A business owner rarely thinks about insurance until a customer, a landlord or an event organizer asks for proof of it. Reviews are a big part of what a concierge agency does, so when we sit down with a small business, the same handful of gaps shows up again and again. They aren’t anyone’s fault. They just come from buying insurance to meet one requirement at a time rather than looking at the whole business.
The first one is products. If you make, sell or even rebrand something, you carry some responsibility for what happens after it leaves your hands. A candle that starts a fire, a skincare product that causes a reaction, a part that fails. Plenty of owners assume their general liability handles this completely, and sometimes it doesn’t, or not in the way they expect. It’s worth understanding how product liability works if anything you sell could ever hurt someone.
The second is the stuff that moves. Insurance people call it inland marine, which is a strange name for something very ordinary. It’s the equipment, tools and inventory that leave your building. A photographer’s cameras in the car, a contractor’s tools on a job site, samples in a trunk on the way to a trade show. A lot of property policies only cover things at your listed address, so the moment they’re out the door, the protection can quietly stop.
The third comes up every spring and summer. A market, a festival, a pop up shop, a trade show booth. Organizers usually ask vendors for a certificate of insurance, and owners often aren’t sure whether their policy actually extends to a temporary space away from their shop. Some policies do, some need an addition, and for one-off appearances there’s also one day event coverage built for exactly this.
None of these gaps is dramatic until the day it matters. The fix is usually to look across everything the business does, not just the address on the lease, and let the coverage follow the business wherever it goes. For many owners the backbone of that is a well built business owner policy.
A review takes one conversation, and it costs nothing extra. The gaps are much easier to fix before anyone needs them.