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Aquarium Maintenance Business

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debonair23

Junior Member
This question pertains to Los Angeles, CA laws.

I currently own a small aquarium store with a partner. Profits have been growing steadily for the past year and we are now looking at moving into the aquarium maintenance business as well. However, we're worried about the liability if something goes wrong whether or not it's actually our fault. With time, any aquarium will develop a leak and we don't want to be blamed for old age. At the same time, we want to be protected against gross negligence in case we accidentally break a glass tank or something like that. We don't foresee anything like this happening anytime soon, but you never really know and when dealing with some tanks that are a thousand gallons or more, we don't want to learn any lessons the hard way.

Gross income looks like it will come out to be around $20,000 after our first year of business and if the market continues to expand in our area like it has been, and if we get into the maintenance business, we're projecting an income of $50,000 - $60,000 next year.

My question is, what would be the best way to protect ourselves and our investment? Insurance companies are extremely hesitant to insure an aquarium maintenance company. The ones who will insure us want $800 - $1,000 per year for $1,000,000 worth of liability insurance which seems reasonable, but I'm worried about if they'll have some loophole to get out of paying when the day comes that we need them. Our other thought is to form an S-Corp so that if something did happen, we may lose the business depending on the severity of the damage, but hopefully our personal assets would be protected. I'm not sure if that's the case or if clients could still come after us personally even if we had a corporation. What would be the best way to protect ourselves on the off-chance that something went terribly wrong at one of our maintenance jobs?
 



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