WINDOW GENIE

Begin with the floor. Window Genie SPV LLC sets a minimum insurance stack you must carry before you open, and your certificate of insurance must prove it.

General liability anchors it. 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, including products and completed operations and personal and advertising injury — plus a rider covering damaged glass of not less than $5,000.

You must also carry commercial auto, workers compensation, crime coverage, and cyber liability. The franchisor and its affiliates must be an additional insured, meaning they receive protection under your policy. The policy must include a waiver of subrogation, which stops your insurer from later suing the franchisor, and 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.

One reading note: the FDD lists workers compensation with dollar figures of $1,000,000 for bodily injury, $1,000,000 per employee for disease, and $1,000,000 for disease. Those are employers liability limits — the lawsuit-defense side of a workers' comp policy — not workers' comp benefits, which are set by state law. The compliance box below splits them correctly.

This is the gap the renewal hides. The moment you added pressure washing with detergents and surfactants, you added a pollution exposure your standard GL excludes.

Your crew softwashes a home's siding, and the runoff and overspray kill a row of mature landscaping and seep into a flower bed the homeowner spent years building. The replacement and restoration bill comes to $22,000. You file the claim and the answer is the pollutant exclusion: standard general liability treats cleaning chemicals as a pollutant and excludes the damage they cause. The fix is contractors pollution liability — CPL, coverage built to respond when chemicals you apply cause property damage or bodily injury. Rikor's baseline for CPL is $1,000,000 per occurrence and aggregate, exposure-gated, and for a Window Genie operation that pressure washes, the exposure is real on every chemical job. Add it before the season, not after the first dead hedge.

Chemical application does not stay where you point it. Wind carries overspray, and water carries runoff past the property line. That drift creates third-party claims the pollutant exclusion also blocks.

Picture a windy afternoon job where surfactant mist drifts next door and etches the finish on a neighbor's parked car and corrodes the fins on their HVAC condenser. The neighbor was never your customer, but they are now coming after you for $11,000. Standard general liability denies it under the same pollutant exclusion that blocks the landscaping claim. Contractors pollution liability is the coverage that responds to third-party bodily injury and property damage from chemical drift, including damage beyond the property where you were working. The prevention is the same coverage and a simple operational habit: check wind before chemical work, and carry CPL sized to a full pressure-washing season.

Window and gutter work means ladders and height every day. A fall is the most common serious injury in this trade, and it lands on your own crew.

A technician cleaning second-story gutters loses footing on a ladder and falls, fracturing an ankle and requiring surgery and months of recovery. The medical care and lost wages exceed $70,000. Workers' compensation — the coverage that pays an injured employee's medical bills and lost wages — is what absorbs that loss instead of your business. Because elevated work is involved, your workers' comp class code is rated higher than ground-level work, and that is reflected in the premium, not a reason to skip the coverage. Confirm you carry workers' compensation even where your state would let a small employer opt out, and that you, as an owner doing physical work, are included rather than excluded.

Window Genie is a recurring, seasonal business. Spring and holiday-lighting season mean more hands. That extra labor follows you to the year-end audit.

You staff up for peak season with two seasonal cleaners and pay a 1099 crew for holiday-lighting overflow, but you never adjust your payroll estimate with the carrier and you never collect the subs' certificates of insurance. No claim happens — the work goes fine. Then the policy year ends and the audit runs. The audit is the carrier's review of your actual payroll and subcontractor payments. The added seasonal payroll lands in your exposure base, and the payments to uninsured subs are charged as if they were your own payroll. The bill arrives months later as a lump sum you did not budget for. This is reconciliation, not a penalty — the premium was always owed once the real labor was known. The prevention is to estimate seasonal payroll honestly at inception, collect a certificate from every sub, and ask for a mid-term adjustment when you staff up so the cost spreads across installments instead of hitting all at once.

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 learn this only when the audit bill arrives.

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. Suppose you estimate $250,000 in revenue and finish the year at $450,000 — a $200,000 difference. At roughly $6 per $1,000 of revenue, the audit adds about $1,200 (200 × $6), billed as a lump sum a few months after the year ends.

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. Window cleaning with elevated work classifies higher than ground-level service, so the code matters and the rate runs higher than a low-hazard trade. Putting an elevated-work technician under a lower code is a year-end audit adjustment, never a denied claim. Across the full stack — GL, auto, WC, crime, cyber, CPL, 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, elevated-work payroll, and CPL are added.

The practical move: estimate revenue and payroll close to reality, and if a busy season pushes you well past your estimate, ask the carrier for a mid-term adjustment so the increase spreads across remaining installments instead of arriving as one large audit 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 your mix of cleaning, washing, and lighting work. The figures below are baselines for newer franchisees and scale up.

Contractors pollution liability is the coverage that matters most for Window Genie and the one the FDD does not require. Every pressure-washing and softwash job uses chemicals that standard general liability treats as a pollutant, so the chemical-drift and runoff claims that define this trade fall into a gap unless CPL fills it. Rikor's baseline is $1,000,000 per occurrence and aggregate, exposure-gated — and for an operation that pressure washes, the exposure is present on every chemical job, not occasional.

Contractors E&O is worth reviewing as your commercial accounts grow. Errors and omissions coverage pays for a customer's financial loss from a professional error, separate from sudden property damage. Rikor's baseline is $1,000,000 per claim and aggregate, exposure-gated to your commercial volume; verify the faulty-workmanship piece is not removed by endorsement.

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

For commercial crime, 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. The FDD's $5,000 client-property floor is thin against a real theft allegation.

Inland marine covers your tools and pressure-washing rig 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 washers, ladders, and lighting inventory.

On umbrella, reason from your worst realistic loss. A chemical-drift claim that damages multiple neighboring properties, or a serious fall, can exceed a $1,000,000 GL limit, and commercial accounts increasingly require $2,000,000 certificates. As your commercial mix grows, an umbrella becomes the layer that keeps one large loss from blowing through the primary stack. For owners doing mostly residential recurring work, the better first spend is making CPL and the primary GL right.

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