Business Insurance

On a non-technical note, one of the things I had to do recently was to get business insurance for my company.  That turned out to be a much bigger pain than I thought it would be.

What happened is that one of my clients decided that they were going to pay all of their contractors through a third party billing agency called MBO Partners.  But MBO Partners had a requirement that in order to be paid through them as a contractor I had to have $1,000,000 of General Liability insurance and workers' compensation insurance.

I got one referral to a business insurance agent from a friend.  He had to collect a whole bunch of information from me over the phone in order to get a quote.  He had to call back to get more information he forgot.  After a couple weeks, he got me a quote from American Family that was about $1060/year.  But that wasn't even official, so I waited longer for him to send an official quote.  This was taking so long that I contacted another agent I just found using Google.  He quoted me a much lower number, but the application process was just as slow and he was slow to return my calls when I wondered what was taking so long.  I contacted yet another agency and they never even called back.  This all dragged on for over one month.

Finally, on my 4th try, I found the site I needed.  It's called NetQuote.  Similar to car insurance sites (and NetQuote also does car insurance quotes), you just fill out one form on their site and they send it to 5-10 business insurance agencies.  I got 3 or more return calls within minutes!  One sent me a great email with comparisons of two plans.  But I ended up going with the first agency that called me because they were able to get me an official quote within an hour, rather than the weeks it took for the first agents I contacted!  And their price for the GL and Workers Comp combined was $715/year.

By the way, I also looked into Professional Insurance, i.e. "Errors and Ommisions", which gives you coverage int he case that a software mistake costs your client money.  The application is *way* longer for that and the only quote I got so far for that was about $1000/year.