There's no such thing as profit without risk. Every business carries its own hazards, from the multinational corporation to the six-year-old with a lemonade stand. If you're trying to earn a dollar, there is going to be some risk involved. The question is whether there's any such
thing as a business with no reasonably insurable risks.
The answer: You can reduce your insurable risks. You can go out of your way to make sure that your business requires as little insurance as possible. However, you're almost always going to run into that one potential hazard that you don't want to cover on your own dime.
The High Risks Of Low Risk Industries
As an example, let's consider one of the lowest risk industries: Blogging.
As a blogger, you don't have a company car or inventory, you don't have any products for customers to be injured by, you probably don't have any employees and you might not even have an office. You can type up blog posts from a comfy seat at your favorite coffee shop. That's about as low-risk as you can get.
Well, tell that to Michael Frisch, an ethics counsel at Georgetown University Law Center who moonlights as a legal blogger at the Legal Profession Blog. Frisch was sued by JP Szykmowicz for defamation of character owing to a series of blog posts made between 2012 and 2018. Frisch is a legal expert. He knows better than most of us what does and does not constitute defamation, and he was sued for simply writing something and posting it on the internet. If it can happen to him, it can happen to any of us.
Now suppose you take a high-risk industry and cut around some of that risk by running a business on a smaller scale, like running a food truck instead of a restaurant. Take Enrique Guerrero for example, who accepted a $50,000 investment to expand his business, and was then sued when the investor didn't see any profits coming his way.
The fact is that no matter how much business insurance you have, you should try to build a hazard-proof business. You'll pay less for insurance, and you'll have fewer claims to make. There's always going to be some risk, and it's better if those risks are insured.
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