GLASS DOCTOR

Start with the floor. Glass Doctor SPV LLC sets a minimum insurance stack you must carry before you open, and your certificate of insurance must prove it.

General liability anchors the stack. General liability, or GL, pays when your work causes bodily injury or property damage to someone else. The FDD requires $1,000,000 per occurrence, the most paid for one claim, and $2,000,000 in the aggregate, the most paid in a policy year. That GL must include products and completed operations — coverage for claims arising after a job is finished — and personal and advertising injury.

You also must carry commercial auto, workers' compensation, and cyber liability. Glass Doctor SPV LLC, its parents, and affiliates must be named as an additional insured, meaning they receive protection under your policy. The policy must include a waiver of subrogation, which prevents your insurer from later suing the franchisor, and it must be primary and non-contributory, meaning your policy pays first. The carrier must hold an A.M. Best rating of A-VIII or better. A.M. Best rates an insurer's financial strength.

That answers the compliance question. The exact box is below, followed by the protection question that matters more.

This is the claim your trade is built to generate. Glass is a product you fabricate and install. When it fails later, the failure points back at your work.

Consider a custom shower enclosure installed three months ago. The glass spontaneously shatters early one morning. The homeowner is cut by falling glass and files a claim for $48,000 in medical bills and home damage. You report it to your insurer. The denial letter arrives: your general liability policy was written without products and completed operations coverage, so a claim from completed work is excluded. You pay the $48,000 yourself — more than a year of profit on the territory — and the coverage that would have prevented it was already required by your FDD. The lesson is simple and costly: products and completed operations is not an upgrade. It is the core of glass coverage, and you must confirm it sits inside your GL limit, not stripped out to shave premium.

Installation is hands-on inside the customer's space. Your technician lifts heavy panes, works on ladders, and maneuvers through finished rooms. Property damage happens during the work, not just after it.

Imagine a technician installing a large mirror wall who loses grip and the mirror swings into a custom vanity and tile, causing $7,200 in damage. Your general liability pays this as property damage at the customer's premises during ongoing operations — the everyday claim GL is designed for, which is why the FDD requires GL first. The risk is a policy with a thin sublimit on damage to property in your care, or a deductible so high you cannot fund it mid-job. Read your declarations page and confirm the property-damage limit fits the homes and storefronts you actually work in, not a generic default.

Glass Doctor franchisees serve homes, vehicles, and commercial storefronts. The commercial side changes both your exposure and what your certificate must show.

A property manager hires you to reglaze a row of retail storefronts. Weeks later a seal fails on a large unit, the glass fogs, and a tenant claims lost sales while the storefront looks defective. The claim mixes property damage with the tenant's financial loss, and the certificate the property manager required listed $2,000,000 per occurrence with them named as an additional insured on a completed-operations basis. If your policy only carried the franchisor minimum of $1,000,000 with no completed-ops additional insured, you are short on both the limit and the endorsement. The franchisor minimum satisfied Glass Doctor SPV LLC; it did not satisfy a commercial client whose contract drives real revenue. Before bidding commercial glass work, have your agent confirm your limits and additional-insured wording match the contract.

Custom shower doors and architectural glass involve measurement, specification, and structural fit. That is professional judgment, and standard GL does not always respond to a pure error in it.

Suppose you measure and specify a frameless enclosure, the spec is off, and the installed glass does not meet the structural fit the opening required — there is no sudden accident, just a costly redo and a customer claiming lost use of the bathroom for weeks. General liability covers sudden property damage, not a financial loss from a specification error. This is where contractors errors and omissions coverage — E&O, which pays for financial loss a customer suffers from a professional mistake — fills the gap GL leaves. The prevention is to carry E&O sized to your custom and commercial work and to confirm any faulty-workmanship piece has not been removed by endorsement before you rely on it.

Two of your largest lines — general liability and workers' compensation — are both auditable. The premium at the start of the policy is an estimate. The real number is trued up at year-end, and most owners learn this only when the audit bill lands.

General liability for a contractor is usually rated on revenue, charged per $1,000 of sales, though some carriers rate on payroll or add subcontractor payments to the base. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares the revenue you estimated against what you actually did, then adjusts the premium up or down. Say you estimate $300,000 in revenue and finish the year at $520,000 — a $220,000 difference. At roughly $8 per $1,000 of revenue, the audit adds about $1,760 (220 × $8), billed as a lump sum a few months after the year closes.

Workers' compensation works on a different formula: payroll divided by 100, times the state rate for your class code, times your experience modification. The per-$100 rate is set by your state's rating bureau, not the carrier — the insurer applies the bureau's rate and runs its own year-end payroll audit. Glass handling and ladder work classify higher than office work, so the code matters. If a technician is classified under the wrong code, that surfaces as a year-end audit adjustment, not a denied claim. 

Across the full stack — GL, auto, WC, cyber, and tools — expect roughly $9,000 to $16,000 a year for a single territory with two or three vehicles and a small crew. FDD Item 7 estimates often understate insurance once vehicles, payroll, and glass-handling codes are added.

The practical move: estimate revenue and payroll close to reality, and if the business grows fast mid-year, ask the carrier for a mid-term adjustment so the increase spreads across remaining installments instead of arriving as one large bill. An audit is reconciliation, not a penalty — if you overestimated, you get money back.

Rikor's recommendations are calibrated to your operational profile — revenue, payroll, subcontractor spend, years in business, and how much commercial work you do. The figures below are baselines for newer franchisees and scale up.

Contractors E&O is the standout for Glass Doctor. Your custom shower doors and architectural glass involve specification and measurement — a professional judgment exposure that general liability does not cover. E&O responds to a customer's financial loss from that kind of error. Rikor's baseline is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, exposure-gated to your custom and commercial volume. Verify the faulty-workmanship insuring agreement has not been deleted by endorsement, because the presence of an E&O policy on a certificate does not by itself confirm that coverage.

The FDD requires cyber liability at $500,000 per claim, already above the $250,000 baseline Rikor recommends for a first-year operator with online booking and stored payment data. That is a case where the franchisor minimum is the stronger position — keep it.

Commercial crime is not in the Glass Doctor required stack, but your technicians work inside homes and businesses and collect payment in the field. Rikor's baseline is $250,000 with a third-party crime endorsement on a loss-discovered form, which covers theft discovered during the policy period even if it occurred earlier, and which extends to a customer's property.

Inland marine covers your tools and glass-handling equipment wherever they travel — in the vehicle or at a job site — because standard property coverage does not follow gear off a fixed location. Size it to the actual replacement value of your cutting, lifting, and transport equipment.

On umbrella, reason from your worst realistic loss. A shattered shower enclosure that injures a homeowner, or a storefront failure at a commercial property, can carry serious bodily-injury or business-loss severity that pushes past a $1,000,000 GL limit. As you add commercial accounts requiring $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 certificates, an umbrella becomes the layer that protects the primary stack. For owners doing mostly residential auto and home glass, the better first spend is making the primary GL, completed operations, and E&O right.

Business interruption is generally not recommended for a mobile glass operation. Lost tools can be replaced quickly, and there is no storefront to shut down.