I'm looking to start a VERY small residential cleaning business. I would be the sole worker, just looking to make a little extra money. I'm not planning to hire any employees and I'm hoping for just maybe 2 or 3 houses a week. do I need a business license as well as Property and Casualty insurance for something this small? can anybody offer any advice? Bonding, insuring and licensing can be costly and if I can put this off until my business grows, that would be excellent. ANY advice is extremely helpful 
I was in an apartment where a cleaning lady dropped some bleach on the carpet by mistake.
The cleaning lady had insurance and the carpet for the entire apartment was replaced.
^^^ just a thought.
Insurance might be a good idea.
/
There are two ways to look at this:
from an agent's point of view - of course you need insurance if somoene tries to sue you, but then it's too late to buy it
and from a business point of view:
The cost of insurance and bonding such a small business, is going to vastly outweigh your income produced by this business.
Most small cleaning businesses I've known about, work uninsured. Bonding is an honesty thing, and you'd have to pay back the bonding company, ANYWAY.
Most small housecleaning businesses run under the table - no taxes, no insurance. Some are over the table, still uninsured, and the proprietor is just careful to keep all assets out of their name (making them effectively judgement proof - can't get blood from a stone!). Still others, run the business as an LLC, to protect themselves (but technically this makes them subject to workers comp laws).
Bottom line - it's a risk to go without insurance, and only YOU can make the decision if it's worthwhile or not.
Do I need business insurance for my small cleaning jobs?
Posted in 
Tags: 
make extra money at home, be a webcam model, anyone can do it
rel="nofollow" from a business point of view, they put out a lot of books, on lots of niche topics ... impossible to invest heavily in all of them
Is browser compatibility killing your online business?: From a business point of view, this... http://www.businessinsider.com/is-brow... & artimpactnetpr.com
Are you a Creative Writing expert and looking for extra money as a tutor in the Bloomington, IL area? - check this out:
Ideas for earning extra money in your spare time: http://www.helium.com/items... help
A while ago I wrote a post, Visualize Disaster , prompted by a real incident we had at my office. Fortunately we came through it OK from a business point of view, but I took away an important lesson: it’s very easy, whether your organization and your team is savvy about disaster recovery or not, to have significant blind spots with regard to recovery in the face of some large, unexpected outage. We have very clear direction and decent budgets to work with, and the safety and recoverability of applications...(read more)