Business.com - How to Reduce Your Business's Liability Exposures

http://www.business.com/insurance/

Learn how to prevent business liability claims.

BIO:

Tim Gaspar is the owner of Gaspar Insurance Services.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello. My name is Tim Gaspar with Gaspar insurance services. We are an insurance agency specializing in protecting small to medium size businesses.

Today, we are going to talk about minimizing your business liability exposures, and how you can effectively do that. There are literally hundreds of ways to limit your business liability exposures depending on the type of business that you have.

Today, we are going to start with the one that happens the most frequently, and unfortunately that is slip and fall accidents. Having a clean environment for your store, business, office, whatever it might be is the key component to making sure that you can cut down on those claims.

Definitely you want to make sure that anywhere the public sees is completely free of debris and is cleaned on a regular basis and doesn't have any exposures in which someone might be able to trip or fall. Now unfortunately, a lot of the claims that we see for slip and fall are frivolous where some actually slipped and fell on purpose in order to collect money from the business owner or the insurance company. Unfortunately that is the world we live in, and that happens quite a bit. But as a business owner, if you have a clean environment free of hazards, you can make it a lot tougher for someone to come in and do that.

Generally, speaking, someone looking for opportunity is going to go after an easy target that actually has something that can be tripped over in their store. Now another key thing you can do to make sure that don't have slip and fall hazards is to make sure that certain parts of your business are off limits to the public. For instance, if you're an auto body shop, you want to make sure that you don't let customers in to the place you actually work on the cars. Have a customer area that is clean, nice, and free of debris where people can sit and be safe, and don't actually let them where most of the work is going on.

Same thing is true if you have a warehouse of manufacturing facility, there should be certain areas that are only accessible to your employees and you don't really want the public going back there because it could expose you to not only slip and fall injuries but all kinds of other injuries as well.

Another key issue with business liability exposures is having product liability complaints. Or some type of claim in regards to the product that you manufacture.

On any business policy, generally speaking, you have something called products and completed operations. And this is the coverage that goes ahead and covers you in the even that somebody sues you for something you make or a service that you do that injures somebody, or injures property.

Another key issue for business owners nowadays are professional liability claims. Anybody that provides any kind of business service whatsoever has an exposure for professional liability claims. A professional liability claim is much much different from a business liability claim in which somebody is financially harmed.

The key thing you can do to protect yourself from professional liability claims is obviously to know your business well, and to give the right advice, but even if you do, you want to make sure that you absolutely have documented communication with your client.

I'm Tim Gaspar with Gaspar insurance for Business.com making sure that you are properly protected and your business insurance premiums are as low as possible.
Limiting liability exposures tips:
• Most common liability: slip & fall accidents
• Make sure you minimize hazards
• Public areas should be clean & hazard-free

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