A “company” is sort of a weird concept, isn’t it? On the one hand, a company is just a name, a brand that has earned some trust with the public. If Coca-Cola lost all of its funding and all of its bottling plants right now, they could hand the name and the secret recipe over to anyone with a basic working knowledge of business, and the new guy would be making millions of dollars within a week, whether that means selling the concept to Pepsi, or brewing it up at home and selling it on the Internet. On the other hand, your company is also the people who work for you, the building in which you conduct business, the phones, the computers, the furniture, the company cars, and more abstract but still very real resources like money, time, energy and staff morale.
What we’re saying is simply that something as complex as a business presents a lot of vulnerabilities, a lot of risk. We might not always think to cover those risks, we might not even know that those risks exist, and that’s why we put together this list of things you might not think to cover, but should:
Commercial Auto Insurance
Easy question here: Do you use own a personal car that you use for business? We mean more than just driving to and from work. Do you ever deliver items in your car? Do you let employees take your car to make bank drops or to pick up supplies? In business, we’re often working with somewhat fluid definition of what’s what. You may come to a point where your personal auto insurance policy isn’t going to get you everything you need should something happen to a vehicle that has transitioned into being a commercial auto. It may be wise to see if you can cover your personal car under your business policy.
Product Liability
Even if you don’t manufacture physical products, if someone decided to sue you over bugs found in your app, it wouldn’t be the first time that had ever happened to anyone. Through your own fault or the user’s, you can never be 100% certain what’s going to happen when someone uses your product for the first (or hundredth) time. Better to cover yourself, and your customers, than face a scandal and a lawsuit.
Data Breach
Bad news: You can’t really copyright an app. Sure, you have a means of recourse if someone steals your code and releases it themselves… Unless they change the app’s name and make sure nobody finds out they stole code directly from you. Good news: Data breach insurance will make sure that you’re covered anyways.
