When starting out on your journey, you probably acted on advice to stack up on insurance products relevant to your industry.
However, while certain types of insurance, like employer’s liability or public liability, recommend themselves fairly easily, you could have easily overlooked tool insurance.
This is understandable, given that this type of cover is an optional extra rather than legally mandatory. Here are examples of firms that can draw especially heavily on insurable tools.
Car body repair
In 2017, news broke that a paintless dent repair trailer containing tools worth at least $200,000 in total had been stolen. The victim was the company Kansas City Dent & Tint, which later recovered its trailer but sadly not the gear that had been inside it.
“The average guy has about $15,000 to $20,000 in tools on his cart that he uses,” the company’s owner Keith Stirling revealed in words quoted by Repairer Driven News. “Each one is kind of custom-suited to him, so it’s not kind of a universal kit that you can buy.”
Home-based
It’s easy to see how tools can “slip through the cracks”, however inadvertently, when they are carried around from one building to another, as might be entailed in certain lines of work. However, do you really need to fret about insuring your tools if you work entirely from home?
Alas, Startups.co.uk warns that the contents insurance you likely already have for your home might not currently extend its coverage to your business tools, helping to justify extra cover.
Tool hire
Well, of course! A company that seeks to hire out tools, whether for domestic or commercial use, obviously won’t get very far if it doesn’t have any tools to hire out. However, the fact that the firm isn’t using the tools itself could’ve led you to overlook the need for tool insurance in this case.
Start Up Donut points out that customers of a tool hire business will want to know that the tools are high-quality and well-maintained. Therefore, you should replace any damaged or lost tools quickly.
Gardening
As gardening shows on TV have flourished in popularity, so has gardening as a pastime. It’s no wonder, then, that many people see the business potential in gardening. Many of us would love good-looking gardens but lack the green fingers to make it a reality.
Equipment which a gardening business could consider insuring include mowers, hedge trimmers, log splitters and chainsaws – not the kind of gear that is always cheap to replace.
Event organizing
When a major, public event, like an exhibition or trade show, is penciled in the diary, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make sure that event will go without a hitch.
In the process, there are various items that an event organizer might need to provide for the big occasion; think crowd control barriers, temporary fencing, portable outdoor lighting and the like.
If you are unsure whether these items or others would be covered by tool insurance, it’s not hard to find advice online.
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