Budgeting for 2021 - The Complete Picture

Budgeting for 2021 has begun! Has your insurance broker been providing more than the placement of your insurance program to help you plan for 2021? Perhaps they’re talking to you about new programs and funding arrangements. But did you know your insurance program’s pricing is the smallest component of the “true cost” of your risk control initiatives (especially when claims occur)?

To budget accurately, you need to see the COMPLETE PICTURE.

Here’s what you should be getting from your broker instead:

  • An analysis of your existing Financial Leakage: What internal expenses can be controlled and recaptured to increase your performance? Your budget will be incomplete without measuring these critical expenses.
  • An evolving plan to deliver specialty resources and projects to help reduce Financial Leakage’s corrosive effects on your bottom line. Once you identify all your additional expenses, it's time to recapture them.
  • Quantification of your broker’s performance in impacting the metrics you care about (growth, sales, margins, to name a few). Knowing how your broker has performed in the past will help you measure their effectiveness in the future.

As you plan your 2021 budget, you deserve to know the complete picture of your financial trajectory. Keep in mind that 30-50% of your expense load in your risk control and insurance programs might be recapturable.

Your job is to ask the simple yet critical question of your existing broker: "How will you help reduce my costs and improve my operations during the next fiscal year?” If they cannot answer this critical question or fail to quantify the frictional costs of your Financial Leakage, you are likely to be under-served.

For a deeper assessment of your existing risk control program, contact our team today. We’ll provide a no-obligation review of your insurance programs and offer deeper insights so you can budget with improved confidence.

Control Your Costs to Improve Your Business Performance

Successful businesses track their financial performance very closely. Did you know there is likely additional capital inside your risk management cost structure that can be recaptured and reinvested inside your business?

It's true!

Here are the facts:

  1. Unnecessary Financial Leakage exists inside every risk management program, including yours. These are the expenses of claims that are not covered by the insurance carrier. For example, these unfunded costs show up as lost productivity, business disruption, or the costs of hiring and training an employee.
  2. Financial Leakage is absorbed by your budget, margins, or EBITDA. These controllable expenses ARE NOT separate line items, and they erode your business performance, eat into your profits, and stretch your budget.
  3. On average, 40% of risk management program costs are due to Financial Leakage.* What could your business do with the recaptured financial waste in your risk management program (up to 40%, on average)?

Here’s the good news:

Your Financial Leakage is controllable! An astute broker, equipped with data and the correct measurement tools, can measure these expenses and put a service plan in action to address the root causes. BUT not all brokers have the same capabilities.

Our firm is uniquely qualified to assess, measure, and build the right plan for your organization to tackle these unwanted expenses. Our client services go well beyond the traditional placements of insurance programs. We partner with our clients, learn their business, and help them improve their results.

Curious to see what we can do for your business? We’re happy to provide you with a no-risk assessment of your current Financial Leakage exposure. Moreover, we’ll discuss specific ways you can recapture these unwanted expenses and improve your business performance!

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3 Steps to Improve Your Financial Position

Right now, it's critical that businesses pinpoint their frictional costs in their operations. With the economy changing dramatically, you must know your cost structure to protect your margins.

One place, often overlooked, to find financial leakage is inside of your Risk Control Program. Chances are there are many hidden expenses that your business is absorbing that are not paid by the insurance carrier.

Every time you have a claim event - a business disruption - the impact ripples inside of your entire business model. The impact is measured in lost productivity, the costs to reconfigure your workforce, any brand damage you may incur, etc.

Your insurance carrier DOES NOT pay these controllable costs. YOU pay them from your capital, EBITDA, and margins.

To reduce this Financial Leakage and improve your financial position, you must:

  1. Identify the amount and source of your leakage. Most brokers can’t do this, but we are uniquely qualified and trained to analyze your current Risk Control Program to determine if you are being well-served.
  2. Develop a long-term strategy to mitigate these unwanted costs. We deploy specialty resources designed to lower the frequency and additional expenses associated with claims events.
  3. Measure your progress. Knowing and attacking financial leakage is a team effort, and you must keep tabs on the progress. As a client, we’ll provide regular scorecards to show you how your business has improved.

As a Certified Analytic Brokerage, our firm is one of the few firms in North America that can provide you with quantifiable results during this important process. We have the resources, data, and insight to offer you a deeper look into the cost impact of your Risk Control program on your business model. We’re financial partners to our clients and work diligently to improve their performance and results.

To see what we can do for you, please contact us for a complimentary assessment of this recapturable financial leakage that is eroding your margins.

Uncovering Hidden Expenses In Your Business

Like any business owner meeting the challenges of today, you know the importance of monitoring your cost expenditures while restructuring your operations.

Improving and protecting your margins during these difficult times requires making informed financial choices with decision support.

Additionally, you need business intelligence to dig deeply into the costs of your Risk Control Program to find and recapture the wasted capital therein.

Did you know that leakage inside your Risk Financing and Risk Control Program can add an additional 40% of your premium cost? It’s true.

These controllable costs need to be identified, contained, and recaptured as soon as possible to protect your business from unnecessary expenditure.

As an Analytic Brokerage, we are among the select few insurance brokerages in North America that can help you identify and measure these unwanted expenses.

Furthermore, we’ll offer solutions designed to recapture them over time.

So, contact us today! We offer a complimentary cost assessment of your existing Risk Management Program that will fully demonstrate how financial leakage is impacting your organization and what you can do about it!

Reduce Your Huge Profit Drain

In these uncertain and evolving times, your largest source of unchecked profit drain lies in your controllable Financial Leakage. These expenses are absorbed by your business when an insurance claim of any type occurs.

Here are a few ways they manifest:

  • Lost Productivity
  • Hiring Expenses
  • Reputation Damage
  • Business Disruption

Your profit drain actually sits right inside your business, and it costs you tens, hundreds, or (with larger organizations) millions of dollars if left unaddressed. Insurance carriers don’t cover it, either, so you’ll need a qualified partner to address it.

Here’s what we can do:

  1. Measure your Financial Leakage. We have the data and business intelligence to help you pinpoint areas for cost reductions.
  2. Develop a plan of action. We are uniquely qualified to provide your organization with a targeted plan of attack to reduce these claims expenses.
  3. Measure the results. We’ll keep score of our progress and tie our results directly to the key performance indicators you care about (profit, budget, EBITDA).

How much is YOUR unchecked profit drain and Financial Leakage?

You deserve to know so you can make informed decisions about your business and operations. Contact us today for a complimentary Financial Leakage Report that will show you exactly how much money is draining from your organization.

As a Certified Analytic Broker™, we'll answer these questions and offer REAL SOLUTIONS to help control your costs during these challenging times.

Contact us today for a complimentary Financial Leakage Report. You might be surprised to see how much wasted capital you’re currently leaving on the table.

COVID-19 Impact - Know Your Real Numbers

If your organization is like most, you’ve had to make some tough decisions during the COVID-19 health crisis. Like most, uncertainty and unbudgeted revenue shortfalls have turned your 2020 planning on its head.

Now it’s time to look at areas for cost reductions in all areas of your business model, including your risk management program.

Before COVID-19, it was good enough to ask your broker: "Are my coverages adequate?" and, "what’s my premium compared to last year?"

That’s top-level information. No matter how you slice it, these are the only questions most brokers can answer for you. BUT, you need better business intelligence now.

The renewal information provided by most brokers won’t help you measure the effectiveness or business impact of your insurance program. In addition, it won’t help you pinpoint and reduce the unforeseen expenses of the COVID-19 crisis.

So, here are 3 critical questions you must ask your broker:

  1. What is the financial impact you have had in the past year on our business results (improved profits, EBITDA, budget accuracy)? Where are we now?
  2. What impacts should we expect inside our cost structure in the coming year?
  3. What projects will you implement in the coming year to reduce our cost structure to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19?

With health and the economic crisis looming, you deserve to know much more than the basics of premiums and coverages. You need to know exactly HOW MUCH your existing insurance program is impacting your financial statement.

As a Certified Analytic Broker™, we'll answer these questions and offer REAL SOLUTIONS to help control your costs during these challenging times.

Contact us today for a complimentary Financial Leakage Report. You might be surprised to see how much wasted capital you’re currently leaving on the table.

Financial Leakage - Know Thy Enemy

Unchecked financial leakage is your largest unaddressed cost. All organizations: large, medium, or small, suffer from them. These unbudgeted expenses impact your productivity, strategic, financial, and operational outcomes.

How does it happen?

Each time you have an accident (whether covered by insurance or not), your organization suffers an increase in costs through a variety of frictional expenses. These frictional costs are larger than the cost of the claim itself in many cases.

Here are the steps to recapture your financial leakage:

  1. Identify it! You must have an assessment of your complete cost structure. That’s where we can help. As Analytic Brokers, we have the tools, insight, and analytics to quantify these hidden costs falling off your financial statement.
  2. Create a plan to recapture these expenses by targeting the claims that cause operational disruption. We deploy our specialty resources, for example, to reduce such incidents that drain your margins.
  3. Measure the impact of the results over time. Lord Kelvin once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.” You need eyes on the impact of your risk control program to guarantee you are maximizing the ROI of your program.

Most insurance providers are unable to perform these critical steps. They use obsolete models and measurement practices.

Our firm is uniquely qualified to provide these critical services. We work from YOUR financial statement to customize a plan to help you achieve YOUR business goals.

If they cannot answer this important question, you are being underserved.

Contact us today for a complimentary Financial Leakage Report. You might be surprised to see how much wasted capital you’re currently leaving on the table.

Where’s The Beef?

Your broker should be providing much more than the placement of your insurance program. In fact, the pricing of your insurance program is the smallest part of the ‘true cost’ of your risk control initiatives (especially when claims occur).

Here’s what you should be getting from your broker instead:

  • An analysis of your existing Financial Leakage (what internal expenses can be controlled and recaptured to increase your performance?)
  • An evolving plan to deliver specialty resources and projects to help reduce the corrosive effects of Financial Leakage on your bottom line.
  • A determination of the effectiveness of a broker’s performance in impacting the metrics you care most about (growth, sales, margins, to name a few).

As you consider whether or not a broker is the right one for you, please understand that they can all look the same. BUT, WHERE’S THE BEEF?

Your job is to ask the simple yet critical question: "How will you help reduce my costs and improve my operations over the course of our business relationship?"

If they cannot answer this important question, you are being underserved.

For a deeper assessment of your existing risk control program, contact our team today. We’ll provide a no-obligation review of your programs and offer deeper insights on what moves you can make to recapture hemorrhaging capital.

Contact us today

Is Your Insurance Broker Focused on YOUR Bottom Line?

Almost every business decision you make each day is focused on improving your bottom line and operating results. So it’s important to know if your insurance broker is focused on YOUR bottom line, or if they’re more focused on THEIRS?

Your broker should be engaging with you regularly to discuss:

  1. Ways to reduce your Financial Leakage (claims expenses not covered by the insurance carrier) through risk-control services and specialized projects.
  2. How they have impacted your Total Cost of Risk (TCOR) over time (using quantifiable data), and
  3. How their TCOR impact is translated to your key metrics (margins, EBITDA, shareholder value, etc.) that impact your short and long term business goals.

Your insurance program is a significant business investment for you. If you feel you are being under-served by your broker, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

You deserve more than a yearly renewal project, industry jargon, and standard loss ratios and subjective numbers.

You deserve decision support, real data, meaningful reports, and improved business results that are tied to the metrics and indicators you use daily to measure your performance.

If you want to know your TOTAL cost structure (including your Financial Leakage) and how to improve it, contact us today. We will focus on helping you improve YOUR bottom line, and we have the data and reports to consistently deliver that to you.

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4 Warning Signs You Have Outgrown Your Broker

Your insurance broker may not be able to provide the level of service required to improve your business results.

Do they…

  • Ask you, "when does your insurance program renew? We'd like to bid."
  • Tell you, "we have a new carrier, program, or alternative risk vehicle we'd love to show you."
  • Talk to you about loss ratios, premiums, or their many years in the insurance industry.
  • Can talk only in subjective terms and concepts (i.e. no data or meaningful numbers).

If a broker focuses on the broad brushstrokes of risk management using standard industry jargon, chances are high you are being underserved.

4 Warning Signs You Have Outgrown Your Broker

In today’s data-driven business environment, you should be looking for a broker who is capable of understanding your financial outlook AND has a plan to improve it.

They will talk to you like this:

  • "Let's quantify how much Financial Leakage you have inside your existing insurance program to identify cost-saving potential."
  • "What are your short and long term business goals? What KPI's should we use to measure our stewardship of your program?"
  • "Based on our risk management strategies and program implementations, we have improved your profits and EBITDA by $[a measurable amount]."

The bottom line is this... If an insurance broker talks to you the same way that all other brokers talk to you, that's a good sign that they are operating on an obsolete platform.

You deserve real data and meaningful metrics that are attached to YOUR outcomes. You deserve "decision support." You deserve more than simple theories and subjective numbers. You deserve to improve your profits, shareholder value, and bottom-line.

If you feel you may have outgrown your broker, contact us today to get a COMPLETE picture of your Financial Leakage with specific solutions to recapture the controllable capital. As certified Analytic Brokers, we’re leading the way in risk management cost-reduction strategies.

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