The point in time when you didn’t need insurance for your business was when it was just you, on a laptop, in your garage, and you hadn’t even launched your first product yet. As soon as you’ve seen any sort of success in your industry, liability, lititgiousness and the random chance of bad luck can all come into play and topple what you’ve worked so hard to build. Here are some numbers you need to know, via surveys courtesy of YouGov and private insurance companies:- 60% of those polled agreed that it was important to insure stock and equipment, while only 40% said that insuring key personnel would be equally important. This, in spite of the fact that 77% of those surveyed said that their businesses would see a major impact were a key employee to be unable to show up for work for six months or longer.
- 66% of businesses lack business interruption insurance.
- Only one in five small businesses polled have a disaster recovery plan in place, even though small businesses tend to be the ones most impacted by disaster. Over half of the businesses polled said it could take them three months or longer to recover from a disaster, should they be able to recover at all.
- 38% claimed that they didn’t think it was important to have a disaster plan in place at all.
If you want a “worst case scenario” example of what can happen without the proper insurance, consider how many businesses were wiped off the market permanently by Hurricane Katrina.
Your Hurricane Katrina might not be a natural disaster, but a car accident that puts a key employee out of commission for the better half of a year. The principle remains the same: you need to be insured against anything from which you cannot easily recover. This is important for big businesses, and several times as important for small and medium businesses.
