Insuring your club can be quick and easy. But like most things, there’s a balance between convenience and quality.
You can have a quick ready meal plonked in front of you in three and a half minutes. It’ll be cheap, it’ll be convenient, but it won’t be prepared with the quality ingredients and care of a restaurant whose chef takes the time to make sure the meal is exactly as you’d like it.
Step One – decide what insurance you need
If you are a club with a permanent premises, you’ll need different cover compared to a club without a permanent premises. Perhaps you have a pitch or playing field within the ground of your sports club that needs insuring too, or an outbuilding that houses expensive machinery or equipment?
Make a list of everything you need to insure – including approximate cost of stock. If you haven’t already, arrange a building valuation to determine your Sums Insured as this will help an insurer decide what level of cover you need. The last thing you need is to end up underinsured – and, ultimately, it’s your responsibility to make sure they’ve correctly valuated their Sums Insured.
Online quotes or even a telephone conversation with a broker can’t help you set accurate Sums Insured. Club Insure offer a valuation service to help you avoid underinsurance.
Step Two – consider the extras
Whether you’re volunteer run or have a whole team of employees, you’ll need Employer’s Liability and of course Public Liability Insurance. You should also consider what would happen if your club was forced to close for a few weeks or event months. If you couldn’t survive short-term without trading, then you’ll need Business Interruption cover too.
Step Three – pick your insurer
You’ve got a few options here. You can buy ‘off the shelf’ cover from an online comparison website or quote form. This will be fairly generic cover, but it won’t be personalised to your individual needs. It’s likely this kind of cover will be cheap but, as we explained above, the quality is likely to be under par. Comparison sites might leave you with gaps in your cover, too, which could spell disaster if something does happen and you’re not insured properly. Working with an industry expert will help spot areas of cover you might not even have thought of!
You could have a conversation with insurers directly. Shop around, compare quotes, read through varying policies. You’re likely to get a more tailored service this way, but it’s a time intensive process and as you don’t have an existing relationship with an insurer you probably won’t get the best price. And you certainly won’t be receiving quality customer service. Again, the slight problem with working with insurers directly is you might not have a full review of the insurance you need – you might only get a quote for the specific insurance cover you’ve asked for.
With both of the above options, you need to be incredibly careful setting your Sums Insured accurately. You should always have a professional valuation done as, whatever option you go with, you will be responsible for any underinsurance.
An insurance broker does the hard work for you.
They’ll assess your needs and use their expertise to relay this to insurers. Insurers trust brokers to correctly assess and declare risks, and therefore offer strong prices to reflect this. All you need to do is have a chat with your broker and they’ll do the rest.
A broker will let you know about every aspect of cover they think you’ll need, from the more obvious Public Liability Insurance through to Business Interruption and Cyber cover. They’ll also advise what thorough valuation service you need, so you should never end up underinsured when working with a reputable broker.
Obviously, we think the right choice is to turn to an expert and let an insurance broker do the hard work for you. But this is a personal choice and ultimately depends on your business model and budget. It’s always worth having a conversation with a broker to find out what they can bring to the table, though.
Step Four – send an enquiry
An enquiry is simply a way of saying hello and providing a few extra details. But it’s the first step to getting your insurance sorted.
If you send an enquiry to Club Insure, one of our team will respond as soon as possible to touch base with you and find out a little more about your club.
Step Five – initial visit
As we mentioned earlier, you should already have a building valuation and know your Sums Insured – or we can arrange this through our valuation service. An insurance expert will be able to conduct a confidential review and advise on different types of cover you may have not considered (such as cyber insurance).
Your insurance broker will then beaver away in the background to find the best possible policy for your needs, at the best price. They’ll present this policy to you – and all they need is a yay or nay.
Step Six – receive and check your policy
It’s important you check every insurance policy thoroughly. An insurance broker like Club Insure will never knowingly leave you underinsured, but you should still make sure no details have been missed.
Go through a mental checklist of every aspect of your policy and make sure it’s enough to cover your business should the worst happen. If you want to chat through this with an expert, an insurance broker will happily go through your policy and explain each section to you.
If you are happy with your policy and have no amendments, then voila! You’re covered. And should you need to make a claim, all you’ll need to do is call up your insurer or broker and let them know the details.
Step Seven – read newsletters and insurance advice
Legislation and regulation are updated regularly. Risk management advice is often circulated. Experts provide new advice and information. To stay up to date and make sure you don’t miss a beat, sign up to relevant newsletters and keep an eye out on industry blogs (such as Club Insure’s blog).
For example, do you know how often you should clear gutters or check your flat roof? Would you know about new employment laws or risk management trends? You know the club industry inside out, but noone’s expecting you to be an insurance expert. But you should keep one step ahead of the risks likely to impact your club, so you can mitigate them. This, in turn, will help you to minimise the chance of your club needing to make a claim.
Step Eight – prepare for renewal
You shouldn’t leave it until the last minute before renewing your policy. Even in a short space of time, the risks associated with your club could have changed and there could be new types of insurance available to help cover you against modern risks such as terrorism.
At Club Insure we touch base with our customers throughout the year to make sure additional risks are covered, and to offer risk management advice. If a risk can be mitigated, such as installing CCTV or purchasing flood resistant doors and windows, then your broker could be able to bring your insurance premiums down at renewal.
The Club Insure team get to know customers by name – not just by policy number. Get in touch with the team and start your insurance journey with us.
