You started a business. You didn't sign up to become an insurance expert too.

One policy, or several? Most small businesses hold their core covers, property, liability and business interruption, together in what insurers call a business pack: one renewal, one premium, sections you still choose individually. It's usually simpler and cheaper than buying the same covers apart. But a pack is a container, not a strategy.

The packs we place do not include cyber as a section, and management liability is only a pack section from a couple of the insurers on the platform. Those, and any cover a pack's insurer simply doesn't write, are when a standalone policy earns its keep. The question isn't pack versus standalone. It's whether every section, wherever it lives, matches what your business has to lose.

Not sure which of this applies to you? Try the Insurance Needs Finder, or skip to a conversation and we'll work it out on the phone.

You can tick every box on an online quote form and still be dangerously exposed, because the form was written for an average business. Your business isn't average to you. The classic version is stopping at public liability and property because they're the covers everyone's heard of. Cyber and management liability get skipped because they sound like something only a big company needs.

They aren't. In FY2024-25, small businesses that reported a cyber incident to the Australian Signals Directorate lost an average of $56,600 each, up 14% on the year before (Australian Signals Directorate, Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024-25). A ransomware attack or a scam invoice doesn't check your turnover before it costs you money.

The flip side is paying for cover you don't need because it came bundled in, while the section that actually matters to your business sits underinsured or missing entirely. If you own the building your business trades from, that underinsurance risk runs deeper again. Commercial Building Insurance explains how a sum insured that looks fine on paper can fail you at claim time.

Plenty of business insurance is sold the way home insurance is: pick a plan, click buy, hope it fits. That works until it doesn't, and by then it's claim time, not shopping time.

We work the other way round. For most business pack risks we put your business in front of a panel of insurers who write that cover competitively, not just the first one to say yes. We'll also flag a further specialist option where it's genuinely cheaper without being worse. You get a choice built from real competition, not a single quote dressed up as one.

We also do something few brokerages in Australia do. We show you what we earn on every invoice, and have done since we started in 2010. If you're paying for advice you're entitled to know what it costs. Most of the industry would rather you didn't ask.

We compared six business pack wordings side by side in September 2026. Four exclude flood unless it has been added and shows on the schedule. On the other two we found no way to add it, so damage at your premises from a river or creek breaking its banks is not covered.

If you close for a renovation, a quiet season or a move, check the empty-premises clock. On four of the six, cover for loss or damage is generally excluded once the premises has sat unoccupied for more than 90 consecutive days. One cuts in after 30 days. Another cuts in after 60 days and reaches every section, liability included.

Before we place a pack, we read the vacancy clause and tell you which version you would be holding. Where flood can be added, we show you what it adds to the premium, which near a creek can be a large loading, and you decide whether to take it. Already on a pack? A broker can check yours on the phone.

If you run your business from premises you lease, For Business Owner Tenants is built for exactly that starting point.

If you own the building your business trades out of, you're both the occupier and the landlord in one. For Business Owner-Occupiers covers both sides at once, because most generic advice misses that overlap entirely.

If you own a commercial building purely as an investment and lease it to someone else's business, this page isn't really about you. For Commercial Property Owners and Commercial Landlords Insurance are the better starting points.

Sole trader, small team, or dozens of staff and a fleet on the road: the routes above still apply. It's the sections and the limits inside them that scale with what you'd have to replace.

Assuming the pack covers everything. A business pack is a container you fill with the sections you choose. An unticked section isn't a gap the insurer quietly fills in. It's a risk you're carrying yourself, whether or not you know it.

Assuming theft is covered under property or contents cover. On the business pack wordings we place, it is not. Theft is its own separate section, chosen and paid for on purpose. Even then it typically only pays in full for forced or violent entry, an armed hold-up, or a short list of other named triggers. A break-in with no forced entry, or stock that simply goes missing, is often outside cover an owner assumed was already there. If theft matters to your business, check it's ticked as its own section, not assumed inside the one next to it.

Setting the Contents and Stock sum insured low because it feels expensive. It is exactly the wrong section to go small on, and stock is insured for what your business paid for it, not what you'd sell it for. Walk the site and price everything you can see at full replacement cost: fitout, contents, electronic equipment, furniture, plant, machinery, stock and customers' goods. Make that total the sum insured. The full walkthrough of why owners get this backwards lives on Retail Insurance.

Answering the subcontractor payments question from memory. It reads like a pricing question and it is not only one. The main reason an insurer asks what you pay subcontractors is to rate the risk of one of them being hurt on your job. A business that engages contractors rather than employing people pays no workers' compensation for them. So that injury risk transfers across to the liability section of the pack, where it arrives as a personal injury claim against your business.

The common misread is to think the question is about covering damage your subcontractors do to someone else's property. It is not. It is about your own liability when a person engaged to work for you is injured, and on many wordings the declaration is what switches that cover on.

Direct insurer wordings commonly exclude personal injury to subcontractors by endorsement, while the Steadfast badged wordings we place generally cover it where the payments have been disclosed. Declare the real figure, and say so if it changes mid-year. The full picture is in If a subcontractor is hurt on your job, can you be held liable?.

Insuring in the wrong name. The policy needs to name the actual trading entity, the company or the trust, not a director personally and not whoever happened to fill in the form. Get this wrong and a real claim can find a policy that technically doesn't apply to the business that needs it.

Where a trust is involved, know who the legal trustee actually is. It's common for an owner to assume they are the trustee personally when a corporate trustee holds the entity, and the difference decides whose name belongs on the policy. Check the ABN is listed too; a policy with no ABN on it is a common gap we find at first review.

Whose name should be on a business insurance policy?

Every entity and person who actually runs or owns part of the business, exactly as the business operates, because the insured name decides who is covered. When a customer was injured during a family-run tourism business's outdoor activity, the insurer questioned whether the operator was even a named insured. CIB reconstructed the policy history from its own records, showed the cover had always been intended to include them, and the insurer granted indemnity with no excess to pay.

The name on a policy is not paperwork. It decides who is actually insured, and getting it wrong can leave the real operator exposed.

A family-run tourism business ran a hands-on outdoor activity for its customers. The family had set the business up years earlier under a structure meant to cover everyone's part in it. When a customer was injured, the insurer questioned whether the person who actually ran the activity was a named insured.

Our account director reconstructed the policy's full history and produced file notes going back years, showing the cover had always been intended to include that operator. On that evidence, the insurer accepted the intent and granted indemnity, with no excess to pay.

This is why continuity and record-keeping are real broker value. A policy that changes hands, or a broker who does not keep the history, cannot make this argument when it counts. The insured name, the entity or trust, and the activities described all have to line up with how the business actually operates, and someone has to be able to prove it years later. What was secured here is indemnity: the policy responding as it should, with no excess to pay, while the underlying claim continues.

Treating renewal as a formality. A business that added a vehicle, hired staff, started selling online or moved into a bigger space has changed its risk. If nobody told the insurer, the policy is covering the business you had last year, not the one you're running now.

Buying on price alone. The cheapest quote is cheap for a reason, usually a lower limit, a narrower definition, or an exclusion nobody read aloud. Certainty costs a little more than the bare minimum, and it's worth it exactly once, on the day you need it.