It is December 24th. The office is quiet, the phones are calm, and a business center is about to learn what happens when holiday decorating meets a year-round electrical load. They decorated early and enthusiastically: extension cords everywhere, lights strung through storage areas, a tree a little too close to equipment that runs hot. One overloaded circuit later, the building is filling with smoke and everyone is asking the same question. This is covered, right?
The honest answer, delivered while standing in soot on Christmas Eve, was "parts of it." The property policy responded, but exclusions tied to improper electrical usage bit hard, and the business interruption coverage carried limitations nobody had ever reviewed. Nobody wants to learn policy language by firelight.
Jessica turns the claim into a holiday checklist. On the naughty list: "we've always done it that way," last minute certificates sent in a panic, pop-ups and temp staff added with zero notice, and treating your broker as a quoting machine instead of a strategist. On the nice list: a pre-holiday check-in, reviewing property values before peak season, confirming endorsements and sublimits, and looping in your insurance team before the lights go up.
Holiday losses are not rare. They are predictable, and predictable risks are manageable if you talk about them early. The clients who weather claims best are never the ones with the cheapest policies. They are the ones who ask questions before the moment of stress, because insurance works when someone answered the phone before things went sideways.
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