General liability insurance is a standard acquisition of the majority of small business owners. Why? Because it is a protective measure against any potential harm or incidents that may threaten to hurt your company. Yet finding the right type is sometimes a long process with multiple confusing elements to sift through until you find the best fit. This guide focuses on how to get the best general liability insurance for your small business in the most cost effective way.
General Liability Insurance Overview
Let us begin with what general liability insurance is. This is a security blanket for an incident on the company premises or with an employee. Incidents are events like a customer being injured in the store, an employee causing damage to a client’s personal belongings or property, or damage to your building or person.
Do You Need General Liability Insurance?
If you have a physical building for your business, any employees, interact with clients, or go into clients’ personal property, then the answer is probably yes. There is a lot of value in a reliable liability policy; it may be the difference between a business going under and a business surviving, as it can provide a complete resolution to any issues that arise.
The Tips
To decide what works for your business, there is a multi-step approach that will render the optimum results. Here are three top tips to get started.
Research First
If your business has no face-to-face dealings with customers, it will require a different policy to one that has daily interactions on the shop floor, for example. Comprise a list of the specific requirements for its circumstances. Policies can cover a range of varying factors, so to ensure the correct information is represented in a contract, you have to know what needs to be accounted for. For example, external impact coverage is common, as this covers events outside of your control.
Prepare Your Answers
Lots of comparison sites allow users to view and cross reference thousands of different insurance options. Independent companies also offer quotes on their websites, like this one that provides a quote for liability insurance in minutes with a few quick answers to some questions. So you can make the process of searching for the right fit even more accessible by preparing some answers to typical questions that may be asked. For example:
- How big is your business? I.e. how many members of staff are there?
- Are you the owner of business related property?
- Are there any direct customer relations?
Don’t Be Afraid to Compare Quotes
Lastly, compare lots of quotes to get a better idea of what’s on offer. Insurance quotes update on a daily basis depending on the economy, financial statistics, and industry projections, so it is worth making the initial research last a few days.
Take a deeper dive into the inner workings of your company to truly understand the extent to which a policy needs to reach. General liability insurance comes with a lot of advantages, but it has to be beneficial to the company to really hold value.
