Bad insurance is typically not a bad product – it's a good product tailored to the wrong company. The needs assessment is the step that comes before that: understanding how the company runs, before any quote is even discussed. This article shows what I ask about, and why.
- The needs assessment starts from operations: what the company does, with what, where, with whom – and what would really hurt?
- Good answers are specific: not "we have a few machines," but which machine's downtime stops production.
- The assessment's result is the basis for the quote request – the more precise it is, the more comparable the quotes become.
The operations questions
The first round is about the activity: what exactly does the company do – and what will it do within a year? "Exactly" is the key word here: a policy's activity description can be narrower or broader than reality, and both are a problem. This covers the geography of operations (premises, performance abroad – territorial scope!), seasonality (fluctuating values), and the chain: subcontractors, suppliers, partner expectations.
The pain-point questions
The second round is about risk – but not in the abstract, in business terms: what event would actually stop the company? Which machine, which person, which location is the bottleneck? How large a loss could the company absorb on its own? These answers rank the covers: what would stop the company gets priority; what is affordable can be a conscious decision the other way too – not everything needs a policy. The methodical canvas here too is the cover map.
The data questions
The third round is about numbers: asset values (at replacement cost!), revenue, headcount, claims history. These form the backbone of the quote request – and here precision is direct money: an understated value creates underinsurance, an overstated one creates unnecessary premium. The list of data to prepare has its own article: quote-request data checklist – roughly 30 minutes of work, once.
What comes of it?
The assessment becomes a quote-request package: every insurer approached gets exactly the same picture of the company – which is what makes the quotes comparable. What follows: reading quote tables and how binding works. The needs assessment is the natural continuation of the portfolio review wherever the review found something to act on.
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