Insurance built for machine shops and manufacturers.

That is the products-completed-operations side of general liability — and for a manufacturer it is the exposure that matters most. A part or product you made that fails in the field and causes third-party bodily injury or property damage is what products liability, carried within general liability, is built to respond to. The way the policy is triggered — on an occurrence basis versus a claims-made basis — changes how a claim years after the sale is handled, which is exactly the nuance we walk owners through.

They are two separate coverages, and conflating them leaves a gap. Products liability — part of general liability — covers the harm a defective product causes: the third-party injury or property damage. Product recall is a first-party expense coverage: the cost of pulling the product back — customer notification, shipping, disposal, and replacement. One answers the lawsuit for the harm; the other pays to get the defective product out of the market. A manufacturer with real recall exposure usually wants both.

Through equipment breakdown coverage, yes. Standard property coverage responds to fire, theft, and similar perils, but it does not pay for the mechanical or electrical failure of the machine itself — a control board, a motor, a hydraulic failure that takes a production cell offline. Equipment breakdown fills that gap for the CNC machines, lasers, presses, and welding equipment a shop or plant runs on, and it can extend to the lost income while the line is down.

When a product fails to perform as specified or promised and the loss is financial rather than physical. Products liability answers bodily injury and property damage; it does not answer a part that meets no one’s definition of dangerous but simply does not do what the contract said it would, leaving a customer with a financial loss. Manufacturers errors and omissions — a professional-liability line — is built for that performance-and-specification exposure, distinct from the bodily-injury side products liability covers.

Workers comp follows your payroll, so the state an employee physically works in matters as much as the state you are based in. Manufacturing is a workers-comp-intensive class — machine guarding, lifting, and material handling drive the injury profile — so the program has to be built to the real floor. We also flag the four monopolistic states — North Dakota, Ohio, Washington, and Wyoming — where private carriers cannot write comp at all and coverage comes only through the state fund.

There is no single price, because premium is driven by your specific operation. The biggest factors are your payroll and operator classifications, your sales and the end-use of what you make (the products-liability driver), the value of your machines and your building, contents, and stock, your recall exposure, and your prior claims history. A job shop machining to a customer’s print looks very different to an underwriter than a manufacturer selling its own finished product. We price to the real risk rather than a generic guess.