When should a restaurant group shop its insurance?
Start the renewal ninety days before the expiration date, and take the program to other carriers every two or three years, not every year. Ninety days is what it takes to pull loss runs, set sales and payroll for the year ahead, and get quotes back from more than one carrier. Shopping every year burns the market, because carriers stop quoting an account they never win. Every two or three years is the practice, and the question of whether this is the year belongs in every renewal.
What the ninety days are for
Ninety days out, the agent pulls the loss runs on every line and asks the question that sets the year: what is coming in the next twelve months. Openings, closings, a new state, a new entity, a change in hours or in the bar. Sales and payroll get estimated for the year ahead, by location, because the premium is charged on those estimates and reconciled at the premium audit after the year ends. Underwriters now ask for five years of loss history, whoever owned the stores.
Sixty days out, the submission goes to market if this is a year to shop, and to the incumbent carrier either way. Thirty days out, the quotes are back and get compared by line, with the rate change and the exposure change shown separately. That leaves time to negotiate, to fix a limit that has not moved since the day a store opened, and to get certificates to every landlord and lender before the old policy ends. A renewal that arrives to be signed can only be signed.
Why not every year
Carriers remember the accounts they quoted and did not win. An account that goes to market every year and stays put gets fewer quotes each time, and eventually the only one left is the incumbent. Every two or three years is the practice. The years in between are for the renewal conversation, not the auction.
There are reasons to go early. This year most of the market came down, the first overall decline in thirty-three quarters, so a program that renewed higher with no claims is worth a second quote now rather than at the next renewal. A new state, a new concept with a late bar, or alcohol passing a quarter of sales can change which carriers want the account at all: standard carriers pull back when alcohol passes 25 to 30 percent of sales. And a program nobody has quoted in three years has been priced by one carrier's rate changes for three years.
Shopped, or just renewed
Ask when the account was last marketed and to whom. Ask for the renewal by line against last year's. Ask for the workers' comp experience worksheet to be read to you, company by company. If the answers are a date, a list of carriers and a line-by-line comparison, the program is being handled. If the answer is a renewal that arrived to be signed, it is being renewed.
The renewal is also when the coverages a group has outgrown or never bought get added, which is its own list: The coverages restaurants forget. The ten questions on the insurance check are the two-minute version of this page.