Case study
Case study
Case study
Marley & Sons is a four-person joinery workshop that had been trading for eleven years on property cover alone. A fit-out contract for a restaurant group required general liability at a limit they did not hold, and the certificate had to be on file before anyone could start on site.
The owner’s difficulty was not price. It was that three brokers had sent three quotes that all claimed to meet the requirement, and none of them read the same.
The Insurize solution
We took the contract’s insurance clause and turned it into a checklist, then tested each quote against it line by line.
General liability, at the limit the contract named
Cover for injury to third parties and damage to their property, at the per-claim and aggregate limits the contract specified — not the headline limit, which two of the three quotes had quietly halved for products liability.
Completed operations
The clause required cover for work already handed over. One of the quotes excluded it entirely, which would have made the certificate worthless the day the job finished.
Tools and equipment away from the workshop
Not required by the contract, but the workshop was carrying about the value of a van in tools to sites every week with nothing insuring them off the premises.
Employers’ cover checked against headcount
Two of the four staff were long-term contractors. We confirmed how the insurer classified them, in writing, before binding.
Results and impact
The certificate was issued within four working days and the contract started on time. Three months later a client slipped on offcuts near an unfinished counter and made a claim for a broken wrist.
The claim settled at just under the workshop’s annual premium multiplied by six, and the business paid its deductible and nothing else. Without cover it would have taken the year’s profit and the owner’s savings.
Since then:
- Liability limits are reviewed each January against the largest live contract
- Certificates are issued directly to clients from the account, not chased by email
- Site photographs are taken at the end of each day, which shortened the second claim considerably
Conclusion
Small businesses tend to buy liability cover because a contract demands it, and then never read what they bought. Reading the clause first and the quotes second took an afternoon, and it was the difference between a certificate that satisfied a procurement team and one that would have satisfied nobody at claim time.
