Keeping a business profitable is hard enough when you’re working in the food services industry and everything is running smoothly. When something unexpected happens and you need to make an insurance claim, it becomes even harder – and that assumes the claim gets paid.
Many of us in the food service industry know stories of businesses that have had to deal with claims after a fire or a natural disaster where the business was underinsured, or the insurance company has denied a claim. Recently, the team at Complete Foods were facing this exact issue when their insurance company said their policy wouldn’t cover the costs involved in recovering from a fire to their forklift, even though they were paying a substantial premium.
As the owner of Complete Foods, Tony Osky describes it, they couldn’t believe when their claim wasn’t paid. “Our previous broker had us paying massive premiums across a number of policies – especially our Property Insurance because we’ve got cool stores with EPS panels. After the fire, they told me they wouldn’t give us the payout to replace the forklift because our excess was too high. It left me wondering what was the point of having insurance.”
“Insurance for food storage warehouses can be very complicated” according to Mark Van Der Haar, Managing Director at AB Phillips Insurance Brokers. “The environment has a lot of moving parts that all carry their own risk, and sometimes it’s about making sure that particular aspects of that environment are covered by different policies. We’ve had years to grow our expertise, so know where to look for solutions to particular problems.”
“When Tony came to us, I did a little digging and it was obvious that the claim had been misclassified. It shouldn’t have been claimed under the property insurance policy with its large excess, it should have been claimed under the motor fleet policy, that included a provision for the pallet-stacker type of forklift that had caught on fire.”
“Mark and the AB Phillips team not only got us the payout for the denied claim, they then went and got us tens of thousands of dollars of reductions in premiums and adjusted our policies to include additional cover where there were evident holes. Their ads say “get really covered” and I totally see what they mean. They now get all our business and I happily send my friends to them.” (Tony Osky, Owner)
If you want to know what it’s like to be really covered, reach out to Alan Limpyer or Mark Van Der Haar at AB Phillips expert team on 1300 242 136 or email them on [email protected]
www.abphillips.com.au
[email protected]
1300 242 136