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If you've never checked the way your business is classified for insurance risk, maybe you should. As Craig Hickerson discovered, an unchecked mistake can be costly.

Hickerson's lesson came in the form of a bill for workers' compensation coverage at a new branch office of his company, Kansas City, Mo.-based Hickerson Cable Installation Inc. Instead of the $1.80/$100 rate he was used to paying, the price had jumped to more than $3/$100. The reason? Hickerson had been classified with the kind of companies that string cable lines between telephone wires, something it doesn't do. Many of the the company's installations, in fact, are underground. "The insurance salesman thought he could slip it by me," Hickerson says. "I gave him the code we're normally classified under, and he was pretty surprised."

There are some 400 workers' compensation classifications, with rates from as little as 48?/$100 for clerical businesses to more than $60/$100 for bridge workers. General-liability classifications are even more numerous -- there are 700 to 800 of them. And liability classification errors are much more common than those for workers' comp. Call your agent today.