Recent surveys show less than half of small business owners are confident in their cover, with about a third admitting they had no plan to deal with worst case scenarios. With rising overheads eating into profit margins, some operators are tempted to cut back on their insurance. But what good is saving a few hundred on your premiums if it leaves you underinsured, ultimately leaving you unable to get back on track if your business is derailed?
Here are some questions every business owner should ask:
After compulsory employee cover for work-related injury or illness, robust public liability insurance is probably the most critical component of most businesses’ risk transfer strategies. Does your business have a shopfront, operate out-and-about, or involve potentially dangerous activities in proximity to the public?
If you check any of these boxes, public liability cover is especially important. Also, if you’re a tradie planning to do business with shopping centres or contract to government, a minimum of $20 million in public liability may be a prerequisite.
What’s the most critical aspect of your business? Stock? Plant or equipment? People? We find that often the most important answer is overlooked – cashflow. Business interruption insurance can cover you for lost revenue, ongoing overheads, and the costs of relaunching if your operations are shuttered by things like natural disasters, fire, theft, or mandated shutdowns out of your control.
The ability to bring in money is a defining feature of any successful enterprise. Ask yourself, how long would your business survive if your revenue dried up? How would you make your loan repayments, keep up your lease, retain your best staff, or keep servicing key clients?
Physical assets like buildings, special equipment, stock and inventory, are valuable parts of many businesses. Fire, flood and theft are potent threats, especially to businesses holding high stock levels, using expensive equipment, or with vulnerability to criminals.
Just like at home, it’s a no-brainer to lock down cover against damage to your building (if you own it) and the valuables you keep there. Unfortunately, many businesses are underinsured in this respect, often because of a failure to regularly update policies as their business grows, and inflation makes materials and labour more expensive.
Regardless of your business size, it’s likely your digital footprint is growing larger by the day. At the same time, cybercriminals are refining their schemes to infiltrate your essential IT systems, critically compromising your business’s reputation and ongoing profitability.
Cyber insurance is a specialised form of business cover that delivers peace of mind in this dicey digital era. In the event of cyber attacks like data breaches, phishing, and ransomware, cybersecurity insurance can cover the costs of data recovery, associated legal costs, third-party liabilities, paying ransoms to hackers, or even engaging PR consultants for reputation management.
Join hundreds of other owners and executives from Aussie businesses – big and small – ensuring they can keep moving forward if things get upended. Our comprehensive insurance analysis assesses your business’s balance of assets and liabilities, comparing likely losses against existing policies to identify any exposures, then offering options for enhanced cover.
To help you better understand your risk and work towards more complete cover, we:
To help you settle on the right risk transfer solution, we:
To help you maintain your coverage and support you when things go wrong, we:
We believe your business deserves the best from your insurance broker, whether you’re an ASX-listed company or a one-man show. From the initial insurance analysis, through to policy selection and claims management, we give the same high-level support to all our clients at every touchpoint.
Did you know insurers aren’t legally allowed to advise clients on choosing the right policy? As insurance brokers, we have access to an unrivalled range of options. Combining our network of providers, access to underwriters from major global firms, and a keen eye for detail, we customise the right cover for you.
Whether you are a listed company or a sole trader, we’re on your team. If you experience a loss we’ll be there to support you. We’ll handle the lodgement of your claim, negotiating with insurers to ensure they are honouring the coverage you’ve paid for, so your business is back to its best as soon as possible.
Parametric insurance is an innovative tool that offers flexibility for your business’s risk transfer strategy. Essentially, it offers instant payouts when triggered by objectively defined events taking place. These can include weather and natural disaster-related triggers (e.g. occurrence of an earthquake of >5 on the Richter scale, percentage of land holding burned in a bushfire), or other events like port closures, energy outages, and more.
It can be used to hedge against traditional tricky exposures or bolster existing defined event policies. Payouts are instantaneous, and don’t rely on you proving any property damage or reduced revenue.
Parametric insurance’s popularity is growing among a range of business owners for its swift payouts, transparency, and lack of deductibles.
Here’s a few ways parametric might be used to mitigate business risk:
Parametric cover is a very flexible approach that offers value to a wide variety of industries and sectors. If you have an unusual or hard-to-cover insurance challenge, get in touch with one of our brokers to discuss whether this innovative solution is right for you.
Get a free comprehensive analysis of your current cover, expose your risk areas, and find the best alternative to correct them. Our expert insurance advisors will hand craft a detailed report (valued at over $500) to show you what you’re really covered for.
All you need to do is let us know what your current cover is. We’ll handle the rest.
Detailed summary of your current cover and exposures, based on a thorough review by our team.
Market-wide policy comparison, to show you your options.
A CoreLogic building replacement estimate, so you can see if your current cover is enough.
Flood mapping, for clarity on your level of risk.
How long’s a piece of string? Your public liability premiums will depend on several factors, including:
In addition to these 3 key factors, other elements like the location of your business will have some price impact.
Simply put, business interruption cover protects your business’s cashflow, an integral part of any successful enterprise. Without it, you’ll struggle to pay your staff, settle bills, make loan repayments, and ultimately operate.
If your business is forced to close or make a major pivot in your operations after an insured event (e.g. natural disaster, fire, theft), business interruption cover can compensate you for lost turnover during the period of interruption.
It can also provide cover for an alternate location for you to operate out of while you repair or rebuild your premises.
Without this adequately covered a business that experiences a major loss is more likely to go out of business than to recover.
We believe this to be one of the most important parts of cover in a business’s insurance program. Without it, a major or even partial loss of income could mean the end of your business.
