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Archive for the ‘commercial insurance’ Category

Salon insurance – getting the best quote

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Whilst no-one would ever say surviving in business these past three or four years has been easy, those that are still around have learned many, many lessons. Parts of the retail industry have been absolutely slaughtered. Think of the big name retailers that have suffered, disappeared or reduced their floor space. There are too many too mention here, but it has helped some of the smaller retailers. How? Because some of the larger companies that have gone were simply undercutting anyone and everything, because they simply added to their ever increasing debt mountain. They were hoping that they would see the recession out, but many were in trouble way back in the good times five or six years ago.

As a business insurance broker, we can see how well parts of industry are doing by the amount of new business we see. A broker gets two types of new business. An existing company that is moving from one broker to another and the brand new, never before traded business. It is the brand new ones that are the measure of what sort of health a particular industry is in.

We are starting to see more and more enquiries for new salon insurance in 2011 than we saw through the whole of 2009, and we are only at July. Part of the process of setting up your new business is that you will need to arrange a suitable policy to protect your business, it’s assets and it’s liabilities. Now, setting up is never easy and never cheap. You do not want to pare costs to the bone at the expense of quality, and the same applies to any commercial insurance policy you decide to take out. You do not necessarily have to have bad, or lesser, cover in order to save money. Speak to a broker and let them look around for you, do not, whatever you do, simply go direct to a one insurer company, they cannot offer you any choice, so how do you know you are getting a good deal?

Posted in commercial insurance, salon insurance | Comments Off

Making complaints about your business insurance broker

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

We have seen in the press recently details about complaints relating to payment protection insurance. We understand why these complaints have started, it was always fairly obvious that at some point the bubble would burst. Policies were sold and anyone that tried to claim would have such a hard job to try and get their claim paid. I remember reading in one of the Sunday papers about someone that had a policy and the insurers insisted in them applying for over 100 jobs per month, and proving this, before they would consider the claim.

The bit that frustrates us, is that even businessinsure, who have never sold one of these policies as we are a pure business insurance broker, have to pay towards the cost of these complaints. That however, is an aside, there is nothing that we can do about it and have to just pay the costs to the FSA.

But what happens if you are making a complaint about your business or commercial insurance? We have had one or two customers complain over the years. The first that tends to happen is that they will say, I am going to speak to the Ombudsman. Now, the complaints have not been about us, but the insurers behind the policies. The correct process though, before going to the Ombudsman, is to raise your complaint with either the broker and/or the insurers of the initial policy. What happens is that you have to exhaust the internal complaints process, before you get to the stage of requesting that the Ombudsman makes a decision. This applies to all types of insurance, whether domestic or business, as long as your turnover is below a certain threshold.

In reality, most complaints are dealt with there and then by the brokers and insurers, usually through what is called an ex-gratia claim process. This is where an insurer agrees to pay a claim, that is not covered, because of the overall value of their relationship with the insurance broker in question.

If you have any cause for complaint, speak to your broker in the first instance.

Posted in business insurance broker, commercial insurance | Comments Off

Spam comments – do they really work?

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

We have been trading as a business insurance broker for nearly 11 years now. We are part of a larger group who have been trading for over 50 years. As a result we have unrivalled knowledge of all things relating to commercial insurance. We try, through or blog, to part with this knowledge and genuinely try and help customers, potential customers or others just looking for advice.

If you are a regular reader, you will know that the topics can be wide-ranging, sometimes bizarre but all the time aimed at provided that one piece of advice or help that is required.

We have learned our lesson though, as far as allowing comments is concerned. When we moved to Wordpress from Blogger, we allowed comments for the first couple of months. We thought, extremely naively, at the time that we would be able to interact, shoot the breeze or just help some people that were stuck with general insurance questions.

We thought that spam comments were no longer used. But how wrong we were. Every blog post that we did had, at times, dozens of spam comments. There was nothing scientific or clever about them, they were just filled with random words and if there were phrases, then it was obviously from someone using very, very poor translation software.

So, in early 2010 we deliberately set the default to block comments. It was with sadness in a way because if people did need help then they were not going to get it from correspondence on our blog. As people can call us, local rate, then it was agreed that having this option was probably better. We offer on our site that we will give commercial insurance advice, for free and we do still find people calling us to check something or just get an honest answer.

But, we are stil getting over a hundred spam comments a day on blog posts over a year old. How can this be beneficial to these people? There must be a financial reason for doing this, as there is a financial cost to send out these comments. I just cannot understand how the big search engines cannot tell that these crap comments are there for one reason and one reason alone.

I know that the spammers like to try and keep one step ahead, but it really is frustrating to have physically delete thousands upon thousands of comments every month. Maybe as time goes on things will get a bit better.

Posted in business insurance, business insurance advice, business insurance broker, business insurance quotes, commercial insurance | No Comments »

Business insurance renewal – how many quotes should you get?

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Business insurance, is one of the few annually contracted services that you can buy, where there is no real commitment to renew. Think to other services that you may get such as electricity or mobile phones and it appears that it easier to get divorced then get out of one of their contracts.

Having said this, your insurers will, if your business has been profitable and is still on their preferred trade list, offer to renew your cover, in the hope of retaining your business for a further 12 months. The good thing is, that you are under no obligation whatsoever to renew. Most of the commercial insurance companies are, or have been, guilty of operating a dual pricing philosophy. They tempt you in with ultra competitive prices and then, when renewal comes around they put on an above inflation increase. If they can do this for a few years, then they can make themselves a pretty penny.

If you think about it, if they undercut your premium by 10% to get you as a customer and then add in two, three or four percent per year above inflation, then it does not take long for them to be charging too much.

So to go back to the original question, at the start, how many alternative quotes should you get at renewal? The answer is, a little bit tongue in cheek, always more than one.

If your existing insurer is not applying a significant increase, ie in line with inflation-ish, then you should seek at least one alternative just to check that they are relatively competitive. You never know how the market has changed in the past 12 months, it may be that prices have dropped across the board. So what was competitive a year ago may now not be quite so cheap.

If however your existing insurer is applying a big increase and your broker has not thought to offer or seek any alternatives, then you need to get at least two alternatives. Speak to another broker and tell them everything about your policy, your business and the risks it presents. If they ask you for the premium, tell them, but make sure it is true. The chances are, in 2011, with the market still being fairly competitive, that if yours is the type of insurance business that they (the insurers) seek, then you will be able to get a better price.

Our words of warning though are that if you do get alternatives, please make sure that you get these from an independent business insurance broker. This way you can be assured that not only will the broker sell it to you on price, they will also make sure that you get a the right cover. There is no point in proceeding with an alternative quote at 10% less, if the cover and excesses are poor.

Posted in business insurance broker, business insurance renewal quote, commercial insurance | Comments Off

Commercial property owners insurance – multiple risks

Monday, May 16th, 2011

As with many services and physical products, the more you purchase the bigger the discounts. This applies equally to commercial property insurance as with most other financial service products.

What this means is that if you approach a single insurer and ask them for a quote on one property, for example a £250,000 shop in Manchester, they may give you a price of £450.00, inclusive of the insurance premium tax. There are many differing factors, such as location, construction, claims and of course type of occupancy that affect premiums, amongst others, but stay with me for a minute or two. Now, let’s assume that you have 9 other, more or less identical buildings in similar rating areas throughout the country. Now, instead of paying 10 x £450 = £4,500, you may only pay £3,500 to £4,000 as the commercial insurance companies are so keen to get in (good) business nowadays that they will offer discounts of up to 25% in some cases. This is all well and good and could represent a saving for you. To give yourself the best chance of getting the double of good premium and good cover, then you need to speak to an independent business insurance broker. They understand what every single insurer is looking for at any one particular time. So, rather than looking for that needle in the haystack yourself, get an expert to do it for you.

But, you do need to be cautious as this is not always the best way of getting the right price. Most insurers prefer their own different types of business, there may be a few that want the same things, but across the board you will not find a single insurer that is happy with all risks. For example, you may find an insurer that likes low risk property owners, ie offices, shops etc. So, you can give them 1o risks of this type and get yourself the nice big discounts. However, if one of the risks happens to be a fast food takeaway, you may find that that one insurer charges three or four times the market rate.

Keeping all your cover with one insurer does not make sense if you have a varied portfolio. As a broker, we prefer to look around for each and every risk presented to us, unless the type of risk is the same (ie residential lets – professional tenants), we will never automatically place all the risks with one insurer. This is lazy and never the right way.

Posted in commercial buildings insurance, commercial insurance | Comments Off

Public liability insurance – height limits

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Public liability insurance will either cover clerical and managerial (non-manual) business activities, or manual activities. The first, and lower risk, is cover for businesses where there staff may visit other properties and in the course of that visit, cause injury or damage. So, the salesmen goes to visit a customer and accidentally knocks a PC over. Yes, this is a scenario that is unlikely to happen, a once in a blue moon event. But, these things do happen and this is where a policy will step in and pay the cost of any damage caused.

The events that are more likely, and of higher risk to the commercial insurance companies, belong to the manual trades. The plumbers, air conditioning engineers, painters and decorators, carpenters and electricians are the typical trades that have more public liability claims. Where they do have claims, they tend to be of higher costs.

The frequency of claims does not tend to be too high, most contractors will tend to try and sort out any problems directly, rather than resorting to making a formal claim. That said, if it does get to the stage of a claim being made, then the cost is likely to be high. The last thing the contractor needs is for their insurers to turn around and say that there is no cover in place.

This does not happen very often and only tends to be the fringe insurers that thrive on referring to the small print. As a business insurance broker, we are not allowed to recommend a policy with an insurer that we have any qualms about. The only problems you usually have with insurers, relate to their ability to pay claims. We do not use insurers that we have concerns about, but this does not stop others using them.

One of the reasons that they may turn down a claim is height work. Most contractors policies will allow work up to 10 metres. This usually means the top eaves of a standard two storey house. Any higher, and the insurers must be told. If you do not tell them and you are working in or on a block of flats or an office block, this could cause a problem.

Two things for you to do. Firstly check your policy to see if there is a height limit and secondly, if you do have a limit, get on the phone to your broker to see if the insurers can extend the height limit. It is always worth seeing if it can be done for free. However, there may be an additional charge for this.

Posted in commercial insurance, public liability insurance | Comments Off

Super injunctions – the point is what exactly?

Monday, May 9th, 2011

A strange start here, but have just returned from a weekend away. Went to a fantastic hotel way up north next to a remote Loch. Apart from the weather, everything was great. Now, this made me think of a few hotels I stayed in many years ago when I was setting up the company on the proverbial shoestring. I had to visit dozens of business and commercial insurance companies up and down the land to try and secure the agencies we needed to operate and trade on a truly independent footing.

That said, I have to stay in some ropey old hotels. It wasn’t necessarily that I was being tightfisted (which through necessity I was) but in those days you couldn’t pick and choose your hotels the way you do nowadays. There are dozens of websites where you can go to check out other guests reviews of the hotels you are planning to stay in.

Whether the hoteliers like it or not, the reviews are as honest as you can get and I would hazard a guess that the majority of people booking leisure breaks do tend to look around and would pick or choose based on a few good, or bad reviews. What I am saying here is that the public speak. It can be a double edged sword for some of the businesses. Do you choose to block yourself from these sites, or do you stick with it hoping to build up some sort of quality feedback?

Most will of course pick the latter. Now we come to the super injunctions. As ever a uniquely British affair, for want of a better word. A celebrity thinks that if their extra marital affair is broadcast, it will breach their human rights. Instead of human rights, we need to think about their future earning potential and how the public perceive them. It is of course nothing whatsoever to do with their rights, it is just that they have been caught bang to rights.

Unfortunately for them, being a celebrity (and yes that does include sports persons) means that your every move is broadcast. Yes, your offspring should be protected but if you have been a naughty girl or boy, grow up and accept the consequences. If you don’t, as with the bad hotels and the reviews, you will get found out eventually.

Lets hope Twitter continues in the same vein it did on the 8th May 2011 and outs (the correct ones) this week.

Posted in commercial insurance, super injunction | Comments Off

Landlord insurance – contents cover

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Landlord insurance policies, whilst based loosely on a standard household policy, do differ in many ways. With your home, you are much more likely to have one policy that covers the buildings and contents together. Whilst you can split them, most insurers will actively encourage you to place them both together, with different discounts available for the combined cover.

As landlords policies tend to be issued by a commercial insurance company, there are, as you would expect, differences. The main one being that you can obtain cover for loss of rental income (see Saturdays entry).

The other main difference is that you do not tend to get contents automatically included. With the vast majority of let properties being unfurnished, you would expect, quite rightly, the tenant to insure their own contents, because you (as the landlord) do not have an insurable interest in their TV, settees or clothes etc.

However, who is responsible for the carpets, vinyl, linoleum, curtains and possibly white goods in the kitchen? You, as a landlord, are responsible for these items and, importantly, they do not fall under the definition of buildings. Any flooring that can be picked up (even carpets) and moved falls under the definition of contents. It always has done and always will.

We always recommend to customers looking for a new quote that they include contents, even if it is only for a few thousand pounds. It makes such a small difference to the premium that it is foolish to not insure it. But you would be surprised at the number of people that do not want it, even for an extra fiver on their quote. Then, when they have a burst pipe claim and the carpets or curtains are damaged, we have to go through the process of telling them that the cover does not apply as they only have buildings cover.

We do try, and as a business insurance broker, are obliged to point out to the customer their cover requirements. If you need a quote, please always listen to the recommendations of your broker.

Posted in commercial insurance, commercial insurance quote, landlord insurance, landlord insurance quote, landlords insurance | Comments Off

Commercial insurance quotes – where, how and at what cost?

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

We are hearing in the news that the coalition government is pinning it’s recovery hopes on the entrepreneurial spirit in the UK. This is nothing new, whether you look back ten, twenty or thirty years it is always private enterprise that gets us out of a mess. The public sector, whether or not they will admit it, have not really got a clue about starting businesses. At the end of the day, we in the private sector need some help and support, but at the end of the day it is our money and our time and our brain power that gets enterprises moving.

Having got that off my chest, what do you do when you are looking for a commercial insurance quote, if you are deciding to get a new business off the ground?

Speak to one of the army of entrepreneurial business insurance brokers. We see every type of business come through our doors, to be fair some of the ones we see we just know are not going to get off the ground, let alone past their first year of trading. But, the vast majority are started up by people that you know are going to spend all of their waking hours determined to make a success of the business. But, one thing they need to do, without fail is to protect their business and it’s assets by getting a proper, commercial insurance policy in force.

How to get your quote and at what cost? The answer is to get it over the phone and the costs will of course vary depending on what type of business, what type of stock, what estimated turnover and may other factors. For a shop, restaurant, takeaway, pub etc the sort of costs are going to be between £500 to £1,000, on average. Of course they may be a lot higher, but the average costs are in this sort of range.

Posted in business insurance, business insurance broker, commercial insurance, commercial insurance quote, commercial insurance quotes | Comments Off

Be careful with increased business insurance excesses

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Everyone who has ever had a business or commercial insurance policy will be aware that excesses apply to nearly all covers. An excess is the amount that you, the business owner, will pay towards any claim. If you have ever had to replace a car windscreen, this is usually a painless process as you just pay the installer your £25 or £50 excess. It doesn’t affect you no claims and to be honest, £50 for a new windscreen is not bad, particularly when they can cost over £1,000 to replace in many modern vehicles.

Returning to businesses, what is, and what is not a reasonable excess? We are seeing more and more alternative quotes which are cheaper than ours, purely because they have a huge excess. We offered to renew a restaurant insurance policy the other day. The customer had been with us for years, had a couple of small claims but over the six years, the insurers had just about made a profit. So, we could not expect the insurers to offer renewal at a huge discount, but they did maintain their £200 excess.

The customer told us that they had been pursued (they did use the word stalked!) by an online business insurance broker. Who, miraculously had offered a cheaper premium. As the customer had been with us for a while, they forwarded the email. All looked OK except their excess was £250. So, going back to our £50 on the windscreen, it is not a huge difference, but a difference.

However, in the small print, on page 9 of 12 in the alternative quote, it said that theft and malicious damage claims were subject to an increased excess of £750. The two claims they had were for a break in and smashed window, so, if they had gone with alternative, for every claim they submitted, compared to our renewal, they would be a whopping £550 down.

Thankfully, our customer realised that this was almost a deliberate ploy (to “hide” the excess) and renewed for a further year. If you are looking around for an alternative at renewal, please make sure you read every, single page.

Posted in commercial insurance | Comments Off