Mitigating insurance costs with operational excellence

RCS Influencer Trent Cotney says great operational procedures and low insurance premiums tend to go hand-in-hand.

Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a conversation with Trent Cotney, partner of Adams and Reese. You can read the transcript below. listen to the interview or watch the recording. 

Jenny Yu: Hello everyone. My name is Jenny Yu here with RoofersCoffeeShop. Today I'm here for an influencer response with Trent Cotney of Adams and Reese. How are you today Trent?

Trent Cotney: Good. It's good to see you again.

Jenny Yu: Good to see you as always. Thank you for being with us so that we could talk about what's going on in the insurance market. There's some volatility right now, and so we are wondering if you could share your thoughts on strategies to mitigate risks and control costs.

Trent Cotney: Yeah, typically when you're talking about roofing or any construction, there are a handful of primary insurance lines that you need. You need commercial general liability (CGL), you need workers comp, you need commercial auto and there may be others that are on top of that, but those are the big three ones. Workers comp, auto and CGL.

The best way that you can go about mitigating that is have operational excellence. So you need strong standard operating procedures. On a worker's comp side, the easiest way to mitigate that is a robust safety program. It needs to be a top down culture of safety. You need to do whatever you can to make sure that your employees go home every night to their families. And by doing that, that's going to decrease your moderate which in turn will decrease your overall premiums. Be mindful of the impact of sub crews and how in certain states that may impact your workers comp rates.

Safety on that end could also be a potential issue with CGL and with commercial auto. It's the same thing really, you need to do your best to train your individuals make sure that you impress upon them safety when driving or mindfulness on job sites. And from a general liability perspective, it is key to make sure that you are doing everything that you can to resolve problems out in the field before they become latent defects that you have to deal and, unfortunately, hire a lawyer. Nobody likes lawyers, right?

So that's that would be sort of my two cents high level. But yeah, that's definitely the the way that I see it is the shops that are running that have great operational procedures, that have low insurance premiums that to be they tend to go hand in hand.

Jenny Yu: Thank you so much. I think it's really valuable information for our community to know so thank you so much. Trent, thank you.