Starting a business is a big task. You have to keep track of a million things, from funding to orders and deliveries. Running a successful startup or small scale business takes a lot of micromanagement to succeed. Despite your best efforts, a small business can often go through rough patches financially due to decreased sales, reduced financial turnover, accidents, natural calamities, or a hundred other things. This is where business insurance comes in.
What is business insurance?
Business insurance is an all-in-one risk management system that covers your business from unexpected financial losses. A business insurance package covers a lot of subtypes under it. This can include personnel protection aspects, such as group disclaims and group life insurance for employees, and financial aspects, such as fire insurance or liability insurance.
Importance of business insurance
Most of the small business owners find themselves asking the question, do I need business insurance? The answer is always yes. Let us understand why. A business and work environment is susceptible to several mishaps. This can go from small scale personnel mishaps, such as one of your employees getting injured in the workplace, to a larger scale problem, where say, a natural calamity causes extensive damages to your business infrastructure. There are other circumstances, such as loss of deliveries, thefts, misplaced orders, and other forms of lost income or revenue. In all these cases, your company would usually suffer a big hit financially. However, having business insurance ensures that your financial losses are covered in all of the circumstances mentioned above. This ensures that your business doesn’t lose money and can bounce back quickly from the setback.
Benefits of having business insurance
Let us take a detailed look at the clear cut advantages that are having business insurance provides:
- Management of third party liabilities: your business can directly or indirectly cause harm to a third party. This can include injuries or harm caused by your company premises, by your company employees, or during a company operation. Having business insurance ensures you don’t have to suffer any financial setback due to such circumstances.
- Loss coverage: your business and business property and infrastructure can suffer from several different damages due to different reasons. Any financial loss you may have had to suffer due to these damages is taken care of by business insurance.
- Protection during natural calamities: natural calamities such as storms, cyclones, and earthquakes are common causes of widespread financial losses for companies, as they face extensive damages to company property and infrastructure. Having business insurance covering damages due to natural calamities ensures that your financial losses are minimized in such cases.
- Legal protection: any small or big company is likely to get entangled in legal red tape at some point. This can range from personnel and company lawsuits to copyright infringement cases. All such cases have the potential for a lot of financial loss. These instances are also covered under business insurance.
Types of businesses insurance plans
Before you decide which kind of business plan you need, you need to know each of them in detail.
- Property insurance: This is the simplest and most basic type of key person business insurance. It usually covers any losses caused due to damage to property or theft from the property. This type of insurances is applicable for both companies owned as well as rented spaces. They cover damages caused by natural as well as man-made causes.
- Professional liability insurance: This is another type of standard business insurance. It usually provides coverage for any financial loss caused by the professional negligence of a company employee.
- Product liability insurance: For any company, their products are the main channel for revenue. In the event of detective or damaged products being sent out or loss of deliveries, there is a chance of a significant financial loss. Any financial loss occurring under such circumstances is covered under product liability insurance.
- Worker’s compensation insurance: This is solely directed towards the safety of the employees of a company. Worker’s compensation provides financial coverage when any company employee suffers a mishap, death, or a debilitating disease. These conditions can often reduce their ability to earn while also resulting in a big financial burden. Worker’s compensation works by helping to reduce this financial load. Thus, they are a great feature to improve employee quality of life, and in turn get increased productivity from them.
Can I purchase business insurance?
Most small scale businesses and startups fall under the legal requirements for obtaining business insurance. As long as you are a registered company and meet the policy requirements of the insurance company, you are all set to get the perfect business insurance for your company. When you arw just starting off with your own business, it actually makes a lot of sense to have a business insurance policy. This is because it provides you with a significant safety net in case of any financial drawbacks which startups often face.
Where to get a business insurance policy from?
Business insurance policies are provided by most large insurance providers. The best way to go about it is to go online and search for the type of business insurance you are looking for. Most major insurance companies have detailed websites which contain all the relevant information about the different types of policies. You can then go on to the different insurance providers’ websites and look through the available business insurance plans. It also allows you to compare the different available policies on the market at the same time.
Business insurance is a much needed financial safeguard for your company that ensures you never have to worry about financial losses the next time your company goes through a difficult spell or a mishap. With the right business insurance, you can focus on growing your company and forget about the associated financial setbacks which may occur during your business’s progress.
