When you start your own business, even when you’re working at home, you need to think about insurance. We’ll show you what you really need.

We’ve put some guidelines together for you. We’ll cover what you legally have to get and what you should consider as you take your decisions.

Here are two golden rules:

• Insurance is all about covering reasonable risk. It’s not about trying to think of the most obscure possibilities.
• Insurance is about protecting yourself against calamity and disaster, so don’t try and insure for minor events. You’ll lose money.

So what Small Business Owner insurance  should you get?

1. Workers Compensation (often called Workers comp).If you plan on hiring anyone this is a legal requirement in all states except Texas. It basically covers you for injuries to your staff. You as an owner, don’t need this and it also not necessary for contractors and volunteers.
2. General liability – Covers legal expenses for claims of negligence that relate to injury or property damage. From my perspective, these are the two main insurance policies. Now there are others you may want to consider.
3. Criminal insurance - This is covering you for theft of equipment and inventory, employee embezzlement , vandalism. We’ve never used this type of insurance, mainly because most of our businesses have been built around IP 9intellectual property) rather than inventory and physical goods.
4. Internet business insurance - Insurance companies have tried to sell this to us endlessly, but we’ve resisted in most cases. You’re covering yourself against hackers, viruses, electronic copyright infringement, etc.
5. Home based business insurance – Be careful if you’re working out of home because your home owners policy does not cover your business. In our experience general liability insurance and workers comp covers most of what you’ll need here.
6. Key man insurance - At Rob’s first company the venture investor insisted that this was taken out to cover him. the idea is that a persons death or illness will critically damage the company. It’s an unusual policy for small businesses at an early stage as you are your own key person!  it seems to be more a venture investor requirement.
7. Malpractice insurance - Generally taken by professionals such as doctor’s and accountants
8. Others - There is a variety of other policies from the obvious  commercial auto insurance through to executive kidnapping. Yeah, when I was running global marketing for a multi billion dollar business, I sat in hotel bars in Latin America with other execs and this was a frequent topic of discussion.

Different businesses have different needs. if you’re dealing with dangerous manufacturing equipment, you have a different risk profile to the person working on their computer at home.

We wanted to show you what’s available. Ultimately you need to decide the best small business owner insurance for you.