank would lend more, as an owner you didn’t really have to face the music and go out there and drum up good quality business.

Some of the left leaning newspapers are saying that the UK has never had it so bad. This is not true, we spent years saying that the UK was over-geared and in debt. This is slowly, and I mean slowly, changing. Will the good times come back? No, not in the easy money form that we saw in 2003-2007. What we will see is a lean, mean, economic machine. The good old times will be back when you only got what you could realistically afford and you realised that just because one of your neighbours had a shiny new car it didn’t mean that you had to get one as well.

Posted in business insurance broker, pub insurance, pub insurance quote | Comments Off

Businessinsure

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Nearly every business can look back at when they first started and look at some good, and bad points, about their “birth” date. We have seen around the world the Blackberry/Research in Motion messenger system grinding to a complete halt. In the same week, one of Blackberries competitors in this field, Apple, launched their own, updated, version of this. Apple may look back in a few years time and find that this was the perfect week for launching/promoting this side of their business. They will have planned this for months and months and the dates probably changed a number of times. Then, completely out of the blue something happens which catapults them right into the media spotlight. Very few of the news stories about Blackberries woes did not mention that Apple were launching their rival service in exactly the same week. Apple gets good, free, publicity anyway, but this is the stuff of the ad departments dreams. We are not saying that all Blackberry users are going to jump ship, but I can guarantee you that more people signed up to Apples IM service than Blackberry.

When Businessinsure started, the idea was evolving around the time of Dot.com bubble growing to it’s largest. Whilst we have been naive and green, as any business is, when growing, we knew that the dot.com bubble would burst. When you saw headline news on the BBC about a new internet company that sold dog food, you sort of knew that this was not going to last. The bubble duly burst in 2000, just as we started to launch our new online business insurance brokerage service.

At the time, there was a complete mistrust of anything Internet related. This was a combination of the existing, traditional broking houses deciding that they didn’t like these young upstarts changing the distribution pattern and the fact that Internet access was not enjoyed by all. There was also a third point in that dial up internet connections were as slow as slow can be.

But, as the internet became more widely available and broadband became more accessible, people realised that to get a shop insurance quote you did not have to go and sit in your local brokers office, you could sit in your own chair, in your own shop and correspond with us.

If you find yourself in that situation right now, please feel free to call us to discuss any of your business insurance requirements.

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Can I get a business insurance package policy?

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Most forms of business insurance policy are a package, made up of different types of cover. If you have insurance for your car, that policy will be made up in a similar way, you will have distinct types of cover. These will include, the damage to the car itself, theft of the contents, the glass and windscreen, your liability (public/third party) to other road users or owners of property and lastly legal expenses in pursuing a claim against a third party that has injured you or caused damage to your car.

It is the same for your business policy, you can get cover for stock, contents, buildings, employers, products and public liability, legal expenses and a whole host of other covers. Many, many years ago buying a policy was a fairly complex process. Technology at the time was limited to telephones and typewriters so everything had to be drafted by hand. As there was human intervention at every step of the process this of course led to errors and it took months for the end consumer to go from requesting a business insurance quote to sitting there with a valid policy in their hands.

I started work for a large insurer in 1986. The department I worked in dealt with some of the larger businesses and for a new customer, it was normal for them not to have received their full policy documentation at time of the first renewal.

What has happened in the intervening years is that nearly all of the commercial insurance companies have built up and designed a range of policies for different trades. There are certain business insurance brokers that design and build schemes with bespoke policies for anything from fisherman to bowling clubs. The package policies we are talking about are ones that have been built for any of the following, pubs, shops, office, restaurants, take aways, hairdressers, beauty salons, hotels and offices. There are others but these are the main ones. The core of the policies are very much the same, with small changes depending on the trade. For example a licensed restaurant or pub will, or should, have the option of loss of licence cover, whereas a beauty salon will need wider treatment insurance.

If you are in one of these main trades then you need to speak to a broker to make sure they can provide you with a suitable package contract.

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Differentiating public, products and employers liability insurance.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

When looking at getting a business insurance quote, there are three types of liability cover that should be included, employers, public and products liability. You can get other types of liability insurance, but these three are the main ones available in the UK.

If you are just starting out in business, you may be looking for a quote and may wonder exactly what cover you need compared to cover that you must have. The must have category is employers liability, unless of course you do not have any employees. This may seem simple enough but please be aware that the definition of employee is very, very wide. This is deliberate in that insurers are no able to not pay out on a claim due to minutiae in the policy wording about what is and what is not an employee. There will of course be people that are not employees, such as third party contractors or bona-fide sub contractors, but in the main anyone that is working, “under your direction”, for you is deemed to be an employee. This can include work experience persons, people under short term contracts and even friends and family working for you on a short term basis.

The insurance industry is sometimes accused of scaremongering. What we like to do though is to simply let you know of the potential for a claim. Under employers liability we have seen, over the years, a few claims paid where there is such a tenuous link between the “employer” and “emploee” that it is always worth getting cover.

The law of the land says that you must have employers liability insurance cover with a minimum limit of indemnity of £5,000,000. Most of the commercial insurance companies will provide a limit of £10,000,000. If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes an employee, as it relates to your business, please speak to your accountant or even the Inland Revenue. You may be surprised at how wide the definition of an employee can be.

Now we come to the others, public and products. These two covers are not legally required, although you may find that many contracts (eg if you are working for a local authority) have clauses in insisting that you have cover in place. Public liability is if you cause any injury, illness, disease or damage on the course of your work. The roofer dropping a tile on someone’s car, someone slipping on water on the floor from a cleaners mop and someone tripping over a loose carpet in your shop are all examples of public liability claims we have seen on policies. The person tripping on the carpet would have put some of the most prolific divers on our football grounds to shame with the “injuries” they suffered and the money they actually received.

Products liability insurance goes hand in hand with public and covers any illness, injury, disease or damage caused by products you supply or manufacture. Again, there is no legal requirement for this, but you may be required to prove that you have cover in place.

Whilst we say that public and products liability are not legally required, please note that this is not to say that it is cover that a sensible and prudent business should ever go without. The problem with liability claims is that they are “once in a blue moon” events. But, when they do get to claim stage the costs are never small.

Many insurers will offer a separate combined liability insurance policy, giving these three covers together under one policy. As with every blog we have ever written or will write, you really do need to speak to an independent business insurance broker to get the best help and advice.

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