Before we closed the other year, I was paying over $70k a year, and that was with excellent workers comp rates. We aren’t back to that level yet, but will be soon. Insurance is expensive, but well worth it. When one of my drivers wrecked a truck and we had to replace it, the insurance company paid the $90,000 for the truck and probably $15,000 towing bill to pull it out of the woods.
Miss spoke, gross payroll..
Yeah profit is, dividends are, wages are. Yes misspoke but you get the point right? It’s setup in a way that promotes exploitation of the labor, creating a feedback loop that feeds back into the government.
Hours worked. (At least for general liability. Obviously workers Comp is gonna be payroll because if someone is outta work for on the job injury the compensation will be based on their payroll.)
Whoa. That's what I would call a heavy setup. I bet cleanup goes fast!!
I agree with you completely. The system seems to be backwards. My new liability insurance company bases their premiums on gross sales, I think that is much more sensible than payroll.
Not putting too fine a point on it here: if you're only bringing in a couple grand a year with that work, let the wood rot. Like has been said so many times here and on previous threads when I have admitted to working without insurance, if you aren't charging enough to do it right, it's probably not worth doing. I now do 99% of my work under other operators licences and insurance, but when I do a solo job, I only do it because it's a friend, and I charge enough that if something goes wrong, the money I make from the job should cover potential damages. I lose more bids this way, but so what?! It was only a few grand a year I was making that way, and I have safer options!!
More sensible IF they look at sales by category. Do you do any consulting? That's somewhere 10% of my annual gross. Should reflect a lower general liability....but possibly more professional liability if those are risk assessments, bit not appraisals or diagnostic services. How about tree planting? That'll be another 10-15%. As long as I'm calling 811, they have very little exposure.
I agree, that would be nice if they were look at categories. I do not do any consulting, or not enough to count at least. Maybe a few hundred dollars a year at most. No planting either, we refer that out. In house, we do pruning, removals, stump, grinding, and treatments. All of those are similar risk level in my opinion.
I agree, it can be profitable, we just don’t usually have time for it during the right times of the year, and that requires me to switch gears from our normal loads on the trucks, and to train the employees to do something they are not accustomed to doing. Unfortunately, that takes all the profit out of it for me.
In Ohio the contractor has legal obligation...plus I don't want to show up and see the HO forgot when I show up with trees. Or when the cable company doesn't mark and we cut a cable, need to be the one that called...
Cable. They are always shallow around here.
Comcast lays their cable that shallow around here as well. Problem is, they refuse to mark their cables. They say it is “cheaper to repair one in ten cables than it is to mark all 10.”
