If you run a small business, either as owner or manager, you don’t need anyone to tell you to keep overheads to a minimum. The cost of business insurance is something that you need to consider carefully, and it can be easy to think about cutting corners and going for a policy merely on price.
However, this can sometimes be false economy because not only can you be picking a policy with not enough cover for your particular situation, you could even be paying for things you don’t even need. With that in mind, here is a checklist to make sure you are only paying for what you need and that you are getting what you need at the best possible price.
Key factors you need to consider
When calculating office insurance cost, there are several things you need to take into account. First among these is the likelihood and size of any third-party damage you are likely to cause. For instance, you are a small business that provides IT services and upgrades, your potential for causing damage is far less than a building contractors.
The next factor is how busy your business happens to be. Suppose you have 100 customers each year; there is less chance of an incident than if you have 1000. This, combined with the first factor, can be the main governers of your premium’s size, rather than the things you would automatically consider like theft or damage to the premises.
This factor can depend heavily on where your business is located and how the insurance industry evaluates your postcode as a whole. Even if your business is not directly affected, the number of break-ins and incidents in the same area can push premiums up.
There is an even more significant effect if you have made claims in the past, either for incidents at your premises or while you or your employees were visiting customers. With this in mind, it might be worth evaluating whether moving your office’s location could be, on balance, a cost-saving move overall.
Additional factors and knock-on savings
You should also consider what you keep at your office premises and if you should move it off-site. This could be something simple like trading in your physical servers sat in the office and moving to a cloud service, where a break-in or incident at the office would not affect your IT services.
Overall, with everything that is at stake, engaging an insurer’s services to assess what you need could be a much better move than going in with a budget in mind. With the potential knock-on savings (like relocation or going to cloud-based services) to take into account – there are ways to make sure you have the correct cover without increasing your overheads drastically.
In conclusion
Looking at small business insurance can be a tricky thing to do. You will have one eye on your monthly overheads, but you will also know the financial repercussions of not having enough cover if the worst does happen. However, by working out exactly what you need and only paying for that, you can come to the best solution possible.
