Hello. I’m Ron Philleo with Philleo Agency Insurance, and welcome to philleo.com. Do you own a tanning salon, or do you have tanning operations as part of a larger business model, such as a fitness center or beauty salon? We can help you insure where others may not want to look at that exposure that you have. Tanning salons are a specialized type business. Many carriers are not comfortable with the exposure that comes along with insuring tanning salons. Here at Philleo Agency, we are very comfortable with it, and we insure many businesses that have tanning operations.

Some of the unique situations and coverages to tanning salons we are very familiar with. And again, we can do a stand-alone tanning salon, or we can do a larger business where the tanning is incidental to other operations in the business. We can insure the property, the beds themselves. We can insure your liability, in case somebody gets injured on the premises or gets injured due to the operations.

So as far as your tanning operations go, give us a call if you need help with that. If you have questions on that, more than happy to take a look at this, provide quotes and coverage recommendations for you. We will need some basic information about your operations and the tanning beds, the percentage of UV and so on, but with a few simple questions, we can have quotes and recommendations for you in a very short period of time.

Call us here at the Philleo Agency if you need help with your tanning salon insurance needs, and make sure to check out our other videos here at philleo.com.

Landscapers and lawn maintenance companies also usually need commercial auto coverage. They have equipment they need to get to and from job sites and there’s trailers involved. A lot of times they add snow plows to the policies. Certainly, there’s a lot going on with that.

We’re very familiar with commercial auto policies and we can help you what the coverages are that you need. Whether it just be a basic truck to get to and from the job locations, or heavy duty trucks, hauling, and trailers, and snow plowing, we can help you with all of those under the commercial auto need.

The next thing is, you may want to consider a liquor liability. This will protect you in case liquor is maybe administered incorrectly, and a lawsuit results in something like that, depending on the laws in your state, some states you’re more prone to carry it than other states.

The next coverage that you want to look at is your property coverage. Do you own the building you are in, or do you rent the building? If you own the building, then obviously we’ll need to insure the building. If you rent a lot of times an owner of a bar or restaurant will build out the interior so you want to cover that you’re responsible for building out.

Also there is some specialized equipment that go with taverns and bars and restaurants such as compressors and coolers. We want to make sure we add on a coverage called equipment breakdown coverage. So, if you get a power surge and it blows out the compressors, that insurance will be able to cover that for you and get you back up and running again soon.

There’s many other coverages that go along with bars and restaurants such as employment issues, and all those other items that come alone with running a business. Business income coverage in case, let’s say, there’s a fire and you can’t operate your business until it’s rebuilt.

Here at Philleo Agency we are very familiar with insuring bars, taverns and restaurants. If you need help with your coverage, we’re more than happy to do that for you. We’ll supply quotes and coverage recommendations for you. Give us a call here we’ll be happy to discuss your needs for any bars, restaurants or taverns that you need help with, and thanks for watching this video, and make sure you check out our videos at Philleo.com.

One of the first things you need to be aware of is liability coverage. Liability is what is going to protect you in case you injure somebody or damage something during the course of your business activities. You want to make sure you have liability coverage for your contracting business.

The other type of coverage you want to have is property coverage. Property coverage can be–a broad definition of it–it can be your tools and your equipment. It could be equipment that you rent; rented tools and equipment. It could be a building that you own. Talk with your agent. Let him know what type of equipment, what type property you have to insure.

There are also coverages that you may or may not need. You may need business vehicle insurance. That’s going to cover you in case you have vehicles on the road and they injure somebody or they damage other people’s property. You may need coverage if your employees are using their own vehicles. You may want to add a coverage called hired and non-owned auto coverage, and that’s an extension of liability protection to protect you while your employees are using their own vehicles.

You also may need work comp insurance. You may be required to carry it under the state that you’re in. Work comp insurance protects your employees if they’re injured on the job. There’s a variety of other coverages; a lot of specialized coverages for contractors. We recommend that you talk with an independent agent. They can assess your situation and make recommendations and shop around for you. We at the Philleo agency can do all those for you as well.

If you’re a contractor, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you about your business. Thanks for watching this video and make sure to check out our other videos at Philleo.com.

If you have a snow plow business, there are basically two ways we can operate. One of them is, I have a snow plow on my vehicle, I only plow for myself and my own properties and I’m not plowing for anybody else for money.

Under your typical commercial auto policy and a lot of times under a personal auto policy you do not need to do anything or add any coverage. Your liability is going to extend to your vehicle as long as you’re not plowing for money.

Let’s talk about the snow plow business that is plowing for money and going out and doing jobs for hire and for other people.

Very important, your personal auto policy most likely is going to exclude those types of activities. You are going to want to have a commercial policy that covers you for snow plowing operations.

There are a couple ends to it. We want to cover the truck for liability in case you injure somebody or damage someone’s property. This is the most important part of the policy for a snow plow company.

If you damage other property or injure somebody your liability is going to pick that up. Make sure you care carrying enough liability coverage. A good independent agent can help you figure out how much coverage you need.

The next thing is, do you need coverage for the truck and the plow itself? If it’s a newer vehicle and a newer plow setup those can get very expensive to replace. So if they are damaged or stolen you want to make sure that the insurance company would reimburse you for that.

That coverage would come under physical damage coverage. It is also sometimes separated out as collision and comprehensive coverage under the auto policy.

Talk with your agent about that. It’s usually based on the value of the equipment and the truck. But very important, if you want coverage for that you have to request that.

The other thing with this is hired and non-owned auto coverage. If you have a snow plow business and there are other people out plowing for you on your behalf using their own trucks, make sure you add a coverage called Hired. That is for vehicles that you hire and non-owned vehicles. That is for vehicles that you do not own that the liability from your policy extends to the operations for people that you hire.

Being from Wisconsin, we are very familiar with snow plow insurance. If you need help in covering your plow operations many times it is a landscape operation and then in winter they plow. We are very familiar with these types of operations, and we can help you with your coverage. Talk to a good independent agent. They can also help you as well.

I want to talk to you today about a coverage that is very important. It’s called hired and non-owned auto coverage. It typically gets attached to either a commercial business policy or commercial auto policy. What’s this coverage do? Well, this coverage is very important. It protects you in case somebody is using their own vehicle and has an accident, while working on behalf of you.

A great example of this or a common example of this would be, let’s say you have an employee and they go to run an errand for you. Whether it be from a job site to go pick something up at a supplier, or whether it be an office worker that goes out to pick up lunch or go to the post office or pick up office supplies, these are great examples of what hired and non-owned auto coverage can do for you. That person is out on the road. They’re using their own vehicle, not a company car, and they have an accident while they’re working on behalf of you. Most likely they’re going to get named in a lawsuit if someone’s injured or property is damaged. And most likely you’re going to get named as the business owner.

How do you protect yourself against that? There’s a coverage that you can add to your commercial policy. It’s called hired and non-owned autos, and it protects you against that. It’s not a very expensive coverage. You can add it to either a commercial auto policy, or if you don’t have commercial autos, let’s say you don’t have any vehicles out on the road for your business, you can add it right to your business owner’s policy. We highly recommend this. I meet with many business owners, and I do not see this coverage on so many policies, and it can be devastating if you don’t have this and one of these accidents occurs.

To add this, again, it’s not a very expensive option. I really encourage you to put that on your policy if you ever have anybody that might run an errand on your behalf or might be in their vehicle working on your behalf. We can explain more about hired and non-owned auto coverage. Feel free to give us a call or sent us an email from Philleo.com.

You know, sometimes the most basic concepts are the most important concepts. I wanted to talk to you about why you should have insurance. A lot of people ask that question, “What should I insure?”, or “Why should I have insurance?”

Well, let’s start with the most basic premise of what insurance is. Insurance is a tool to transfer risk. And typically, the risk you want to transfer is a risk you couldn’t afford to absorb yourself. Let’s say if you injure somebody in an auto accident, or if your home burns down to the ground.

Those would be very expensive items to have to pay for out of your own pocket. So what you do is, you transfer that risk to an insurance company. The insurance company sets a premium, you agree to pay for it, and if one of those occurrences takes place, then the insurance company will reimburse you for your loss.

That is the true point of insurance. Now many people sometimes start to insure for things they can afford to lose. And at that point, we try to advise our clients to maybe reevaluate their insurance needs and say, “Do you need to pay a premium for something that you can actually afford to pay for out of your own pocket?”

Now, no one ever wants to suffer a loss, but sometimes you are better off not insuring for a loss, and absorbing that yourself. In return, you get to keep the money for yourself, instead of paying a premium to an insurance company.

So what we do with our clients is, we evaluate their risk to see if they have a need to insure all of the items that they want to. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we want to make sure that we’re not wasting our money or insuring items that you can certainly afford to manage the risk yourself.

And that’s the true definition of insurance. Make sure you have an agent though, that can work with you regarding that. If you have any questions of what to insure, or how to insure it, you can always visit us here at Phileo Agency, or go to the website at phileo.com.

Hello. I’m Ron Philleo with Philleo Agency Insurance. There’s lots of different types of business liability coverages. Today I’m going to go into some of the most common coverages, and check our website for future videos because we’ll go into more detail with some of these coverages I’m going to mention in future videos.

The most common one is general liability coverage. General liability is just that. It’s very general. It covers if people get injured because of your business activities or if you damage property due to your business activities. It’s a real important coverage. You want to make sure that’s on your policy.

There’s auto liability coverages. If you have vehicles out on the road or even if people are working on behalf of you and using their own vehicles, you want to make sure you have auto liability coverage or even an additional coverage called “higher denominal auto coverage.” Check our website because I’m going to go into more detail with higher denominal auto coverage on future videos.

There’s also errors and omissions coverage. That’s like a malpractice type policy. So, if you give someone some bad advice or you fail to do something that you were supposed to do and you get sued for an error or omission of your work, that protects you against that. That’s under the category of professional liability or malpractice type insurance.

There’s also work comp insurance. That’s coverage for if your employee gets injured on the job while they’re working on behalf on your business. Your workman’s compensation coverage covers that. We’re going to go into more details on work comp videos. So, check that as well.

There’s also product liability coverage. Product liability is your product fails to perform if somebody gets injured or a property is damaged in the result. Product liability will cover you with that.

There’s lots of different types of insurance. Make sure you talk to your agent or give us a call. I’d be happy to talk to you about your business and determine what coverages are right for your business.

But, make sure you talk to an agent that knows what they’re doing with business insurance because the coverages are very specialized and you don’t want to be left without the right coverage. After a claim, it’s just too late to add it.

Workman’s compensation insurance. You’ve heard me mention it before. I’m sure you’ve heard lots of people mention it before. I’m going to explain briefly what work comp insurance is, give you a brief overview of it and we’re all going to do additional videos on how you generate the premium for work comp, or how the premium is calculated.

But, to start off, with work comp insurance covers your employees in case they’re injured on the job. So, while they’re working on behalf of you, the employer, if your employees are injured while at your office, at a job location, or perhaps they’re traveling. The point is, if they’re injured while they’re working for you, the employer, they’re covered.

Now, states require this coverage. There’s a mandatory coverage usually called “statutory limits.” Those limits are the minimum insurance required for each state. Talk with your insurance agent. They can let you know what those are.

The point is, though, without this coverage, you will get fined by the state if you have employees who are working without work comp insurance. Or worse yet, if one of your employees gets injured and you don’t have work comp insurance, you can be sued. That’s going to be a big issue if you don’t have the right coverage.

Now keep in mind, as an employer you don’t have to carry work comp on yourself. So, you can save some money there. Many employers actually opt out of the work comp coverage for themselves because they may have coverage through a health plan or some other way to provide for their injuries in case they’re injured while on the job. So, keep that in mind that you don’t need that necessarily if you are the employer.

We’re going to do an additional video on how the work comp premiums are calculated. So, take a look at our Website at Philleo.com to see that additional video.

But again, work comp insurance is designed to protect the employees, paid for by the employer, very important. Have it or the state is going to fine you.

So, you understand you need to have Worker’s Comp Insurance because you viewed our video on Worker’s Comp Insurance.

Now, the biggest question to you is, “How much is this going to cost me and my business?” Well, Work Comp is not like a generic policy where you just go out and you buy a policy for Work Comp.

Work Comp is specifically rated and there’s two factors that go into rating it. The first one is what kind of work are your people doing? Someone that’s working inside of an office has a very, very low hazardous job. Someone that is a steel worker, trimming trees, putting on roofs, those are all very high hazardous jobs and the chance for those people to get injured are much more than, let’s say, the office worker.

So, the rate for those types of jobs is going to be much more expensive than an office worker. So, the first thing is what type of job they’re doing. That’s called the “classification” and there’s different codes for every job. Your agent should be able to help you find the appropriate code for your business.

The next thing that Work Comp is based off of, it’s based on payroll. The higher your payroll, the higher your Work Comp. Work Comp goes, it’s based on every $100 of payroll you have, they assign a figure to that and that’s how much they charge you for Work Comp.

When I say “they”, I mean state. The state sets the rate on this. So, it doesn’t matter which insurance company you go to because the rates are going to be the same with every single company. The insurance companies just administer the program.

So, how much is your payroll and what type of work are they doing? Those are the classifications that are going to matter to how much you pay. Now, an agent should be able to help you determine the appropriate classification and then help you get a rate on that.

A couple of quick things on which company you choose. If your payroll is large enough and your premiums are high enough, you may be eligible for what’s known as an “experience modification.”

So, if your losses are better or worse than the average of people in that classification, you may get a lower rate or you might get a more expensive rate depending on your experience.

Experience modification is only assigned after a company has been in business for several years and they have developed a track record.

The next thing is being able to get a dividend. Some insurance companies will give you money back from your Work Comp policy if you didn’t have a claim or if you didn’t have many claims. Those are called dividend.

Again, if your account is large enough, the insurance company may offer you a dividend. A good insurance agent will talk to you about that and incorporate that with the rest of your business insurance.

Usually, the best way to do that is make sure your Worker’s Comp insurance is with the same carrier that you have the rest of your business insurance with.