Bulletproof your workshop with insurance.
This is Bulletproof Your Workshop and we are talking about insurance, my name is Cathryn Warburton, I am the Legal Lioness and I like to help you future-proof your business and future-proof your workshop so you can avoid problems that might occur in the future. My best and biggest piece of advice I can give you regarding insurance, when you run a course, whether it’s an online course or a face-to-face course, is talk to an insurance broker.
I’m not an insurance expert, but I can give you some information and some background, however I recommend that you talk to an insurance broker. The kind of things that you would like to cover off with a broker is number one, public liability. Public liability really relates to if somebody hurts themselves while they attend your course. So, for example perhaps the stairs are slippery, they slip down, tragedy strikes, they become paralyzed, they can’t do their chosen job. So, the public liability insurance will cover you for claims that somebody like that might make against you because they got injured on your course.
The other kind of insurance to think about is professional indemnity insurance. This is not for people who are business coaches, professional indemnity insurance would be for somebody like me, who’s a lawyer. I have two types of public indemnity, if in my workshops, I provide professional advice, and for whatever reason, things go wrong with somebody applying that advice, the professional indemnity insurance covers me if that person makes a claim. So if I gave someone the wrong information and they’ve suffered a loss as a result of the incorrect information the professional indemnity will cover me for those mistakes made in a professional capacity.
So we’ve got public liability, professional indemnity, then you might want to think about the third type which is just general insurance. The general insurance covers you off for, if something happens for example, to your equipment, if it gets stolen while you’re traveling. It might cover you if somebody comes to your premises while you’re running a workshop, and bumps a desk resulting in another attendees’ expensive iPad falling off the desk and smashing, that general insurance may cover you off for the damage to that equipment. I’m saying may, because insurance is a complex area, and you really need to get the advice of an insurance broker.
Tell them that you want to cover off anyone who’s injured, or killed, at your workshop, any damage to property that happens at your workshop, whether it’s online or face to face. Are you responsible if you run an online workshop and you send an email inviting people and that email’s got a virus in it for example? Then that virus locks down the person’s computer and they can only get out of the lock down by paying $10,000, are you liable for that?
Now, I’m not sure of the answer to that to be honest, but find out from your insurance broker if you can be covered for that kind of thing, or if you need to be covered for that kind of thing. Again, I must stress, I am not an insurance expert, and my absolute best advice for you is to talk to your insurance broker, and tell them you want these three risks covered off. If there’s anything else that often goes wrong in your industry or problems you’ve had in your workshops, you can add them to the list and find out from the broker whether those risks can be covered off as well. So, all the best with insurance, it really is worth getting cover.
