Electrician Insurance – A Quick How To

If you are thinking of starting your own electrical contractor business, or if you are planning to grow your existing one, you must become fluent in insurance speak and understand just how to piece together the insurance puzzle for your own specific company. Electricians face some unique insurance issues, so here is a basic primer on the types of insurance policies that you should consider for your electrician insurance program.

This guide should serve as an introductory overview of insurance options for an electrical contractor. For more detailed information on any of these policies or coverage types, please contact our office and we will be happy to give you more one on one personal help.

Liability Insurance – If you have been an electrician for any amount of time, you have probably encountered the need for a certificate of insurance. If you don’t know it already, you will soon find that you will have customers who will require that you prove to them that you have liability insurance on your electrical contractor business. This is the most obvious coverage type and it is usually the first one that electricians think to purchase. This is designed to provide you with protection for losses that you cause in the operation of your business for which you are legally obligated to pay.

Workers Compensation Insurance – Too many electricians, particularly smaller operations want to skip over this policy and not buy it at all. What drives this thinking is the NC law that says you don’t have to purchase a workers compensation policy if you have 3 or less employees. But what people fail to realize is that if you don’t purchase a policy, then your company is on the hook for paying all claims as though you were the workers compensation insurance company. Don’t skip this coverage, one bad accident could put you out of business and ruin all that you have worked so hard for. For more information on workers compensation in general, you can visit the website for the NC Industrial Commission.

Equipment Coverage – This protection comes in two types. Coverage for your equipment and coverage for hand tools. We rarely see a strong need for equipment coverage among electricians, but don’t let this fact lead you to forget to insure your hand tools and small equipment if losing those items would jeopardize your ability to stay in business. Often this coverage can be added for a small limit of coverage to your general liability policy for very little money per year.

Business Auto Insurance – Quite often, one of the first things an electrician does after starting up his or her business, is to title one or more personal vehicles in the company name. There are often nice tax advantages to this but if you do so, don’t forget that you will need the insurance policy to be titled the same way. This means you will need a business auto insurance policy. One quick tip, if all of the vehicles that you own are listed on your commercial auto policy and you don’t have a personal auto policy in your name, then you are vulnerable to a gap in coverage I call the DOC gap. To learn an inexpensive and easy way to protect yourself from this gap, read my blog on DOC for electricians.

Disability Insurance – What happens if you become injured and can’t work? Who will do the work and who will run your business? Disability insurance is a good solution for you to solve this problem. Most electricians don’t remember to cover this exposure and the failure to do so have run a few out of business.

It’s clear that buying insurance for your electrical company is a complicated and specialized process. You need an agent who specializes in electrician’s insurance, and one who can help you navigate the maze of policies and underwriting rules. At Clinard Insurance Group, in Winston Salem, NC, we specialize in helping all kinds of electricians with their electrician insurance policies all over North Carolina. We can help you develop a plan that protects your business and saves you money on your electrical contractor insurance policies. If you own an electrician business in NC, then you owe it to yourself to call us, toll free, at 877-687-7557 or visit us online at www.LowRatesForElectricians.com and we will be happy to help you.

The source information for this article can be found at www.InsuranceAnswerGuy.com.

Workers Compensation Insurance – What About Your Safety Program

Workers compensation insurance for many industries, especially those in construction such as painting contractors, HVAC companies, electricians, landscapers and plumbers just to name a few, can be a huge piece of the insurance budget. In addition, with workers compensation insurance in NC, your policy is experience rated, which means your losses follow you around for years and add to the cost of your particular policy. So why don’t more contractors embrace safety training?

The answer of course is complicated but one of the biggest reason you see so little safety training in the small contractor’s world is that either the contractor doesn’t understand how much it can impact his bottom line, or if he does, he just doesn’t know where to start. This is where company selection can be crucial to the small contractor. There are some companies out there that specialize in workers compensation insurance and don’t deal in any other types of policies. One of the advantages of using these types of companies is that often they will provide you with lots of safety training tools for free.

These tools can range from helping you meet posting requirements in your shop to advice and help with safety services and even helping you develop and create a true, on the job safety training program for all of your employees. One example of a company that does this very well is Summit Insurance. Take a quick look at the offerings that they have on their web site by clicking here. You can see that they are fully engaged with their clients to help them find ways to reduce accidents and downtime associated with injuries.

Let’s face it, when you have a workers comp claim it will cost you money on your policy eventually. But more importantly, think of the immediate costs of stopping work to get your injured employee to the doctor and the downtime associated with waiting on an employee to get back to work. A large percent of accidents that occur on construction sites are preventable with better education and better rules enforcement. If you are already spending money on a work comp policy, you should ask yourself what your insurance company is doing to help you reduce and prevent accidents. Remember, there is much more to the workers compensation policy than just the rate, or the bottom line price. As you can see, there are huge hidden costs in the process and you need to hire a workers comp company that will help you manage those huge hidden costs.

Clinard Insurance Group is a NC insurance agent who specializes in helping small contractors and construction trades all across North Carolina. We understand your difficulties and we speak your language. We have developed specialty programs for all different types of small contractor groups including a landscapers insurance program, and electricians’ insurance program, a special insurance program for painters, an HVAC insurance program, a plumbers insurance program and many others. If you need help with your business insurance, please call us toll free at 877-687-7557 or visit us on the web at www.thecontractorshelper.com.

This article was pulled and written from source information, all of which may be found in its entirety at www.InsuranceAnswerGuy.com.

Electrician Work Comp Insurance – Pay As You Go, Saves The Cash Flow

Electrician insurance plans should all include a workers compensation policy unless of course you work alone and have no employees. And work comp policies can really punch a hole in your cash flow if not handled correctly. For more information on this, read my blog on the audit trap. In addition, there come times when work is hard to find and you may experience a drop in your cash flow. What if there were a program that would adjust your premiums to match your current work load and cash flow?

In fact this program exists and is available today. With a little understood tool called pay as you go, you can have your income cash flow better match your workers compensation premiums. Now understand that not every company that writes workers compensation policies for electricians can or will offer this feature, but if you can find one that does and if their price is right, this can be a nice benefit for electricians.

Let’s look at the mechanics of this type of work comp plan. Of course the details will vary from plan to plan, but the very best of them will send you an email or a mail reminder each month. You then log on to their web site and enter your payroll totals for the past month. The web site will then calculate your premium for that month and you can pay your bill on line right then and there with a credit card, or the system will generate a paper bill which is mailed to your office. What this means for you is that now your workers compensation expense tracks your payroll with only a 30 day delay. And this short delay means that your workers compensation expenses will more nearly track your revenue and mean less wild swings in your monthly cash flow.

Ok, there are a few things to watch out for here. First of all, there are some payroll service companies out there offering pay as you go workers compensation to go with their payroll service. On the surface this sounds great but there is a problem with this approach. One huge factor in your workers compensation insurance costs is your experience modification factor. And you need to work proactively to protect that mod to keep future costs lower. Companies that specialize in payroll services and sell work comp as a sideline are rarely as good at keeping claims costs low as companies whose prime mission is workers compensation insurance. These dedicated work comp companies will often have nurses and case managers on staff to help reduce your overall claims costs. And keeping your claims costs low will keep your rates low over time. To learn more about this read my blog on protecting your experience mod.

One last thing to mention here is that the pay as you go feature offered by some companies is often only available to electricians whose premium exceeds a certain level, often as high as $5000. There are a few companies out there who can offer this feature at a much lower premium level, but you will need to find an agent who specializes in electrician’s insurance to find them.

At Clinard Insurance Group, in Winston Salem, NC, we are the electrician insurance specialists. We have companies that can write pay as you go workers compensation policies for electricians with annual premiums as low as $1000. If we can help you with any of your electrician insurance policy questions, please call us, toll free at 877-687-7557 or visit us on line at our electricians’ insurance program policy page.

Some of the source material for this article was drawn from other blog articles which can be found at www.InsuranceAnswerGuy.com.

Electrical Contractors – Don’t forget DOC coverage on your electrician insurance for your trucks

Most electricians did the basic set up work on their electrical contractors’ insurance years ago and few ever revisit the underlying structure of their insurance plan. As a result, there are electrical contractors out there, running around with a huge hole in their insurance policy protection. I call it the DOC trap and you can figure out if you are vulnerable to this problem by asking yourself a few easy questions.

First of all, to understand this problem, you have to understand that your electrician insurance policies cover the named insured on the policy. In many cases that is the name of your corporation or LLC, and if your personal name is not on your business auto insurance policy, then you can’t expect personal protection from that policy.

Here’s the problem. Let’s say you are at a party with a friend, who has had too much to drink. You kindly offer to drive him home but on the way home, you are involved in an accident that is your fault. For this example, let’s say the total damages, including injuries are $250,000. That’s not hard to do with medical costs the way they are these days. Now, if you have a personal auto policy in your name, then you will be protected for your liability in this accident as long as you have liability limits high enough to cover the losses. But suppose you don’t have a personal auto insurance policy because you just drive your company truck all the time. If your electrician auto insurance policy has your corporation as a named insured, then the basic policy will not give you any protection for this accident.

So what is the solution? It’s simple really; you should add DOC coverage to your commercial auto policy. DOC stands for drives other car coverage and this endorsement will add your name to the policy making you a named insured for this excess coverage. This endorsement usually costs less than $200 per year per person and is used to plug a dangerous hole in protection.

So to review, you should consider DOC coverage if the following statements are true.

1. Your electrician insurance policy on your trucks is in a business name and,

2. You don’t have a personal auto policy in your name

At Clinard Insurance Group, in Winston Salem, NC, we specialize in helping electrical contractors with their insurance needs. We want all of our clients to be informed insurance consumers so that they can make the right decisions for themselves and for their electrician business. If we can help you with your electrician workers compensation insurance, your electrician liability insurance, or any of your other electrical contractor insurance needs, please call us, toll free, at 877-687-7557 or visit us online at our electrical contractors insurance helper page.

The information in this article was drawn from an article which can be found at www.InsuranceAnswerGuy.com