INSURANCE MATTERS

Christopher Bates, Divisional Director, Corporate and Commercial Division, UIB Group.

As businesses of all sizes are being hit with the stresses and the knock-on effects from the COVID-19 coronavirus situation, surely at some point now or in the near future we need to look back at this situation and learn from the issues that we faced (or are still facing).

There will be many if not all of you reading this, be it self-employed; business owners; entrepreneurs (call yourself what you want), that will have lost out financially and faced unneeded stresses. Some will be talking about this for the next 20 years, whilst others will actively seek to protect themselves and their businesses from not going through a similar thing again (be it coronavirus or any situation that can deem us out of pocket and running at 1,000% mental capacity) So ...what’s the best way to learn from this? The phase is called “Business Continuity Planning” or BCP for those who love to sound like they know what they’re talking about. Let’s be frank, no one could have predicted and in turn protected themselves for a specific situation as like COVID-19, but there are many simple steps that can be taken to reduce your financial loss and save your mental health (what’s left of it). Business Continuity Planning is the process of giving some thought in advance to how you would maintain service to customers and recover from damage to, or loss of, a particular element of your business and developing those thoughts into positive plans. An example away from the dreaded C-word (I mean Coronavirus, not the naughty c-word)…I am a selfemployed kitchen installer and I’m involved in a work place injury, where I’m off work for 12 weeks. It’s my own fault as I was working alone. My work has been steady for the last few years, so I bought a van on hirepurchase; I pay my van and public liability insurance monthly; I have a mortgage; a couple of grand debt on credit cards; but little to no savings. I’m married with two kids. My wife is a stay at home Mum. I, like most people, live month to month, pay cheque to pay cheque. So how am I going to survive in the above example? No income for 12 weeks is going to cripple me! Food, mortgage, household bills, van payments etc. all need to be paid...I’m trying to recover physically, yet I’m now causing myself mental injuries through stress. The question to ask yourself is how long can you last with no income?

This is by no means an article to give you all the answers, because some questions just can’t be answered, it’s an article to make you think of how to protect you and your business if something unexpected happens. Take some time, when you’re not busy doing other things, to think about Business Continuity Planning. It could save you a lot of unneeded financial loss and save your sanity. www.uibdirect.co.uk