Conversations on Risk Management

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Paul Martin and Colin Rooke discuss how to have a conversation about risk management before the paperwork.

Listen to the full episode here, or read the full transcript below.

Paul Martin:

Welcome to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers. This is Paul Martin, the host of this program. And you hear me as the business commentator on CKOM. And joining me, Colin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers. Colin, we have covered a lot of ground over the last few years as we’ve been doing this program, and here we are coming up towards the end of another calendar year, and those conversations come out of that. But before we get to it, it just struck me as we have covered a lot of ground here, and I think probably for some people who listen to this program, I think, hm, sometimes I’m not sure if I have a problem. I’m not sure what I don’t know. And also, sometimes I just don’t even know where to start on this stuff.

I know Colin talks about these step by step programs and filling out forms and stuff, but it doesn’t have to necessarily go that way, does it? You can sit down and just have a conversation as well as do the actual kind of pull out the paperwork process.

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. Absolutely. So, not everything that we do needs to always be a big project, meaning we have a lot of our … Certainly, our ongoing clients, and then we also have a lot of people that would just reach out and say, “I need help with this. You talk about risk management. You talk about helping business and I have this problem. Is there anything that you can help with?” And so, we spend a lot of time doing that.

You can be any size, but it doesn’t always have to be a large project. Sometimes, you run into a topic. It’s brought up. It’s brought forward to you. And you really don’t know where to start. It could be a work flow, for example. We consider that risk management as well. Now, we’re certainly going to put our own, I’ll call it, insurance-y flair to it. So, we’ll explain what it is, how to set yourself up, or how to follow the work flow, whether it’s return to work, that sort of thing, and then certainly we’re going to add the consequences of not doing this, maybe some claims example, talking about, again, your own liabilities, which I think is a good thing because no one else is going to present these topics in that type of light.

So, really good example. One of the shows that we’ve done recently was talking about if you have a Board of Directors, we had a very very involved assessment that we can do, we can walk the Board through, and you can grade yourself on our level of proactiveness, risk management.

However, each topic in that assessment will frankly bring us down a rabbit hole to dozens of other topics, and that’s what we’re after. We want to know at a high level how you’re thinking, and then we really want to dive in and say, “Okay, so this is an area where there hasn’t been as much understanding or attention to detail.” And certainly we’ll work on that, but what I want to, I guess, bring forward today is that would be for an established Board operating for some time, and now we’re at the point where we want to do a review of how it’s going.

But what if you’re forming a Board? What if you don’t know how to form a Board? You don’t know how to orient a new Board member, or maybe you have been, but you want some advice on the right way to do things. So maybe you have a Board. Certainly there is an orientation. We do invite new members, but really there’s nothing proceduralized about this. There’s nothing recorded. We can help with that also.

We can provide a work flow that says, “Here’s what you should do from a protecting your liability standpoint.” It walks you through exactly what to do and what not to do, every step, and if you just followed it, you’d be doing great. But then, we add in, “Here’s why you need to do this. Here’s why it’s so important, and here’s some examples of what happens if you didn’t do this and you were called to task or there was an incident.”

So, we explain the why. We explain the exposure. We explain the potential costs. But we also help you plan out the whole workflow, the whole, again, in this example, forming a Board or bringing in a new Board member. We can help you do that as well.

Paul Martin:

I’m curious. This seems more like the kind of stuff you’d hire consultants for, and you’re saying you just do this. To borrow a word from you, how is this insurancy?

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. It’s a really good example, and I certainly don’t want to say, “Don’t hire a consultant.” And you might need a consultant to go a lot deeper. We spend a lot of time working or finding other third party advisors that can help our clients if they need more. The reason this is an insurance question or issue is we’re telling you how to orient a Board member or form a Board because it’s very important that you do things a certain way. And if you miss certain steps, you can open yourself up for liability, which we will explain that, “Here’s why you should do it because it’s a best practice, but here’s why you need to do it from a protecting the Board standpoint.”

So, it’s advantageous to us. It’s advantageous to our clients. And it’s advantageous to an insurance company to say, “They have a step by step orientation package and they understand exactly why they need to follow this from a loss perspective because we’ve explained that to them.” And suddenly, the entity is better protected. We’ve done our job as risk managers and the insurers are happy.

Paul Martin:

It really is just the notion of, at the end of the day, this topic or kind of discovery point that we come back to, is that you do all this stuff properly. Run your business well. Insurance companies like that because you look like a better risk for them. You look like you’re going to make fewer claims and smaller ones if you make them.

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s what I’m trying to stress that it doesn’t always need to be the big project, or sort of the project that gets you over the hump. It might be from day one. For example, we’ve talked a lot about COVID and return to work procedures, what you can do and can’t do, the fact that we’ve got policies in place. But if you say, “Okay, well frankly the whole idea of return to work due to COVID is a little rich because I don’t have a return to work policy as it is, let alone bolting on the changes around COVID or hybrid work force.” And so again, you can hire consultants to help you do this, and I’m not saying don’t.

But we’ll help you understand why it’s important to the insurance company that you do this as well, and it is all part of our getting to know the clients, working with our customers, eliminating risk, having risk identified and quantified and working an ongoing plan.

Paul Martin:

It just strikes me that, if I go through this, and I’m making the assumption that I’m going to hire the consultant because that would provide me with good advice, but you’re really helping me figure out what questions to ask the various consultants about when I’m grading them.

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Paul Martin:

You’re giving me kind of a report card that I need to check all the boxes when I’m hiring this consultant.

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. I couldn’t have said that better, that we’re not trying to replace the consultant. It’s something that we’d say, “Look, this is what you need to have done. We’re not going to be the ones that do this for you. You are free to, or we can help you find that individual. However, this is why we need it, and these are the ramifications of sort of not doing it or ignoring the problem.”

Paul Martin:

Great. Colin, we’ve got to take a little break. We’ve reached the midpoint of the program. I can’t believe how fast it’s gone by, but you’re listening to Colin Rook, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers. I’m Paul Martin. This is Risky Business. Back after this.

Welcome back to Risky Business Commercial Insurance with Butler Byers. Paul Martin here, your host. And talking with Colin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist at Butler Byers about, well, I like to call him the librarian. He just is a place where you go with … He isn’t all the books, but he knows where all the books are. He’s really a very knowledgeable guy in terms of being able to guide, direct, and help.

And I think the point you’ve been trying to make in today’s program, Colin, is that this doesn’t need to be, as you called it, a big project. And sometimes, people just call up and ask a question. Right? Even small steps are good steps.

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. Absolutely. Another really sort of good example would be training around diversity and inclusion. Anyone can find that information. You can Google it. There’s a ton of literature, and certainly we have that as well. But again, when our clients ask us about, “Can you help with this?” There’s more of a flair to it. So, you can find your own research on the impacts of diversity and inclusion on an organization, and then we add in, sort of to that same sentence, what most wouldn’t consider is management liability.

So whether we bring it up or it’s brought up to us, it’s for the right reasons, and then we say, “In addition to that, here’s what could happen if you don’t do this. Here’s some examples of where it’s gone wrong.” And so, yes. Here are the impacts. Here’s what you can do. Here’s why you should hire someone to work with your organization. Here’s why you should change your policies and procedures. Here’s why you should be more aware and certainly educated.

But if you’re going to take this information and shelve it, here are a bunch of reasons why you might want to change your mind from a liability perspective, and we’ll walk our clients through that for almost any topic. And again, as you referenced, we’re not trying to replace the consultant, but this would certainly be something you want to make sure every item here gets covered because we are suggesting, “This is what the insurance markets want to see. This is a best practice.” Therefore when you find that help, you’re checking off all the right boxes and we have helped you do it.

And not specific to this topic, but there are a lot of conversations that go on in organizations or documentation, whether it’s a, well, employee safety manual or driver’s safety training. Yes, every organization wants to, for the most part, make sure their employees are safe and their cars aren’t bumping into others.

But a lot of it is driven by fear or the request of an insurance market. It is. You see it in the movies and it’s a real thing. And so again, if we can get ahead of that and say, “We’re already identifying. We’ve already identified it. We’ve quantified it. We’ve organized and prioritized it and we’re working the plan right now,” we get ahead of that. And so, when the question comes up, “Oh, we already knew about that. It’s already taken care of.” That’s the point of all this.

Paul Martin:

I’m assuming that it goes unsaid here, but this helps in worst case scenario. You need to make a legal defense. At least you can say, “Hey.” Point to a judge and say, “Look, here’s where we tried. We gave it our best efforts. We’re not ignorant on this. We actually took some steps.”

Colin Rooke:

Absolutely. The term negligence, of course, is used very frequently in our line of work. The difference between negligence and not is just what did you do. Did you make some kind of attempt or were your efforts reasonable? Did you put any effort? Was there due diligence done? And if we can say, “Look, bad things still happen. Things get missed. Accusations occur. But here’s what we’ve done to do our part to ensure it didn’t happen, doesn’t happen, doesn’t continue to happen.” We’ve documented all of that in the event that you are called to task.

We have worked together proactively, identified the problem, and have made some measure to address it.

Paul Martin:

You know Colin, some years ago, I took some governance training for the kind of stuff that Board of Directors participants or members would be taking, and one of the bits of advice we got from, I think it was a professor or something, from one of the Ontario universities who was speaking to us, and he just said, “Ask yourself this. I’ll pose this to all of the business owners and managers that are listening to us today. If you’re on the stand, how are you going to ask that question? What are you going to say if you’re on the stand?”

And I thought that was a very sobering kind of a question. It really made you think like, yeah, I can’t just give this short change or ignore it and pretend that I don’t know what’s going on because how are you going to answer that on the stand. You want to sound like you’re actually in control and in charge and ahead of the issue.

Colin Rooke:

It’s funny. I use that example all the time, and that’s what drives a lot of this. When called to task, what will you say you did or did not do? You can’t do everything, but could you make some attempt at all? And so, I use that phrasing all the time to say, “Look, it could be a matter of just circulating something and asking your employees to read it over and maybe you do that biannually,” but it’s the attempt. It’s the effort. It’s the thought that matters.

Paul Martin:

I’m going to take you back to where we started this conversation here today, and it was really sort of designed to speak to business owners in particular, business leaders, managers who might be scratching their heads and saying, “I think this Colin guy is onto something but I really don’t know where to start.” So, but what do you say to them when they ask you that question, or how should they be answering it in their own minds?

Colin Rooke:

That’s a good question. It all starts with a conversation about risk, learning the organization, learning where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going and how we can help get you there. It really does just come down to, okay, let’s just chat. Let’s figure a few things out. I want to know how you think and we’ll go from there.

Paul Martin:

Yeah. Not particularly complicated, and don’t be afraid. Just send an email. Pick up the phone. Give you a call. Right? You or someone on your team.

Colin Rooke:

That’s right. If you have a question that you can’t find an answer, you want sort of the risk management flair to it, just ask it and we’ll get you what you need.

Paul Martin:

And that may include background information, just some general reading. Make yourself more knowledgeable about the topic. And funny thing happens once you start to gain some knowledge. You ask better questions.

Colin Rooke:

Yep. Absolutely.

Paul Martin:

And those questions are often asked of yourself, right?

Colin Rooke:

Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Paul Martin:

Well listen Colin, this has been a very interesting conversation as always, so thank you for this. I just want to invite our listeners, those who are in business or in roles or responsibilities, even I think members of boards or not for profit boards and charities and this kind of stuff, these rules kind of apply to you too. So, just reach out. Give me a call and we’d be pleased to chat with them.

You’ve been listening to Colin Rooke, the Commercial Risk Reduction Specialist with Butler Byers. I’m Paul Martin. Thanks for joining us. This is Risky Business. Talk to you next time.