Two different things get discussed together here: money to make premises safer, and money to recover after something has gone wrong. They come from different places and the preparation for each is different.
Money for safety and security improvements
City and district programs. Baltimore’s economic development arm and neighborhood organizations periodically run programs funding security and safety improvements on commercial property: cameras, exterior lighting, roller shutters, alarm systems, and sometimes glazing. These are typically limited to defined districts, reimbursement-based, and undersubscribed relative to citywide programs.
Availability changes year to year, so a page like this cannot usefully list what is open. Ask the city’s economic development arm and the organization covering your commercial district, which is also the argument made on the neighborhood business networks page.
Utility efficiency programs. These fund efficiency, but the categories overlap more than they appear to. Exterior lighting is frequently the single most effective security measure available to a storefront, and it is exactly what a utility lighting rebate pays toward. This is the most reliably available money in this whole area, and it is available continuously, not in windows.
Insurance-linked incentives. Some insurers reduce premiums for alarm systems, monitored fire protection or approved locks. Not funding, but a real and permanent reduction in cost.
Money after an incident
Insurance is the mechanism. Everything else is supplementary. What matters is what the policy covers, what the deductible is, and whether business interruption cover exists: lost income and continuing expenses while the premises are unusable. A substantial number of small businesses do not carry it, and many who do are underinsured on the period of restoration, not on the value of the property.
Federal disaster assistance becomes available where a disaster is formally declared, in the form of low-interest loans covering physical damage and, in some cases, the economic injury from the disruption. It is lending, and eligibility depends on the declaration.
Local emergency funds occasionally operate, run by foundations or by the city, usually small and usually quickly exhausted.
Ordinary business lending is what most businesses actually use, because it is available without waiting for a declaration. The micro loans page covers the lenders who work at this scale, several of whom have moved quickly in past emergencies.
What to do beforehand
All of this is free, none of it can be done afterwards, and it determines what any claim is worth.
Photograph everything. The premises, the equipment, the stock, room by room. Repeat annually.
Keep an inventory with values and purchase records, and store it somewhere that is not the premises. A cloud folder is sufficient.
Read the policy—specifically what is excluded, what the deductible is, and whether business interruption is included and for how long.
Back up the records off site. Accounts, customer lists, supplier details. A business that loses its records loses more than its stock.
Know who to call. Insurer, landlord, utilities, and the city inspector who will need to see the premises before reoccupation.
The last of those is the one that surprises people. After a significant incident the premises generally cannot be reoccupied until the city has inspected and cleared them, and if the damage touched structure, electrical or plumbing, permits and inspections are required before reopening. That is a timeline, and it is usually longer than the cleanup.
The first week after an incident
The order matters and the first days set up everything that follows.
Make it safe and stop further loss. Most policies require the insured to mitigate, and failing to do so can reduce a claim. Board up, cover, move what can be moved somewhere dry.
Document before touching anything else. Photographs and video of everything, from several angles, before any clearing begins. This is the evidence and it cannot be recreated.
Notify the insurer immediately, even before the extent is known. Policies carry notification requirements with time limits.
Tell the landlord, who has their own insurance and their own obligations on the structure.
Keep every receipt from the moment it happens: cleanup, temporary premises, emergency purchases. Much of it is claimable and unreceipted spending generally is not.
Contact customers and suppliers with something realistic. Businesses that go quiet after an incident lose customers who assumed they had closed permanently.
Business interruption, which is the part that matters
Property cover replaces the things. Business interruption cover replaces the income while the business cannot trade, and it is what determines whether a business survives a long closure.
Two questions worth asking your broker before anything happens. Is it included at all? A substantial number of small business policies do not carry it. And for how long? The period of restoration is frequently set at a duration shorter than a real rebuild, particularly where permits and inspections are involved, and a business insured for three months facing a nine-month reinstatement has a gap that no claim will fill.
Prevention pays better than recovery
The measures that reduce risk are mostly cheap and mostly the same ones that reduce insurance cost: monitored alarms, adequate exterior lighting, maintained fire protection, proper storage of anything flammable, and water detection where there is anything worth ruining.
The utility lighting rebates described above will part-fund the second of those, which is a rare case of a safety measure that pays for itself twice.