With all of the skills and experience you have as a landscaping contractor, you may assume that buying insurance to keep you covered on the job is not all that necessary. Too many small business owners make the same assumption and later find themselves in hot water because they have inadvertently caused damage to a customer's property. Even though landscaping mostly takes place outside of the home, there are still damages that can occur with this line of work. Take a look at these three damages that could happen while you are doing landscape work on a customer's property.
You accidentally damage existing plants and trees.
A customer tells you that there is a specific tree or plant they want to keep incorporated in their landscape, so you do what you can to work around them while making changes. Unfortunately, the stress to these trees and plants causes them to die. It is not unheard of for a landscaping contractor to be sued by a property owner because they destroyed a plant or tree on their property, and this is oftentimes a lot easier to do than avoid. Plus, there are some plants and trees that are extremely expensive or hard to come by. If you have landscaping contractor insurance, the costs to replace these plants may be covered.
You accidentally cause water damage to the home.
You implement a sprinkler system and fail to take into account the slope of one pesky little area. Over the course of a few weeks, water drainage from one sprinkler head leaks down into the basement of the home because of it. This is just one way you could cause water damage to a customer's home as a landscaper. Because you will often be working with water, it is best to have some form of protection in place just in case something gets damaged.
You accidentally damage a customer's vehicle.
It is always a good idea to ask customers to park their vehicles in the garage if you are mowing, weed eating, or doing other jobs that can involve flying debris. However, this may not always be a possibility. If a misguided limb, rock, and bit of tree root flies through the air and dings a customer's vehicle, their car insurance company will be looking to you to cover the damages. These kinds of damages are not always an inexpensive repair, so having contractor's insurance can truly save you in these situations.
To learn more about landscaping contractor insurance, check out websites like http://www.olynorthwest.com.
Share
