Towing Business Insurance l How Much and What Coverages You Need

If you guys are a tow truck driver, I'm going to run through the insurance companies and insurance coverages that'll take you and that you might want to take a look at. Let's get into it. So I am Hunter Wood Nelson Insurance Agency. We deal with a lot of tow truck drivers. We really do a lot of just basically anything commercial, auto. So whether it's trucking, it's tow trucks, it's household good movers. It's basically anything on those lines, junk callers, whatever the case is. Right. So I actually hear this all the time from other insurance agents. They go, there's, there's kind of a saying out there. There is probably. Well, I mean there is. There's 10,000 plus insurance companies out there. There might be four that'll take you and your state, your current condition, your business type, your situation, all the cases. Right. And a lot of people actually talk about how tough it is if you're a tow truck driver. If you are a electrician, there is a million insurance companies. I'll take you if you're a tow truck driver. This is like the list nationwide. There might be one, two, like regional guys like, oh, hey, we do it in four states or something that'll take them or take a tow truck driver. But this is really the bulk of them. So I'll kind of run through this list here first and tell you guys about this. But once again, I'm Hunter with Nelson Insurance Agency. I am the principal of the agency and we have a lot of agents here who also who deal tow truck insurance. So just getting kind of the list. Yeah, I'll start with the new venture guys. If you are a new venture, you're one unit. Whatever the case is, get into it. I'll start these guys. And then if you've got 50 tow trucks, we'll get into that. We'll get that side. So if you're just starting up or you got one truck, Progressive, Berkshire prime are really going to be your main options here. Of the three, Berkshire is my favorite. So I say Berkshire. So it's Berkshire Hathaway Homestate companies. We have most of our tow trucks with them. Honestly, if you've got probably five or less trucks, we have really just seen Berkshire come in and just smoke rates. Like for example, I had somebody with progressive paying about 13,000 for the truck. I kid you not, Berkshire for the same price or for the same coverage, that's 4, 500. It was just absolutely unreal. Granted, they're not coming in that cheap every time, but they're really good in South Dakota. They're really good. Pretty much anywhere but South Dakota. They really dominate versus like Progressive. So Berkshire. Yes. They'll offer your auto liability, physical damage. I'm getting these coverages here later on Hook. They'll basically do all these. Besides these last two coverages here, like I said, they'll do your repo. They'll do your one new unit, one unit, new venture type guys. So they will accept repo. Progressive is a little more strict on the repo. So if you guys are doing repossession, you know, maybe Progressive is not gonna be your best bet. I will say here too, we have Berkshire's sister company, National Indemnity. I didn't bother putting them on here because most time you're going to go to Berkshire and they're going to be cheaper, better, quicker, policy changes, everything along those lines. Right now, I have seen a couple guys go to Prime. Prime is probably going to be a little bit your last option. They're going to be if you got, oh, some claims, some. A lot. Maybe a decent amount of claims. If you're really young or, and or you have lots of stuff, speeding tickets or accidents or whatever the case is, you're gonna be paying a pretty penny. I had somebody go over there, paid $36,000 for the one tow truck and he landed a big, big deal for a repossession contract. So he didn't care and he went with prime. And they actually came in and beat Berkshire. So, you know, everybody's got their place there. And then once you get into. We'll kind of get the middle ground here. I'd say middle ground. You're probably looking more on Western national and kbk. KBK may be the most popular tow truck insurance company out there today. KBK is what is called the brokerage name. Okay. So when you buy insurance from an insurance agent, you actually have to go through insurance agents to get access to most of these companies right here. KBK will not work with any insurance directly. So what they do, KBK is a brokerage. I go to kbk. They work with insurance company called Guard. Guard has billions of premium. It's another Berkshire Hathaway company. And Guard gave them their policy form, said, hey, I'll let you do the underwriting and the pricing with it. And KBK created the program called the KBK Towing Program. They're phenomenal. I've seen multiple people with them. There was a guy who had four trucks. He had auto liability, physical damage. He was towing semis. He had high on hook, slash intow coverage, general liability, garage keepers, the works. You name it, he had it good. So he had 250,000 in tow coverage. He had each truck insured for about 200,000. And he was paying about 38,000 a year, which sounds like. Which if you guys have insurance or. Now, you know, it's a fantastic price for having $200,000 trucks. High intel coverage, $3 million of general liability, high garage keepers. I mean, there's the one unit guy paying 36,000. Right. So you see the big difference by having a truck worth way, way more. All sorts of stuff. Way more trucks, everything. KBK is awesome. Western national is going to be more your regional type of stuff. They're in the Midwest. They're not as easy to find. You're gonna have to find an agent who has access to them. They don't love towing, but they'll definitely do it. So they got a little bit of ground in it, but like they have nowhere near the marker shares, these three guys, by any means. But they are still a very, very good option. I've seen a 27 unit here in South Dakota with them as well. Obviously we do towing truck all over, but just kind of. That Arrowhead is the exact same deal. So Arrowhead is actually another program. So they use AIG's paper. If you guys know who AIG is, they are a monster insurance company. They. Yeah, I mean, they do the backing for FedEx. So they insure the 138,000 trucks and vans and everything FedEx has got. So, yeah, AIG is huge. These guys a little more. A little more picky, you know. International Interstate and AIG want some more trucks. National Interstate wants 15 arrowheads in our program. So it's gonna be through underwriting. You have to submit a lot of information. You have to really tell your story to your insurance agent. Give them every piece of information. Because you're gonna be talking to the underwriter who's gonna determine that price and everything. There's no system involved. There's no nothing. This guy's gonna be sitting here looking at the story. Why should I insure this guy? And based on what he's telling me about his culture and his safety and his success or claims in the past. How should I determine this price? So you're really going to want to work with your insurance agent and see what you can do there. Same deal goes for KBK and National Interstate and all that stuff. I personally, my favorite. So kind of running through these three guys here. If you are just starting Off. If you can get Berkshire, you're sitting golden. If you're. These guys will insure your even 100 unit tow truck fleets, no problem. I've seen 150 units with KBK and nobody was even touching the price. So if you're kind of get, if you're up there, you got closer to a fleet, you, KBK will even take you two trucks. But if you're getting up there in trucks and you got a row, well ran business national are saying KBK are kind of my guys. So those guys are still phenomenal. Those guys are all phenomenal. After tow truck insurance, I know there's not a whole lot of options, but it's good to know at least of the options. That way you're not thinking it's just progressive and that's about it. So if you just get started off or you kind of want to review your coverage, what, what even is. What even are the coverages that you should have that you should be looking out for? And I mean, heck, you guys can be paying 10, $15,000 a truck, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. But you should definitely understand what you're, what you're showing all this money for. So your auto liability is going to be liability, which means it covers a third party. It's not covering you, it's covered somebody else that you get into an accident with and cause either bodily injury. So you get into an accident, send somebody to the hospital, or property damage, and you smoke a building or you smoke a truck or another automobile, whatever the case is. Now you got to pay them out, right? That is if you're at fault. So if you're negligent auto liability pay for that. Physical damage is your quote unquote full coverage. That's covering. Now your truck, it's your truck itself. You're going to put a value on that thing. Now granted, if you say your truck's worth a hundred grand doesn't guarantee you're going to check for 100 grand. They're going to give you the lesser of what you put the value, what you list the value as and what it's actually worth. It is absolutely ridiculous. You got to guess what it's worth. You got to take your best guess of what it's worth and pray to God it's accurate. So because if your stated value is too low, you're gonna miss out some money. If it's too high, you're gonna pay more, but you're not gonna get anymore. So the racket, how it works, but that's how they do it. On hook slash intoe coverage is gonna be whatever you're, whatever you're towing, you got a stand on the back, it might want 250. And on hook and slash intoe coverage you're hauling, you know your everyday road, you know, I'm a roadside assistance guy for your private passenger autos, you know, maybe 50,000. If you're going to be hooking up to a new truck or BMWs or something, you might want to be sitting at 100,000 garage keepers. This is not going to be for everybody but if you're holding on to these pickup trucks or the autos you're towing. So if you're connected to a auto body shop, you're an auto body shop and you got a tow truck business, you're bringing them along and they're both on the same business name. You probably want garage keepers going to be keeping these. If you, if you're fixing at your house or whatever the case is, anything where these things are be in your possession once they're on hook, once they're unhooked, you are going to want garage keepers coverage. General liability is going to be the liability for not deriving basically. So most of your guys time is going to be spent in the truck. That is why your auto liability is going to cost 10, 15 times as much as your general liability. Your general liability is going to cover oh, advertising injury. So if you guys advertise and get sued for, I guarantee you I'm going to go pick you up in 10 minutes. Whatever the case is, you can 100% get sued for that. If there's anything along the lines of when you're hooking up the, the auto on the back and something happens there or, or hey, you know, person I'm helping with towing your car here, can you, can you go on that side real quick and do something? I, you know, whatever the case is, they're going to hurt during that process. You deliver the auto and say it's, say you dropped it off in a bad spot and somebody hits like there's all sorts of stuff where general liability can come into place. The other thing too is if you have a building, the main one is we slip and falls, right? If so if you got a property, somebody comes in, slip and falls, General liability is going to be there. Umbrella is going to raise your auto, your, I shouldn't say auto liability but your liability limits. So umbrella think higher liability limits. Imagine here you've got general liability work comp and auto liability, right? So workers Comp is going to have another coverage, what they call employer's liability. Am I going to dive two too deep into it right now? But yeah, employer's liability, another two coverages. Now I got a million dollars in coverage. You get a million dollar umbrella. It automatically stocks stacks over all three of those policies and now they're all 2 million. So that's what umbrella is. Last one here is if you got any employees at all. They are W2 employees. Work comp is going to be good for you guys. You're going to want this. Some states require it. Actually in some states require. Once you get so many employees, it is a little riskier than you think. Doing well, you guys know. But you know, some people might think that you're, you're in the truck all day long. How am I going to get hurt, right? Work comp is going to be a very important one. It's a little more expensive than if I have any of my employees in my office because worst thing that's going to happen is they're going to fall out of their chair. But work comp is going to be very, very good for you guys as well. So if you guys have any questions on tow truck insurance, if you guys are struggling finding tow truck insurance because it can be really tough, it is one of the toug businesses to find insurance for because there's really not a whole lot of companies out there. So if you guys have any questions or want to reach out to me at all, feel free to reach out. Get them. Hunter with Nelson Insurance Agency. My phone number and email will be in the comments or will be in the description below. Please like subscribe. So I keep making videos on this. Really my goal is just that help you guys out. I actually don't get a whole lot of people reaching out to me for this stuff. So I just keep making videos to educate everybody and make their life a little bit easier because insurance is stupid expensive. So thanks for watching and we'll end it there.