You’ve put a lot of time and energy into building your business. Days and evenings working hard—sometimes with little reward—to build your company. It paid off. Now you are in charge of a growing business and part of your job is to pay your bills and take care of daily monthly and even the annual expenses such as insurance. Of course part of being a responsible business owner means you’ve paid for insurance to protect your growing company. But is your coverage complete?
A commercial property policy is essential. But your commercial policy doesn’t cover a far more common problem: sudden accidental equipment breakdown.
Most people think of boilers breaking down when you talk about equipment breakdown coverage. But what about a business that relies on telephones computers cash register systems or heating or air-conditioning units? The impact of a breakdown of one of these pieces of equipment could have devastating consequences.
For example during the last two weeks in June 2013 approximately 5.1 million work hours were lost when extreme flooding hit the province. This resulted in $485 million in lost economic output by these businesses—due in part to equipment breakdowns. That’s because as soon as your equipment fails almost immediately your operations are interrupted. Now the question becomes: How will you deliver your orders? If you don’t have back-up equipment or facilities where will you set up shop and how much will that cost? And what if your customers can’t wait? Orders may be cancelled which adds to your growing mountain of costs or worse your reputation could be damaged.
One of the best ways to protect your business—and your economic security—from this type of devastating loss is to make sure your business equipment is protected.
Equipment breakdown insurance covers you for property damage (or damaged contents) resulting from the sudden and accidental breakdown of insured equipment—coverage that is not automatically covered by astandard commercial property policy. Without this additional coverage your business is at risk of absorbing the full impact of costly repairs and replacement associated with breakdowns.
Putting together aemergency plan and developing a strategyto deal with disasters is also an excellent idea.
To get a better understanding on how you can prepare and protect yourself against potential losses due to business equipment breakdown contact yourindependent insurance broker.
