AP 0549: Do I Need Insurance for My Online Business?

AskPat 549 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 549 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

Alright, here's today's question from Liz.

Liz: Hey, Pat, this is Liz at livenaturally.com, and I saw you speak at LeadPages conference and you were terrific, thank you so much for speaking, it was a great talk, and go Backstreet Boys. Anyway, my question is about business insurance. I have health and wellness coaching online business. I have liability insurance because I teach live yoga classes and fitness classes, but my question is, do you need business insurance for an online business? Thanks for all you do, love the podcast, bye-bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Liz, thank you so much for the question. I'm glad to hear you have liability insurance for what you do, I think that's important for certain kinds of businesses, of course. In terms of business insurance, online business insurance and things like that, I actually have that too, and it actually came in handy when my site was hacked in March of 2013. My site was down for about a week, and as a result, it was estimated that I lost about $15,000, which is pretty insane when you think about it. It shows you why it's important for, if you have a business and it's primarily online, why insurance is something that you should think about.

Now, it's not necessarily required, and of course, I'm not a professional, so I would make sure you connect with a professional, somebody on your end who you work with, who you trust, who can give you information specifically for you, and your specific position. For me, it came in handy in 2013, because I had lost about $15,000 and I got some of that back. Now that, some of that back, was 20, 30% of it, but it was still very helpful because that was something that was very unfortunate to happen. What happened was, some hackers came in and they just totally overloaded the servers, and all my websites on that one particular server went down, and including SPI and a couple others. Some of my other niche sites, still hosted on Bluehost for example, were still up because those weren't connected to it, but my main sites and stuff were down specifically.

Now, a few things were also helping me in my favor, this is not really related to business insurance, but because I had my email list, I was able to still keep in constant contact with my audience during that down time and tell them what's going on. I was also in San Francisco, quite interestingly enough at the time, recording videos for my other book, Let Go, some behind the scenes stuff in certain locations that are mentioned in the book, and Caleb and I decided to shoot a video while we are there, and put that out on my YouTube channel. That was a way for me to tell people what was going on with the site, and just keep people, in the know, of what's going on, so that when the site got back up, everybody would kind of be cool and not make it seem like I was just gone and missing. So, having the email list was really important, having the YouTube channel and other channels, of course, the podcast was still going up and so, it wasn't like I disappeared and it didn't affect business that much.

But, like I said, because the website was down, I did lose quite a bit of money. Insurance can help you in that way, and there's a lot of different kinds of insurance, and there's a lot of technical things that go along with that. I would make sure to read all the fine details of all those things in case you wanted to get involved with that.

Liz, that's all I'm going to say, I don't have much else to say beyond that. It's definitely worth considering for sure, it's not required, but for many businesses, especially ones that are doing some good money online and rely on the online space to receive that income, then it could definitely be worth it. It's sort of those, “just in case” things, and I had never thought that my site would get attacked in that way, and I would lose that much money, but it did, and I'm very glad that I was given the advice to consider having that kind of insurance in the beginning because it definitely paid off. I still have it and I still pay for it, but it is definitely that piece of mind of knowing that it's there, just in case, that's really helpful, too.

Anyway, lots of things to go along with that, but I do want to thank you, Liz, we're going to send you an Ask Pat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. I also want to send a t-shirt to anybody else whose question gets featured on the show. If you have a question you'd like to ask, head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page.

Now to finish off, here's a quote to finish it off by Andy Warhol, he said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them, yourself.”

Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of Ask Pat. Thanks guys, bye.