Align Your Insurance Strategy With Confidence

Your personal, professional, and business goals take many shapes and forms. From buying a home, acquiring collectible items, and pursuing monetary investments, to starting a business or sitting on a board, reaching the different milestones of your life takes time and dedication.

 As your objectives, commitments, and assets evolve, you’ll want to think about the strategies you can implement to safeguard the things you value most, for all aspects of your life. Working in partnership with a cross-functional insurance advisory team will help you best leverage the available insurance and risk management options to protect the complete scope of your interests.

It’s important to remember that with insurance, you can’t set it and forget it. Maintaining optimal alignment with your changing needs takes careful consideration, continuous fine tuning, and open communication.

Approach insurance as a team

Although the boundaries between your private and public commitments may seem obvious, sometimes the distinction isn’t as clear as you might think. Understanding how they intersect can better position you to build a robust, integrated insurance strategy that protects your assets and reputation.

So, what’s the best way approach insurance and risk management across the different areas of your life? The answer is different for every person, but working with a singular broker partner that has advisory teams with proven expertise in all areas of private insurance, business insurance, and beyond pays dividends for individuals in a variety of ways.

Working with one integrated team helps build an optimized approach to risk management that will:

Minimize communication gaps

When an advisory team from a singular broker partner works with you for all your private insurance needs, it’s easier for team members to maintain open channels of communication regarding the totality of your exposures. And if you own and operate a company or sit on a board, having your business insurance and private insurance live with the same broker partner allows the teams to develop a more holistic, continuous view of the layers of your life and when specific events necessitate a change in your insurance portfolio. This enables them to be nimbler versus being reactive.

If you’ve ever played a game of telephone, then you probably know how quickly critical information can fall through the cracks as one person passes it on to another. The same thing can happen if you work with different broker partners for your insurance needs. When you have an integrated team of advisors working together on your full insurance portfolio, it’s easier for them to communicate about how your private and professional insurance coverages align with one another as you pursue your goals.

When these teams work in harmony, it also reduces communication silos for your attorneys and financial advisors. If you’re working with more than one broker partner, you and your centers of influence will likely have to spend more valuable time coordinating between additional parties.

With an integrated team under one broker partner, a call to one member of your team alerts every member of your team. Minimized communication gaps amount to improved synergy, efficiency, and potential cost savings.

Optimize efficiency and cohesion

If you have all your insurance policies live with the same broker partner, whether it’s solely for private insurance or also for your company, the teams working on your insurance portfolio should establish a regular meeting cadence to discuss the challenges, changes, and concerns impacting you. Think of your advisor as an air traffic controller – providing oversight and coordination on your behalf. This empowers your team to determine how they can improve your risk management strategy, while getting the best terms for coverage from insurance company partners.

Over time, this collaboration helps client advisory teams build a deep knowledge base of your goals, assets, and exposures. It’s also their job to act as a relationship manager between you and insurance company partners, identify potential coverage gaps and overlaps, and collaborate with you to demonstrate your risk resiliency to insurance partners. When several broker partners manage different insurance policies, you might lose out on the benefits of these critical insights.

Enhance results through collaboration

Life events, like marriage, divorce, starting a family, acquiring assets, or selling off property, can require changes to your insurance policies. When the same team handles your entire insurance portfolio, they can more easily identify inflection points that might trigger changes in other coverages, so you’re not left with gaps and overlaps in coverage. This helps you ensure that you end up on the right side if a claim happens, and that you’re not overpaying for unnecessary coverage.

Your team will also work with you to identify where you can bundle coverage to obtain premium discounts. And when it’s time for renewals, working with one broker partner that has all your information can make the process significantly easier.

Discover many solutions with one partnership

When you work with one broker partner with expertise in all areas of insurance, the benefits for you are multifaceted, especially when the boundaries between your private, professional, and business interests begin to converge. Your advisory team can help you understand the difference between personal and business policies, and how they interplay with one another based on your specific situation.

Here are some examples of what this might look like in practice.

Board commitments

Sometimes, your professional commitments can create risks for you, personally. If you sit on the board of a company that’s sued and you’re implicated in the lawsuit, claimants may pursue your personal assets and earnings to recover damages. If the company doesn’t have directors and officers (D&O) insurance, then you would be responsible for covering your litigation costs. During a review of your lifestyle, your private insurance advisor should discover your board commitments and learn if the company has D&O insurance. Your advisor will then offer recommendations about how to structure personal umbrella coverage to pick up where the D&O policy drops off so that you’re optimally protected if a claims scenario arises.

Domestic workers

If you’re interested in hiring domestic staff, such as nannies, housekeepers, or gardeners, you have a few options. You can use a business or agency that specializes in the specific service and sends out people to do the work, or you can hire domestic help on your own. In the former case, the company or agency you use has the role of employer and would be responsible for paying workers, insurance, and legal compliance. When you hire workers directly, then you’re their employer and will need to be aware of the laws, regulations, and insurance requirements. Policies that may come into play include workers’ compensation, disability insurance, employment practices liability, auto insurance, home insurance, and umbrella liability. Your private insurance advisor should provide guidance about which policies you’ll need, and how to set appropriate limits.

Home business

Owning and operating a business out of your home comes with its own set of risks and insurance needs. Many standard home and auto insurance policies have exclusions for business-related activities. Depending on the sophistication of your home business operations, your insurance advisor can help you determine when endorsements to your existing private policies are enough, or if you need to build a more robust business insurance strategy. If your home business operations require the guidance of a business insurance advisor, your private insurance advisor will be able to connect you with a highly experienced colleague to be part of your insurance advisory team.

Chose the right broker partner, with confidence

The goal of maintaining one partner to oversee your risk management strategy is to have a clear picture of the totality of your risk, so you can work together and be proactive managing it, identifying areas of cost savings, and reducing potential areas of loss. Because orchestrating your insurance needs can get complicated quickly, doing your due diligence when choosing your broker partner can ensure that they have the necessary experience to deliver the desired results for your company.

Consider these important areas as you choose a broker partner:

• Cost effectiveness
• Insurance partner relationships
• Client services
• Claims support
• Experience working with centers of influence
• Breadth and depth of resources
• Approach to renewals
• Business insurance capabilities

When our clients consolidate their insurance portfolio with us, we deliver effective results. Our advisory teams will work with you to understand your risk in its totality, determine how changes in your private and public life impact your risk and insurance strategy, and collaborate regularly as a team to ensure the best outcome for you.