(Editor’s note: This is the tenth installment in a series about opening a mobile pizzeria by Jason Cipriani, co-owner of Sips & Pies. You can read the other articles here.)

Admittedly, out of all the aspects of opening a mobile pizzeria, insurance is the topic I know and understand the least. I get the premise: I pay an insurance company for a plan to cover any claims I may have.

From my (basic) understanding, we needed an auto policy to cover our trailer while it’s traveling down the road, and we also needed general liability insurance to cover any accidents, injuries or property damage.

I Thought We Had a Plan 

Immediately after buying our trailer and bringing it home last fall, we called our insurance agent, whom we’ve known and worked with for years on personal stuff.

We walked him through what we bought, what we’d use it for in the spring and asked what we needed to do. We also asked him how we should title the trailer. Do we put it under our personal names? The business name?

After some back and forth and guidance from our agent, we came up with a plan to title the trailer under our names. It was added to our personal insurance for the winter (since the business wasn’t operating yet) with basic coverage that cost less than $20 a month. We were told to call back in the spring, as we got closer to opening, to increase coverage.

So, that’s what we did. Only when we called in the spring – roughly two weeks before our planned opening – we found out our insurance agent had left the agency. No big deal, right? Explain the plan to our new agent, and we’d be set. I was so wrong.

The new agent hated everything about the plan. According to him, we should have registered the trailer under the business name, and the original plan of renting the trailer to the business from our personal names (something that’s common, I’m told), wasn’t going to work.

We were instructed to create a bill of sale from ourselves to the business and go back to the DMV, pay the associated taxes and get the name on the trailer’s title changed over. I didn’t take that advice; instead, we added the business name to the title for $7 instead of paying hundreds in taxes to resell the trailer.

I’ll spare you every detail of the multiple conversations that followed, but in the end, I paid $916 for a Business Auto Comprehensive and Collision Coverage Policy that covers the trailer for one year. That plan, I’m told, covers the trailer should anything happen to it while being towed.

In addition, I had to add an “occasional business use” policy to the truck we use to tow the trailer – adding another $30 a month to our policy – just to ensure we’re totally covered.

Finally, the agent recommended we add an umbrella liability policy to our homeowners and auto liability policies with a $1 million limit per occurrence.

General Liability Is Easy

Before we could work at any of the local commissary kitchens, we were required to have a $1 million general liability insurance in place. Our commissary kitchen (along with others we toured) recommended using the Food Liability Insurance Program (FLIP) for ease of sign up and cost.

When going through the process of getting the trailer covered, I also asked our new agent for a quote on general liability. I let them know we had a quote for $65 per month through FLIP, and I was told they couldn’t come close to that cost and didn’t even quote me.

So, I signed up for FLIP. The process took maybe 10 minutes. I opted to pay for the year in full upfront to get a discount. I haven’t had to file any claims, so I can’t say whether they’re easy to work with. Hopefully I’ll never have to find out.

Be More Proactive

In the end, I spent $2,056 on insurance for our first year of business.

If you’ve read previous columns, then you know there have been many times when I debated just walking away and not opening our mobile pizzeria. I don’t know if that feeling was ever any stronger than the day I called our (new) insurance agent and was told everything we had planned to do was wrong. I called my wife immediately after speaking with the agent and told her we weren’t going to do this. The insurance was a mess, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

For whatever reason, listening to the agent (or any insurance agent, for that matter) talk about liability, policies, coverage and limits sounds like a foreign language to me. It’s downright overwhelming and so quickly can make me feel like I’m being taken advantage of.

When it comes time to renew, I plan on being better prepared. I am going to do more research instead of waiting until two weeks before opening and feeling like I have to go with the options being presented to me.

I’m already dreading it.

JASON CIPRIANI is the owner of Sips & Pies, a mobile wood-fired pizzeria serving Neapolitan-inspired pizza, in Colorado.