By Business Insurance 
Insuring your company’s facility is a vital way of ensuring that you get the high-quality coverage you need to operate smoothly. However, did you know that many people and facilities pay far too much for their insurance? It’s true! Poor maintenance is often tied heavily into your insurance costs in ways you don’t understand, and fixing these concerns may reduce insurance costs in a variety of ways.
In this article, we’ll examine why this is the case, give you a better understanding of your overall insurance, and provide a few tips that help to make this an easier thing to assess and manage. By taking these steps, you’ll give yourself the high-quality experience that you need to minimize your insurance costs. You’ll also provide yourself with the help needed to stay on top of your financial needs.
How Insurance Costs Tie Into Maintenance
If you’re looking to reduce insurance costs, you typically need to look at your facility quality itself before you begin. While there are many things that may affect your property’s insurance costs, including geography, the size of your premises, its overall age, your safety and security options, your equipment types, and your fire protection, maintenance may have a surprisingly strong impact in ways you don’t expect.
Why is this the case? Well, your facility maintenance can severely impact the safety, quality, and overall general operation. Let’s pull back a little and examine why this might be the case. First, we’ll break down a few potential applications that you might have in your facility and give you a better understanding of why poor maintenance may impact your bottom line and cause serious financial issues.
Then, we’ll examine a few other elements that you might not anticipate and give you a better understanding of how your insurance operates. In this way, you should get the comprehensive help that you need to avoid serious financial difficulty. Just as importantly, you can keep your facility fully operational and reduce insurance costs in ways that you might not expect you’d do otherwise.
A Typical Facility Maintenance Situation
We’re going to examine a potential maintenance situation at a standard manufacturing facility. The type of facility doesn’t matter much, and we’re going to use fairly basic terms when discussing this factor. That’s because it’s typically much easier to examine these factors in a more general manner: the overall maintenance doesn’t matter much in its specifics as long as the broad outlines are followed.
Let’s say that this manufacturing facility has a variety of production equipment items that require monthly maintenance, including part lubrication and more. These steps are fairly simple but are easy for a facility to miss when not done properly. Your team hasn’t maintained these parts as they should for a few months, and a variety of problems may start developing with your parts over this time.
For example, poor lubrication may cause rubbing parts on your machines that wear away their overall structure and cause serious operational issues. Even worse, these parts might start failing on you! It’s true: you might end up seeing your manufacturing and production equipment failing, including struggling to operate efficiently. Even if they don’t stop running, they make work less effectively and need more attention.
This neglect can build up over time and may affect much more than just your standard production equipment. Before you know it, your whole facility is suffering from serious breakdowns. Even if your situation doesn’t reach this type of pandemic concern, that doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. Even minor changes or breakdowns can seriously cause problems with your operation that you might not expect.
How This Affects Insurance
This information is useful, but how exactly does poor maintenance affect your insurance costs, and how can you use better maintenance to reduce insurance costs? Your insurance company is likely to do regular inspections on your facility to see how it is operating. They’ll likely examine every aspect of your operation, including the maintenance you perform, to see exactly how you are keeping your facility strong.
As a result, if they come to your facility and notice that it is not operating smoothly or that you’ve let various elements of it run down, they’re not going to be very happy with you. They might even downgrade your insurance policy or increase the price. This factor can also be an issue even if your company doesn’t notice these maintenance issues. Why is that the case, and how does it affect you?
Every time you use your insurance policy, your company is going to notice. And what is likely to happen if you let your facility run down through poor maintenance? Regular insurance claims to fix these issues. Though your insurance provider may deny these claims if they’re obviously based on common wear-and-tear issues, they will take note of them and may increase your rates.
Therefore, it is important to take various maintenance steps to reduce insurance costs for your facility. Whether you work in manufacturing, commercial, or retail facilities, you can take many steps to help yourself in this way. In the next section, we’ll break down several ways you can avoid these problems and the type of maintenance that makes the most sense for your needs as a business owner. It can also help you plan these steps with minimal challenge at the same time.
Types of Maintenance You May Want to Consider
If you’re trying to reduce insurance costs by getting maintenance, there are many steps that you can take. We carefully brainstormed a few of the most common problems that may impact various commercial or industrial facilities and compiled them here for your easier understanding.
Thankfully, you can take many of these steps without spending a lot of money, though others may cost a bit more than anticipated. That said, you need to take as many as you can to keep your facility safe. Your specific needs may vary depending on your company and its overall operation.
That said, we strongly recommend that you take the time to understand your available options here and weigh which are the most problematic for your company. Start with these factors first and then move on to more minor issues, spending as much money as is necessary to get repair help.
Note: these steps may not just be one-time things you do to help keep your facility safe. Many of them may require multiple visits over several years to execute properly. That’s the thing about your company’s maintenance: you can’t lose your due diligence. Know when to schedule various repairs, and you should have little difficulty getting a great result for your facility’s unique insurance and maintenance needs.
Plumbing Help
If you’re not sure about what kind of steps to start with, a good plumbing service might be a nice stepping stone. Fixing up your facility’s plumbing will help in many ways by ensuring that your facility’s water runs smoothly. This step may also help cut back on potential costs you might not expect.
Thankfully, there are many different repairs you can do here. For example, a drain plumbing service may help out by ensuring your water drains smoothly throughout your facility. Just as importantly, you can replace various fixtures and appliances that don’t work smoothly to keep your insurance costs low.
Elevator Fixes
Have you considered serious elevator maintenance for your facility? If you have any elevators, you shouldn’t ignore this factor. Dangerously under repaired elevators may put your facility in a very problematic spot and cause serious complications that may impact your insurance costs.
Likewise, elevator modernization may help by introducing newer and better elevator concepts that keep your customers and employees safe. Just as importantly, these steps might help to streamline your facility’s operation by ensuring that you don’t run into any long-term maintenance problems.
Efficiency Checks
Did you know that your facility’s energy use is probably incredibly inefficient? We’re not taking a shot at you here, mind you. It’s just that most companies don’t pay enough attention to their energy use and don’t understand how improved energy efficiency may reduce insurance costs over the long term.
For example, you can contact an energy auditor who will carefully examine your energy use and figure out where you could improve it. This type of maintenance is preventative and should be something you take seriously when looking to improve your overall insurance costs as a business.
Better Roofing
You can also reduce insurance costs by improving your roofing. Your roof helps to protect you against various wear and tear issues and can also keep your facility from suffering any serious damage. Without proper roof maintenance, your roofing is likely to end up in pretty rough shape.
As a result, you should talk to roofers to see what kind of help you can get for this process. These professionals will provide regular maintenance to your facility and can also take the time time to better understand the necessary repairs you may need to minimize serious financial complications.
Water Checks
Another way to improve your maintenance and reduce insurance costs is to make sure you check your water flow regularly. This process includes making sure your drains move properly and that all of your appliances and other items use an appropriate amount of water. An expert may help you with this process.
Don’t forget to consider a hydrant flow test for any hydrants in or near your facility. These hydrants may need checks to make sure that firefighters have enough water to help during serious emergencies. This type of maintenance will generally greatly impress your insurance companies in unexpected ways.
Asbestos Inspections
While it might be hard to believe, many facilities (particularly older and rarely maintained industrial companies) may still have asbestos in their construction! This fact is critical because you can reduce insurance costs if you get rid of any of these items or at least get an abatement test.
You can contact an asbestos inspection company and ask them to see whether or not you have any asbestos spread throughout your company. They can then remove anything that they find and give you the assurance that you have none. In this way, you can save a lot on your insurance.
HVAC Help
You can also reduce insurance costs by working with HVAC professionals to ensure your facility runs smoothly. Good heating and cooling not only keep your employees and customers comfortable but minimizes the risk of things like burst plumbing pipes in the winter and much more.
Thankfully, you can call heating and cooling services to inspect your furnace, air conditioner, air ducts, and much more. Taking these steps can help to ensure that you don’t run into any problems later and will give your insurance company the chance to consider reducing your premium costs.
Electrical Help
Lastly, you should seriously consider commercial electrical services if you haven’t gotten your facility checked out lately. It’s not uncommon for many companies to miss out on common symptoms of electrical failure and to let their facilities get into pretty rough shape as a result of this failure.
Thankfully, high-quality maintenance steps can help you avoid this problem. Talk to an electrical team and see what kind of repairs and upgrades they can provide for you. They can put in modern wiring, better outlets, improved transformers, and take many more steps to keep you safe from serious issues.
As you can see, there are many ways you can reduce insurance costs in your facility and ensure that it operates smoothly and efficiently. Do you know how the old saying goes? “You have to spend money to earn money.” Yes, these maintenance steps may cost a bit of money for your operation. However, they’re more than worth it if you can get lower insurance costs. So, make sure you talk to all involved parties (including board members) and discuss the importance of facility maintenance. You won’t be disappointed.