As a business owner, you can’t always count on good luck.
Or simply making a claim on your commercial property insurance coverage. Instead, you must manage your risk now. Recently, we talked about the importance of having a written emergency disaster plan for your business and this article is part 2 in this series.
Tips for your written emergency plan to protect and secure your building and contents
- Do you have enough fuel for your back up generator?
- Protect yourself from looters
- Secure all entry points to reduce the threat of unauthorized access
- Make sure your security system is working
- Hire temporary security guards
- Did you have a fire, tornado or hurricane that damaged your windows? Board up all windows, doors and cover all holes in the roof to protect your property.
- Do you have a list of approved contractors with phone numbers to make these needed temporary repairs?
- Do you have a temporary base you can relocate your equipment and property to so you can continue business as normal as possible?
Call your insurance company immediately
- As soon as possible after the disaster, thoroughly inspect your property and record a complete description of all damage to it.
- Remember you can only make claims if the claims inspector can inspect your property. So don’t throw things away unless it is 100% necessary!
- Take photos of all your items that were damaged for insurance purposes.
- Be sure to wear safety gear such as gloves, eye goggles, etc. The last thing you want is someone getting hurt and having to make additional claims!
What is your Plan “B”?
Just supposed your place of business was destroyed, like a client of ours was. We don’t want to be a negative Nellie, but what would you do?
- How would you care for your clients?
- Where would you get materials from if all local distributors were impacted by the same disaster?
- Where would you store materials?
- Where would you make your temporary base camp?
- Do you have a backup of all of your customers important information available to you?
No one wants a disaster in their business
However, think how glad you will be that you took the time to plan ahead in the event of one happening! Review your disaster recovery plan annually and be sure communicate with your employees.
Would you like some help updating your commercial property insurance policy? Give us a call atInsuranceHub today to see how we might be able to help you.
