ZOOM DRAIN

The Zoom Drain franchise agreement requires general liability insurance on an occurrence form. The minimum limit is $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate. The carrier must be admitted and rated A- VII or better by A.M. Best.

The named insured on your certificate is your own legal business entity — the LLC or corporation you operate through. Zoom Drain Franchise, LLC is the franchisor. It is named as an additional insured, which means it is added to your policy for protection. The franchisor is not the named insured. Those are two different roles, and they cannot be swapped.

That satisfies your franchisor. Here is where the requirement ends and your real risk as a drain and sewer operator begins.

The franchisor entity is Zoom Drain Franchise, LLC. The 2025 franchise agreement (Item 8, Section 8.9) requires you to name Zoom Drain Franchise, LLC and its affiliates as additional insured on your liability coverage, and to add a waiver of subrogation in their favor. A waiver of subrogation is a promise from your insurer not to chase the franchisor to recover money after it pays a claim.

What the agreement requires you to carry:

General Liability at $1,000,000 each occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, written on an occurrence form. The occurrence form covers claims based on when the harm happened, not when the claim is filed. The policy must be primary and non-contributory meaning your policy pays first, before the franchisor's own coverage. Zoom Drain Franchise, LLC must be an additional insured, and a waiver of subrogation must apply.

Commercial Auto Liability at $1,000,000 combined single limit. The agreement requires "any auto" coverage, including hired and non-owned vehicles that is, rented vehicles and the personal trucks your crew sometimes drives for the job.

Workers' Compensation at the limits your state requires, plus Employers Liability at $1,000,000 each accident, $1,000,000 disease per employee, and $1,000,000 disease policy limit. Workers' compensation pays medical bills and lost wages for an injured employee. Employers liability covers lawsuits that fall outside that no-fault system.

Cyber Liability at $25,000. Cyber liability covers a data breach or a hack of your booking and payment systems.

Employment Practices Liability (EPLI) at $25,000. EPLI covers claims by employees for things like wrongful termination, discrimination, or harassment.

Business Interruption covering at least 12 months of lost income, including your royalty fees, with no co-insurance clause. Business interruption replaces income if a covered event shuts your operation down.

All policies must be written by an admitted carrier — one licensed by your state — rated A- VII or better by A.M. Best, with 30 days written notice to the franchisor before cancellation.

One thing the Zoom Drain FDD does not require is pollution coverage. For a drain and sewer business, that is the gap that matters most. More on that below.

This is the question that matters more for Zoom Drain than for almost any other plumbing brand, because sewer and drain work is not part of your business — it is your business.

The standard general liability policy contains a pollution exclusion. The exclusion removes coverage for bodily injury or property damage caused by the release, discharge, or escape of pollutants. Insurers read that language broadly. Sewage is a pollutant. Drain chemicals are pollutants. The hydrogen sulfide gas that comes off a sewer line is a pollutant. Grease and waste pumped from a restaurant trap are pollutants.

So when a sewer backup floods a basement with contaminated water, or a hydro-jetting run forces waste into a space it should not reach, the standard general liability policy points to the pollution exclusion and steps back. The damage is real. The customer is real. The coverage is not there.

The coverage built for this is Contractors Pollution Liability, usually shortened to CPL. CPL covers bodily injury, property damage, and cleanup costs from pollution conditions caused by your work. For a drain and sewer specialist, it is not an add-on. It is the policy that responds to the exposure on your most common job.

The Zoom Drain franchise agreement does not require CPL. That silence does not make the exposure smaller. It only means the decision is left to you.

Most denials on a drain and sewer job trace back to one of three gaps. Knowing them in advance is how you keep a claim from turning into a bill you pay yourself.

The first is the pollution exclusion covered above. If the damage involved sewage, waste, drain chemicals, or gas, the standard general liability policy treats it as pollution and excludes it. This is the most common denial for a sewer-focused operator.

The second is mold. Standard general liability policies exclude mold and fungus. A sewer backup or a slow drain leak that sits behind a wall can grow mold within days. When the homeowner traces the mold to your job, the exclusion applies. A limited mold endorsement can be added, but its cap is often $25,000 to $100,000 — and serious contamination runs higher.

The third is the work itself. General liability excludes damage to "your work" — the actual drain or sewer line you repaired. If a repair fails and the pipe has to be redone, that re-do is usually on you, not the policy. The damage your failed work causes to other property may be covered. The cost to fix your own work usually is not.

None of these denials mean your agent sold you a bad policy. They mean a standard plumbing policy was not built for a business where every job carries sewer and chemical exposure. The fix is to build the policy around the work you actually do — not the work a general plumber does.

The Zoom Drain franchise agreement requires "any auto" coverage, including hired and non-owned vehicles. That language exists for a reason, and it protects you against a common and expensive gap.

Hired and non-owned auto coverage — often shortened to HNOA — covers vehicles your business uses but does not own. That includes a rented box truck and, more importantly, the personal vehicle one of your technicians drives to a job when the service van is tied up.

Here is the gap it closes. A personal auto policy excludes business use. When your technician runs a call in his own truck and causes an accident, his personal insurer can deny the claim because he was working. Without hired and non-owned coverage on your commercial auto policy, that accident lands on you with no policy behind it.

For a dispatch-driven operation like Zoom Drain, where crews move between sewer calls all day and a backup vehicle gets pressed into service during busy stretches, this is not a rare event. Confirm your commercial auto policy lists "any auto" and includes hired and non-owned coverage — exactly as the franchise agreement requires. The requirement and the real exposure point the same direction here.

A Zoom Drain van does not carry ordinary hand tools. It carries hydro-jetting units, sewer inspection cameras, locating equipment, and pumps. A single camera rig can run several thousand dollars. A trailer-mounted jetter runs far more. Replace a van's worth of that equipment and the number climbs fast.

Standard commercial property insurance covers equipment at your fixed location — your shop or office. It does not follow the equipment once it leaves the building. So when a van is broken into overnight on a job site or in a driveway, the property policy often does not respond, because the loss happened off premises.

The coverage built for this is Inland Marine, also called a tools and equipment floater. Inland marine covers your portable equipment wherever it goes — in the van, on the job, in transit. It is written on the actual cash value or replacement cost of your scheduled equipment, so you set the limit to match what you actually carry.

The Zoom Drain FDD does not require inland marine. For an operation whose specialized gear lives in the van, it is one of the most practical coverages to add. Schedule the high-value items — the jetters and camera rigs — by name, so a total loss is paid at the value you expect, not a depreciated guess.

Most drain and sewer franchisees also bring in independent contractors during heavy weeks — a 1099 jetting crew or a specialty sewer-repair sub. When that subcontractor's certificate has lapsed, your carrier can find the gap before you do. Rikor's subcontractor compliance monitoring tool tracks those certificates in real time. See how subcontractor compliance works →

The honest answer is that your premium depends on details specific to your operation that no published estimate can capture. What you can understand is how the number is built and what to check on a quote.

Three lines drive most of the cost: general liability, commercial auto, and workers' compensation.

Workers' compensation is usually the most variable. Carriers price it with a simple formula: your payroll divided by 100, multiplied by your state's rate for your classification code, multiplied by your experience modification. For plumbing work, the classification is NCCI code 5183. Your experience modification starts at 1.0 for a new operation and moves with your claims history. One serious injury claim can push it higher for three years, raising every renewal.

Commercial auto scales with your fleet. Each van adds premium, and driver records affect the rate for everyone who operates a vehicle on your jobs. A dispatch-heavy drain operation with several vans will pay more here than a single-van shop.

General liability has a moving part most franchisees miss: it is auditable. For contractors, general liability is usually rated per $1,000 of gross revenue — though some classes use payroll or subcontractor cost instead. An audit is the carrier's year-end review that compares the revenue you estimated when the policy started against what you actually earned, then adjusts the premium up or down.

Here is what that looks like. Say you estimate $250,000 in revenue at the start of the year, and a strong run of commercial grease-trap accounts pushes you to $750,000. At a general liability rate near $7 per $1,000 of revenue, the audit adds roughly $3,500 in premium on that $500,000 difference. It usually arrives as a single lump-sum bill a few months after the policy year closes. Workers' compensation works the same way on payroll — and that rate is set by your state's rating bureau, not the carrier, so the insurer simply applies the state number and audits your actual payroll at year-end.

The practical move is to estimate your revenue and payroll close to reality, and if the business grows fast mid-year, ask your carrier for a mid-term adjustment. Spreading the increase across your remaining payments is far easier on cash flow than absorbing a surprise lump sum after the year ends.

Across plumbing franchise disclosure documents, the consistent pattern is that Item 7 estimates understate the real annual cost of a properly built program once workers' compensation for a working crew, commercial auto for a real fleet, and trade-specific coverages are included. For a single territory running two to three vans and four to six technicians, a complete plumbing program commonly lands in the range of $12,000 to $20,000 per year. A drain and sewer specialist with grease trap and hydro-jetting work, commercial accounts, and the pollution and equipment coverages those require usually sits at the higher end of that range — and the gap between a compliance-only policy and a complete one is exactly the gap a single contamination claim exposes.

The most useful thing you can do before accepting a quote is confirm it reflects your state, your payroll, your fleet, your claims history, and your subcontractor use — and that it includes pollution and equipment coverage, not just the franchise-agreement minimum.

The Zoom Drain FDD requires general liability, commercial auto, workers' compensation and employers liability, cyber, EPLI, and business interruption. Where experienced operators go further depends on the franchisee's profile — revenue, payroll, subcontractor use, fleet size, and how much commercial grease-trap and sewer work the operation takes on. The recommendations below are Rikor's baselines for newer franchisees. Benchmarking is relative to your exposure, and the numbers scale up as you grow.

Contractors Pollution Liability — the single most important gap in this FDD. Every Zoom Drain job carries sewer, waste, or chemical exposure, and the standard general liability pollution exclusion removes all of it. The FDD does not require CPL. Rikor recommends carrying it at $1,000,000 each occurrence as a baseline for a drain and sewer operation, sized up for heavy commercial grease-trap volume. For this brand, pollution coverage is not a "nice to have" — it is the coverage that responds to your most common loss.

Inland Marine / equipment floater. Sized to the actual replacement value of your jetters, camera rigs, locators, and pumps, with the high-value units scheduled by name. Standard commercial property does not follow equipment off premises. Inland marine does.

Higher Cyber and EPLI limits than the FDD floor. The FDD requires both at $25,000. That limit does not go far. The Rikor home services benchmark starts cyber and EPLI at $250,000 each for a newer franchisee, scaling toward $500,000 to $1,000,000 as headcount passes ten employees or revenue passes $750,000. Zoom Drain's online booking and payment processing makes the cyber exposure real, and any business with employees carries EPLI exposure.

Commercial Crime — $250,000 with a third-party crime endorsement. Commercial crime covers theft by your own employees, including theft from a customer's property while on a job. The FDD does not address it. Sewer and drain calls put your crew inside homes and businesses every day, so the third-party theft endorsement is the piece that matters.

Mold endorsement on the general liability policy. Sewer backups and slow drain leaks grow mold quickly, and the standard policy excludes it. A mold endorsement adds limited coverage where the exclusion would otherwise leave you exposed.

Independent Contractors Liability endorsement. Drain and sewer operators commonly use 1099 jetting and sewer-repair crews during busy stretches. This endorsement keeps work done on your behalf by a sub from being disputed at claim time.

Umbrella — driven by your commercial exposure. An umbrella adds a layer of limit above your general liability, auto, and employers liability for a claim that breaks through the primary limit. Whether you need one comes down to your worst realistic loss. A grease-trap backup that floods a restaurant's kitchen and dining room, or a sewer contamination event inside a commercial building, can run well into six figures — past a $1,000,000 primary limit — and commercial restaurant and property-management accounts often require $2,000,000 to $5,000,000 certificates before they will hire you. For a Zoom Drain operation taking on that commercial work, an umbrella is the layer that keeps one large contamination loss from exceeding your primary coverage. For a franchisee running mostly smaller residential drain calls, the realistic worst case usually sits inside the primary limits, and the better first dollar goes to pollution and equipment coverage. Size the umbrella to the commercial work you actually take on.