PRECISION GARAGE DOOR SERVICE

This is the question every new owner needs answered first — and it is the one we cannot answer from a document we do not have.

We do not have a current Precision Garage Door Service FDD on file. Insurance requirements live in Item 8 of the FDD, and they vary by franchisor and update every year. Without that document, we will not state limits, endorsement language, or a franchisor legal entity, because guessing any of those would put a wrong name or a wrong number on your certificate of insurance — a certificate, or COI, is the one-page proof your franchisor and your clients rely on.

What we can do is explain the coverage that the work itself demands, so you know what to look for when you read your own Item 8.

Your work does not end when the door goes up. The door keeps cycling — opening and closing thousands of times a year — under tension you set. That is why your largest exposure surfaces after the job, not during it.

A homeowner is satisfied with a new door and opener. Six months later you get a call — not a complaint, a subpoena. The torsion spring failed, the door came down, and someone was hurt. The lawsuit alleges your installation set the spring tension wrong. Nothing about the original job looked defective the day you left. The exposure was always a coverage-classification question that surfaces only in litigation: does your general liability — coverage that pays when your work causes bodily injury or property damage — include products and completed operations, the part that responds to claims arising after a job is finished? If your GL was written without completed operations to save premium, a serious injury claim from an installed door becomes money out of your own pocket. The prevention is structural: confirm completed operations sits inside your GL limit from the day you open, because you cannot add it after the claim arrives.

Garage door springs and cables hold enormous stored energy. A spring that lets go can break a hand, an arm, or worse. This is the injury your trade is known for, and it lands on your own crew.

Picture a technician adjusting a torsion spring when it fails and snaps back, fracturing his wrist and requiring surgery. The medical bills, the months of lost wages, and the rehabilitation run past $90,000. Workers' compensation — the coverage that pays an injured employee's medical care and lost wages — is what stands between that injury and your bank account. Without it, you pay everything yourself, and in most states you also face penalties for not carrying it. Even where your state lets a small employer opt out, the right move for spring-and-cable work is to carry workers' compensation anyway. Confirm your owner-operator status too: if you are physically doing installs, you generally should be included on the policy, not excluded

Most owners build a policy around residential service and then grow into commercial doors — warehouses, storefronts, multi-unit buildings. The commercial side changes both your exposure and what your certificate must prove.

A commercial client hires you to install rolling steel doors at a distribution center. A door later fails and damages a loaded forklift and inventory beneath it, and the business claims tens of thousands in lost operations. The certificate that client required showed $2,000,000 per occurrence with them named as an additional insured on a completed-operations basis. A residential-minimum policy at $1,000,000 with no completed-ops additional insured is short on the limit and missing the endorsement. The fix is not complicated, but it has to happen before you bid: ask your agent to confirm your limits and additional-insured wording can satisfy the contract, usually through a higher limit or an umbrella layer.

Commercial installs often need more hands. When you add crew or sub out overflow, your workers' compensation cost follows the labor — and you settle up at year-end.

Suppose you bring on two extra installers and pay a 1099 crew during a busy commercial stretch, but you never tell your carrier and never collect the subs' certificates of insurance. At the year-end audit — the carrier's review of your actual payroll and subcontractor payments — that extra labor is added to your exposure base, and payments to uninsured subs are charged as if they were your own payroll. The bill arrives months later as a lump sum. This is an audit adjustment, not a denied claim: the carrier is collecting premium that was always owed once the real labor is known. The prevention is to disclose added crew when you take the work and to collect a certificate from every sub, so their coverage — not yours — answers for their injuries.

Your two biggest lines — general liability and workers' compensation — are both auditable. The premium you pay at the start is an estimate. The real number is trued up at year-end, and most owners do not learn this until 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 $400,000 in revenue and finish at $620,000 — a $220,000 difference. At roughly $9 per $1,000 of revenue for installation work, the audit adds about $1,980 (220 × $9), billed as a lump sum after the year closes.

Workers' compensation follows its own 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. Garage door installation, with heights and spring tension, classifies higher than light service work, so the code matters. Misclassifying an installer is a year-end audit adjustment, never a denied claim. Across the full stack — GL, auto, WC, crime, and tools — expect roughly $9,000 to $16,000 a year for a single territory with two or three trucks and a small crew. FDD Item 7 estimates, where an FDD exists, often understate insurance once trucks, payroll, and installation 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. Because we do not have your FDD, treat these as a checklist to compare against your Item 8 once you obtain it.

General liability with products and completed operations is the foundation. For garage door work, completed operations is not optional dressing — it is the coverage that answers when an installed door or spring fails later. Confirm it sits inside your GL limit.

Contractors E&O deserves a look. Errors and omissions coverage pays for a customer's financial loss from a professional error — for example, a spring-tension calibration or safety-inspection judgment that is alleged to be wrong. Rikor's baseline is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, exposure-gated to your job sizes and commercial volume. Verify the faulty-workmanship piece has not been removed by endorsement before you rely on it.

Inland marine covers your tools and equipment wherever they travel — in the truck 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 openers, spring inventory, and lift equipment.

Commercial crime fits because your technicians work in and around customers' 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 happened earlier and extends to a customer's property.

For EPLI — employment practices liability, which covers claims like wrongful termination or harassment — Rikor's baseline is $250,000, scaling to $500,000 or more as you pass 10 employees or $750,000 in revenue.

On umbrella, reason from your worst realistic loss. A heavy door or a failed spring that injures someone can produce a serious bodily-injury claim that exceeds a $1,000,000 GL limit, and commercial clients frequently require $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 certificates. An umbrella becomes the layer that keeps one large injury claim from blowing through your primary stack. For owners doing mostly residential service, the better first spend is making the primary GL and completed operations right.

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