Business insurance is an umbrella term for business-specific insurance such as general liability insurance, intended to protect against general liability concerns that can crop up.
Many times, what can befall a business is unexpected. That might be a customer having an accident on your premises or property damage by an employee while working inside a customer’s home.
This insurance type is specific and focused on third parties. It relates to where the business has impacted them negatively, rather than being insurance that protects employees or companies from risks of a cyberattack, which requires different policies.
Here are 4 benefits of general liability insurance to consider.
- Rental Property Damage
A business that rents real estate out to tenants takes on certain risks relating to how they treat the property. Tenants can damage property, or a loss can be attributed to a weather event such as lightning or a fire at the property.
To avoid worrying about renting out a property, location-specific insurance, such as Florida business insurance, can provide the answer for property owners. It’s there to reduce the concerns over getting into the rental business and the additional risks that it entails. For example, if you own a rental condo in that area, you might want to protect your asset, and not every Florida business insurance policy is the same. Therefore, you should speak to an expert who knows the ins and outs of this type of insurance to get a clear policy that you can rely on.
- Legal Defense
Mounting a legal defense against accusations from a third party is no small matter. Just hiring a lawyer and going through the initial steps to respond to the threat of a lawsuit isn’t cheap. Then should the issue not get resolved in a rbitration, it may become an active legal case.
Business insurance can provide the funds necessary to mount a proper legal defense. These policies are there to cover companies trying to do business honestly and ethically. Many businesses are sued relatively frequently, so it’s difficult to argue against getting this type of protection.
- Personal Injury to a Third Party
Should someone walk into a retail store owned by the business and get injured, it creates a headache.
They’ll need medical care and potentially an ambulance to be called. Given that the accident happened at a store operated by your company, the customer may seek to recover all medical costs and loss of income while they’re off their feet.
Injuries to people on the premises who aren’t employees are separate. Business insurance also covers this aspect.
- Reputation Damaged: Did We Do That?
Companies can put information out into the world that suggests another party – perhaps a company or an individual – took specific actions (or failed to do so). With such sharing of information, it opens the door to reputations being harmed.
The line between its fair game to comment versus going beyond ‘oversharing’ to reputational damage is not always clear. Should a company or person suffer a business decline, they can attribute this to past harm to their reputation. That doesn’t make it accurate, but insurance can cover the costs to defend against such an accusation.
There are many benefits to business insurance. Since accidents and unintended consequences do occur in life, it’s a good idea to insure against them.
