If you don’t run a small business, then the function and point of small business insurance might seem relatively pointless at first. Insuring a car or a home is straightforward to understand because they are physical things that need protection. A small business is a little more intangible and abstract than that.
Indeed, several small business owners see ensuring their livelihood and the fruit of their back-breaking hard work as an unnecessary expense for some reason and I suspect it is this more abstract nature that is to blame.
The question to ask is not “what is small business insurance” because that’s too vague and conceptually confusing. Instead, you should be asking “what does small business insurance do for you”.
Safety net
A small business is a precarious thing. The success of the venture lives and dies by the hard work and effort of its owner, but that does not make it immune from outside forces that can disrupt business operations at a moment’s notice.
Running a small business means you don’t have the backup of a larger corporate structure to back you up. If you make a mistake, it won’t just be a poor performance review and demotion waiting for you from head office, but the potential dissolution of your livelihood, to say nothing of what it will make you feel about all the time you’ve invested into this company.
Natural and man-made disasters await around every corner for the unprepared small business owner. Due to our most stable weather system in the UK, you can normally predict natural disasters. We tend not to suffer from unexpected earthquakes or tornados and if your business is on the flood plain, you can expect flooding at certain times of the year but that’s about it.
Then there are the much more unpredictable human disasters. A particularly clumsy customer tripping and falling on your premises and taking you to court for it, or a careless employee blaming you for not training him properly in lifting heavy boxes could set you back financially if you’re not covered adequately. Even with little to no merit, a court case can be a hugely costly setback that could easily threaten to put you out of business.
So what actually is small business insurance?
It’s impossible to not ask this really. Having said that “what is small business insurance?” is the wrong question, let me clarify why and offer a bit of an answer. It’s the wrong question because it’s too vague. What small business insurance actually is relies too heavily on the nature of the small business in question to be able to give a definitive and straightforward answer.
The form of small business insurance is whatever you want it to be. The function however is always the same: peace of mind applied to something that does its absolute best to constantly worry you.
Leave a Reply