So, you have decided to start a shipping business? You already have a lot of big competition out there, but if you know how to undersell the big shipping magnates, you have a shot at success. As you start up the business, you will need five types of business insurance. Make sure you have all of the following, or your business could go belly-up in a hurry.

Commercial Property Insurance

This type of insurance protects your business property. If there is a warehouse fire, or a tornado wipes out the office, or a flood kills the engines on half of your shipping trucks, the commercial property insurance restores your business property to its former glory. Since the trucks and property alone are the very heart of your business, you want to make sure these are covered.

Commercial Vehicle Insurance

Commercial vehicle insurance covers your trucks in the event of an accident. Shipping trucks are large, extremely heavy, and it only takes a slip of the brakes or a patch of ice to send a truck careening into other drivers on the road. Thousands of dollars in damage are done to shipping trucks every year, not to mention the vehicles these trucks hit. 

Workers Compensation Insurance

Every business that has employees has to cover work-related injuries to its employees. If you do not, your employees can sue for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You could lose everything with just a crushed arm injury, all because you did not purchase workers compensation insurance for your employees.

Professional Liability Insurance

In business, reputation is everything. Claims of fraud and misrepresentation, followed by lawsuits, whether substantiated or not, cost you your reputation, not just your money and your business. You cannot restore your good name if you do not have this type of insurance to prevent libel and defamation during the trials. This type of insurance also helps pay for legal representation, something which no one can be without when they are being sued.

Business Interruption Insurance

Shipping companies are always at the mercy of the weather. Look at the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and around the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico. The devastation has made shipping in, around, and through these areas problematic. Closer to home, your phone lines, your electrical power, and even your heat for the warehouses could be shut off from bad weather. That places your business in quite a predicament because you lose money every hour that customers cannot communicate with you and you cannot process orders properly.

This type of insurance puts you back on track in as short a time as possible. It provides you with emergency funds to find backup power sources, keep the warehouses at the correct temperatures for what you ship by paying for emergency repair services, etc.. While these incidents may be few and far between, you do not want to take the risk of having business shut down for a day or more.

Other Business Insurance Products

There are other business insurance products as well. Ask your insurance agent to recommend some other products that may prove to be invaluable to your budding shipping company. Some of these might include a group health insurance plan to reduce missed work days, a business owner's policy, an umbrella policy for business owners, and even a general liability policy.

Buying all kinds of insurance to protect your company is expensive. However, when you compare the costs of everything that could go wrong against the replacement costs and court costs, the monthly premiums are a drop in the bucket by comparison. Since your shipping company is brand-new, you want to be certain you are covered for every possible situation that could arise in your first five years of operation. For more information, contact companies like Insure With U.S.