Miriam Allred (00:11)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. Thank you all for tuning in week after week. I hope you are enjoying the show. Just a quick note from me, the host, drop a review wherever you're listening. I know a lot of you are on Spotify and Apple or YouTube. I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me and the world know what you think about the show and what you're getting out of it for your business. Also share it with a team member. A lot of these episodes are focused on specific departments or operations within your org.
And so share it with a team. And if you have a topic or a guest in mind, feel free to reach out to me, send me a DM on LinkedIn or reach out to me via email. I would love to hear from you Today in the lab. I'm joined by Gavin Studner, a client advisor at Acresure in the home care practice group. Gavin is an expert when it comes to all things home care insurance. And it's a topic that's maybe on none of your minds, but
should be on everybody's mind. So Gavin, I'm constantly interviewing people about recruitment and retention and sales and billing and operations, but I love to bring you on the show to tell the home care world why insurance is just as important as all of those other topics. So let's do just that today. ⁓ Let's first let everybody get to know you a little bit. Tell us about yourself, about your passion for insurance and your experience working in the home care field.
Gavin Studner (01:36)
All right. Thanks for having me. Passion about insurance. I don't think a lot of people can say that in the industry. But yes, I am passionate about insurance. I am proud to be a fourth generation insurance broker. So it runs in the family, learning at the young age of 13 And here I am today. I have gray hair and still in the industry. So it's been great. I'm really enjoying focusing on home care and the human services organizations because I know that.
Every dollar we can save in the insurance ⁓ expense for home care agencies goes to being able to help people. So I love my job because I indirectly help people.
Miriam Allred (02:15)
Yes, I love that. And some people may know you from Odell Studner. Tell us a little bit about the last couple of years and the transition from Odell Studner to Acrisure Just explain that for us.
Gavin Studner (02:26)
So Odell's Sunder side emerged with an organization called Acrisure We wanted to take our leap not only from one of the largest regional insurance brokers to the national landscape. So our office has turned into the headquarters of the mid Atlantic division for Acrisure. Acrisure is the fifth largest broker in the nation and the largest privately held PNC broker in the country. We're about five billion in revenue. And with that economies of scale, we can give our clients. ⁓ greater insurance costs and coverages to be able to help them grow their business.
Miriam Allred (03:00)
Amazing. so inside of Acrisure there's the home care practice group, which is you and a team that works specifically with home care companies and you have deep experience in that area. Tell us about the gamut of home care companies that you work with startups to massive enterprise companies and everything in between any, any specifics on just like demographics of who you guys are best suited to work for.
Gavin Studner (03:22)
Yeah, I mean within our home care practice group, we also have divisions that break out as well. So we have divisions that focus on startups because they typically require a little more handholding, a little more understanding, a little more education. And then we have within our home care practice group teams that focus more so on the larger enterprise organizations.
The 5 million, the 10 million, all the way up to $100 million in revenue. Some, a nexus up to $250 million in revenues, depending on the size and the scope. they're at that point, they have their own risk management team that we coordinate with. So really, it depends on the size, but there's a team within our organization to be able to help.
Miriam Allred (03:56)
Okay, awesome. And like I said at the top, most people aren't thinking about our insurance and myself included, but this is why I have you on is like, it's something that should be top of mind. I think you maybe already referenced it or you referenced it every time we talk is second to payroll insurance is the next biggest line item on your P and L. And that alone warrants this conversation of what is happening in the insurance world and why do need to think about it and why do we need to talk about it? So, let's just start there. How often do you think home care companies should be thinking about insurance? Are they just thinking about it at renewal? Like how often are they thinking about it and how often should they be thinking about it?
Gavin Studner (04:38)
Yeah, everything you mentioned in the beginning about the different operations of a home care agency and where they focus is important. The billing, the scheduling, the payments on the back end. So everything is important, absolutely. Insurance is not talked about enough. And you said it perfectly. It's something that I've said for years to home care agencies. Insurance is your second largest expense line out of payroll.
It's something that affects not only your top line but your bottom line growth. What you take home is to your family but also how you're able to grow in the future. It's something that needs to be top of mind and I understand that for home care agencies that are startups there's so many things going on. You're really trying to and get just just stay on your feet, focus on the day, focus on the week and insurance typically isn't that. You place your insurance and it's time to focus on the next thing and I get that.
And that's why you have your insurance and risk management team to be able to help you cover those items that you're not going to be thinking about. When you are a larger home care organization, maybe 20 million, 40 million, 100 million in revenue, it's important to be able to have conversations with your insurance broker on a quarterly basis, I would say. I you should be thinking about it, let's say monthly, whether you're having safety committee meetings, whether you're having C-suite meetings about organizational risk management.
But it really depends on their size, but it's something that should be thought about way more often than it is.
Miriam Allred (06:01)
I'm curious in your experience working with a variety of sizes, who is usually your point person in the office at the company? For startups, likely the owner, the CEO. As these organizations scale and grow, typically who's managing the insurance at the business?
Gavin Studner (06:20)
So you're absolutely right. Startups, it's going to be the owner who's going to be handling. Then as you continue to grow, it can be the HR, it can be the administrator. Then as you scale up to the next level, it's a CFO. And then you scale up to the next level, then it's an in-house risk manager. So typically with each size organization, you have different people within the organization handling different roles when it comes to insurance.
But the scale I just mentioned is typically how things grow in terms of who's handling the insurance as your organization grows.
Miriam Allred (06:56)
Today, we're going to talk about three hot topics, the three hot topics around insurance that everybody needs to know about. We're basically just going to dive into those. But before we do, we're talking about different size agencies. And you're onboarding new agencies all the time. And so those initial conversations are just raw and natural. And they ask you questions. And there's misunderstandings. And it's just of like open fire in those calls.
I want to hear from both lenses of like startup to kind of smaller businesses and then up to larger agencies. What are some of the most common misconceptions when it comes to home care insurance? What are things that they don't understand or you have to break down for them in some of those early, early meetings?
Gavin Studner (07:43)
One thing, insurance is not a commodity. We have to stop thinking about insurance as a commodity. And the reason I say that is because too often people come to me and our team saying, can you get me lower insurance rates? Can you cut my cost of insurance? And yes, cutting in short costs of insurance we understand because it's your second largest expense on how important that is. At the same time, anybody can give you a policy that's Swiss cheese. Anybody can cut
your insurance costs in half overnight if they want to. But the problem with that is that you have insurance for a reason and it's to protect you. You do not want Swiss cheese coverage. You want a nice block of cheese. It doesn't have any holes in it. So it's changing that perception of looking at insurance as a commodity, as just as an expense and looking at it as rather, what do I need to properly protect my business? Yes, protect my expense line, absolutely, but protect my business because
I equate it to your home. God forbid your home burns down. That's your largest asset. Do you have insurance to rebuild? Well, for your business, your other largest asset, if there's a claim that happens, do you have enough insurance to keep your doors open? That's the conversation we have.
Miriam Allred (08:59)
Yeah, the cheese analogy, that's awesome. People want to cut corners and save money, but at what expense? How much risk are you willing to take? ⁓ Is that the same for large organizations and large entities as well? Typically, those businesses are maybe more sophisticated, have more time in other industries. They may have more knowledge about insurance, but maybe not from the home care lens.
Any other thoughts or misunderstandings that larger orgs might have?
Gavin Studner (09:32)
So it's a different conversation with larger organizations. They do typically have a lot more experience when it comes to insurance and the importance of insurance and making sure that they're protected because they now have a full C-suite team that they have to work with and protect themselves as executive officers of the company. So when you talk about larger organizations and how they look at insurance, it's always about how do we protect the organization.
It's not a conversation of if and what corners we can cut. It's about how can we grow our insurance and resumption program as we continue to grow to make sure that we're matching the growth with protection. That's the conversation we're having. They don't look at insurance as a commodity.
Miriam Allred (10:19)
And one more kind of general question here, I'm putting you on the spot with some of these early questions. ⁓ What does the kind of generic insurance portfolio look like for a home care company? Like if you can just dial through, you know, the most common coverages and why they're essential for home care.
Gavin Studner (10:37)
Absolutely. mean, my mind just goes racing with that question because there are so many things to talk about that, quite frankly, lot of home care agencies aren't discussing with their insurance broker because they may be using a mom and pop shop up the street who don't understand home care insurance. So you have for a startup, you have property coverage, potentially if you own or you are renting an office space. You have your general liability and professional liability coverage, which is something you need to get licensed, which protects you against
third party claims out of or not out of related to your job and what your caregivers are doing in the homes. You have umbrella coverage, which is extra protection on top of your general liability, professional liability, giving you extra limits. You have your auto coverage. People don't talk about that. Well, if your caregiver is driving from client to client, they are driving on behalf of the business. That's an important coverage. Then we can talk about other coverages like employee and practice liability, which covers
know, sexual harassment, wrongful termination claims such as that, ⁓ cyber coverage, you're holding on to important client information and employee information, crime coverage. There's just so many things to talk about and just educate startups on and then when you start to get into the enterprise level, it's not so much education about it, it's more so about are your limits matching how your size and how big you are.
