Many years ago, if you wanted to get a business insurance quote, you had only one real option. You could not go direct to an insurer, you could not use the internet (as it did not exist in it’s current form) and you could not buy your policy over the phone as it was just not the done thing at the time.

Your option was to speak, either by going to see them or having them visit you, a broker. Even more restrictive, was that you had to deal with a local one. If you were based in London, and phoned a broker up in Edinburgh, they would think you had something to hide.

This process took absolutely ages, from initial visit to getting a quote and then maybe a policy. The length of time was usually nothing to do with the brokers, it was the insurers that were notoriously slow. A broker had to gather information from you and then submit that to insurers for quotes. In turn, they would provide a business insurance quote to the broker. Timescales varied, anything from the same day, on rare occasions to two or three weeks in some cases. For some commercial combined insurance policies, I remember customers not receiving their policy documents until their second year of cover!

Nowadays though, things are very, very different. With the advent of the internet and telesales, you can phone a broker up anywhere in country and they will be able to give you a quote. No more do insurers question “out of area” quotes, they understand (in the main) that people choose the internet as their preferred method of gaining a quote and it is immaterial to them where the person is based. A small caveat needs to be added though, overseas call centres do not go down well in the UK.

If you are looking for a quote and as we say, you want to do it the easy way, then you just need to give us a call. If we cannot help you, we will always try and help you find a company that can help.

Go on the net today and search for a business insurance quote. Nearly all of the sites that you visit, that offer online quotations, will have a set number of categories, whether for a pub, property owner, shop or printers. But what happens if your business is one of those that doesn’t quite “fit” into one of the insurers preferred categories.

For example, we had a sandwich bar, with a children’s hairdressers (believe it or not), trading from the same premises. This is not a salon, it is not a shop, it is a bit of both. The customer was a bit frustrated after being told on numerous occasions that she could not get a quote. It did not mean that there was anything wrong with her business, it just meant that the people she was talking to could not look out of the box and get a product for her. As it happens we placed the cover, at a competitive premium, on a commercial combined insurance policy. The reason for doing this is that we could specify exactly what the business description was, so in the event of a potential claim years down the line, the insurers could not complain that the risk was different to what they thought and potentially repudiate the claim.

Package policies, as you will see from previous posts of ours, are great. They help a significant proportion of the business insurance purchasing customer to get the policies they need. But there is a gap and that gap is filled by commercial combined polices. These policies are made up in stages, you pick and choose (along with your broker) the exact cover you need so that your business is insured on the correct basis. Also, you may have some out of the ordinary risks that are not normally included on a package. As ever, a broker is the person to speak to, as they will do the donkey work for you.