Once you have analyzed the risks, you need to consider the cost of the various coverages and what your most significant exposures to risk are. Then you should consider your available insurance budget and decide which risks you should insure against.
Yes. For example, you cannot insure against many business eventualities such as loss of business to competitors or rising prices of supplies.
As with other potentially risky aspects of life, insurance can help by taking risks faced by many policy owners and pooling them so as to compensate the ones who sustain substantial losses. Pooling of risks works because what is unpredictable for an individual business is much more predictable for a large group of businesses. If your building burns down or is burglarized, the money the insurance company collects from its policy holders plus what it earns from its investments is used to offset your losses. People who do not suffer losses but have paid their premiums have the assurance that if they suffer insured
The insurance company has to pay for the cost of the coverages provided to the insured businesses. The predictability of these costs will vary based on the type of coverage. Some losses are immediately apparent (e.g. fires) while others take years to become final (e.g. court judgments for liability coverages). Various expenses, such as getting customers and administrative costs of running the business must also be paid. Investment returns on premium dollars not yet spent add to the available funds to pay these expenses. Insurance companies judge all these and other factors including competitive forces, the legal environment, the investment returns likely to be earned for some years in the future. Then they set rates that make for a profitable operation, subject to regulation by the insurance departments.
Some types of package coverages such as business owner’s policies are underwritten by class of policies rather than as individual companies. If your business fits in a certain classification the whole group of businesses in that class is underwritten together so that rates are set for all of them rather than considering each individual company. This leads to more efficient underwriting and helps to keep the rates low if your business meets the requirements to be accepted in one of the classifications. It also means that such policies have less flexibility than you would have if you purchased individual policies for each type of coverage.
Property and casualty insurance provides a tool for reducing the individual business’s risk by spreading the risks faced by many businesses. Many business owners contribute their premiums to the insurance company that provides the policy, but not all of the insured businesses experience losses so the insurance company is able to use some of the premium dollars to compensate those who actually sustain losses. In effect, the relatively small amount of money contributed by the many companies that are insured is used to reduce the losses suffered by the companies that actually have losses.
The cost is dependent on the specifics of your business situation. You can probably reduce the cost by shopping around. There are many companies providing business coverages and competing for your business.
Many small to medium size businesses may be able to save money by considering packaged coverage instead of purchasing a lot of individual policies for the different risks.
The risk assessment process is the basis for determining what insurance you need. Many insurance companies provide a wide variety of business property and casualty coverages. These can be underwritten individually and tailored to your specific business.
In today’s business world, your computer data constitutes a key asset – perhaps more valuable than many of your tangible items such as buildings or vehicles. So safeguarding data and data processing assets are crucial success factors.
Many data related risks can be greatly reduced by non-insurance steps. For example a carefully designed program of backing up data frequently and dispersing data processing and records in widely separated locations can avoid many of disruptions caused by natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, etc.) or by area-wide disruptions of communication or electric power and even terrorist attacks. If such events do occur, the redundancy and dispersion should make it possible to recover your operations quickly in most situations.
Archived data should also be maintained in secure locations. If you do not have the capability of securing such records, you might want to consider using the services of outside companies that store your valuable records in secure, carefully controlled, remote locations such as special warehouses or underground mines.
And security of customers’ private information is increasingly important to give customers the confidence to use your products and/or services. So you need to consider what information security risks you have and how to eliminate them.
These are areas where you might find preventive actions to be preferable to insurance and remediation.
The term “Business Insurance” refers to a wide variety of insurance coverages that can reduce or mitigate or compensate for exposure to risk for the business or its employees. It also includes coverages mandated by law such as unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation social security, and (in some states) state disability.
A closely held corporation has a small number of shareholders, no public market for the corporate stock and the ownership and management overlap. Many small closely held corporations are functionally not greatly different from small unincorporated businesses in such matters as how they operate, make decisions and raise capital. Despite the difference in liability exposure, some lenders have been known to require managements of small corporations to pledge personal assets to secure business loans.