COVID-19

TRANSCRIPT

[Bruce Silverman] Hey everybody, and welcome once again to another episode of "Managing Risk for Tomorrow Today" with Jeff Kleid. I'm Bruce Silverman. Jeff is the founder of Victoria insurance, 800-979-0176, jdkleid@eliterisk.com, and the website is vclrisk.com. Jeff, how are you? Good to see you once again.

[Jeff Kleid] Good. Nice to be seen.

[Bruce Silverman] Well, if you're as good looking as you are, it is good to be seen. Let's jump right into it. COVID-19 the pandemic, obviously, has been a very controversial, very hot topic for a number of years now. It has been with us for a while. Is it still with us?

[Jeff Kleid] I mean, yeah,. I mean, it's not going anywhere. How you treat it and how you how you deal with it, and how it affects your business is really what it comes down to, It's just, you know, it's part of the makeup now. It's a new checklist item, you know, how do we how do we adapt if people are out or sick or something, knowing that, you know, for the most part, people are gonna get better and be fine. It's the same thinking as flu or things like that. But it's here.

[Bruce Silverman] We've had Corona viruses in our midst for many, many years, this one happened to be something that that really, in some ways, snuck up on the nation became a worldwide pandemic, one of the biggest things about COVID-19 is at the beginning of it going back to the early part of 2020. March, specifically, businesses shut down. And a lot of businesses had to pivot in the way that they do business. Whether it is they shut down their physical, they went remote, the restaurants that were not serving in the in the dining room, but pushing food out the front door, let's talk about that pivot that businesses needed to make, and how that has become possibly mainstream today, in the way that businesses have had to change the way that they go about doing business.

[Jeff Kleid] I mean, look, I think, you know, it's funny, because on another, you know, on another episode, we talked about climate, right, we talked about that. So if you think about it from that standpoint, for years here in California, a large business large company, a large location that was dependent on other locations, or was the location people depended on to, for the business to happen, they started putting in generators, so that if there was a power outage or wildfire, or something, they could be up and running. They put in alternative spots, you know, even even tech centers, you know, big, big groups of buildings, that house on the cloud technology, right? Data centers - there's systems that go all over the place. So like, if you're in wildfire area, somewhere in the Midwest, there's a there's a sister data center that will switch over, I don't know, the sister or brother, I don't know, but just how that you know, they how they work.

[Bruce Silverman] It's a relative...

[Jeff Kleid]  Right. It's a relative, but you literally have to think about pandemics and COVID, the same way, right? A lot of people scrambled put all these things in place. Some people said - "Alright, I'm gonna do what I have to do it, it's got to be done. But I don't want to use it." And then some people have actually built a protocol that exists for how they operate now. And so at any moment, they can, you know, they've already pivoted now at any moment, they can redirect to that thing, where you know, where people have to realize is, even if the threat of the biggest concern, which was the illness, now you've got vaccines, you've got alternatives, you've got different types of treatments. And by the way, any one of them can be good.

The problem is you don't know what anyone is good for which individual and how it works, but I can't I can't speak to what's not good. So I'm not a doctor. But what I would say is, you have to do the same thing as a business owner and think, okay, when's the next pandemic? And what does that look like? And how am I ready for that? And is there another viral? And by the way? The answer is, yes, there is. And it's, to your point, why is this different than other coronaviruses? Why was this different? Whatever. Again, I can't speak to the specifics, but I can tell you that the reaction was different. And there's clearly a reason and here's the here's the part that as I won't call myself a risk manager because I'm technically not a risk manager.

But I will say, as a guy with a risk management thought process to me when I see something where almost everybody in every direction in every country around the globe is reacting to the same thing. To me, that's a flag that says - Okay, there must be a problem. Because the people don't do that. Like, you know, it's not a US thing. It's not a UK thing. It's not a Europe thing of Spain thing a, you know, a China thing, an Asian thing, like, it's, it's not any of those it's a global pandemic.

So, you know, I've been dealing with insurance in the pandemic space for 20 years. I mean, it's not easy to sell, because when there's nothing going on, people don't buy it. So I didn't chase selling it. But I did absolutely pre COVID Send in applications for pandemic coverage on a regular basis, you know, over the years for radically for different things. Clearly, events like Wimbledon, you know, this is like the probably the most well known thing, you know, they paid a one and a half percent rate, which means for every $100, they paid $1 and a half. If you do the math, right? They paid a one and a half percent rate for I believe $400 million worth of coverage in case Wimbledon got cancelled, and couldn't operate whatever they're looking at, what do we need to do to stay in business? But not everybody does that. That's I mean, that's the reality is not everyone. Not everybody is functional enough to say, "Should I do that" or puts that in their budget just doesn't happen?

[Bruce Silverman] You bring up a really interesting point, which is line items in budgets for insurance in general, whether it's health insurance, life insurance, building insurance, you were talking about COVID, specifically, and other coronaviruses and other pandemics. It's not something that's necessarily on the forefront of people's minds or even businesses minds. But going forward, after the experience that we had, starting in '20. What should businesses really been doing? What should their mindset be, in terms of putting into their budgets, ways to protect not only their income, but their employees, their employees benefits, keeping them employed? And just keeping the business going? In general, if we ever face something like we did starting in 2020?

[Jeff Kleid] Well, I mean, I think first of all, there's goodwill. Right? So goodwill goes a long way. So when you talk about what do you do for your employees? How do you put it at a time? And your employee benefits? Or what do you do? So there's a lot of things on an employer can do if they choose to, like, for example, and again, I don't deal with cafeteria plans, or, or you know, where you can put a lump of your money, pre tax dollars into something, and you can use it for whatever. But what I would say is, you probably could, and if people aren't doing businesses aren't doing it right now, they could custom craft a line item that says, you know, emergency fund as your pre tax dollars. So you're like I'm putting in 10%. And they may already do that, because I don't deal with it. But with that said, like, you have to think about it. You know, what's more important, because it's not always about it. It's not always about the income either. It's also about the extra expense and the interruption itself, from a standpoint of I don't know how to turn this off. I'm just gonna turn this off. I don't know why it's just going crazy right now...

[Bruce Silverman] He's such a busy, busy guy in demand. While we're doing a podcast, everybody needs to reach out to him and talk to him about their insurance needs. He's the founder of Victoria insurance, 800-979-0176, jdkleid@eliterisk.com, and the website is vclrisk.com. So back to the conversation. 

[Jeff Kleid] So yeah, we were talking about a little bit about, you know, like benefits and things like that. But there's other stuff. You know, like years ago, I remember this is clear as day like, I remember, in my first company that I was fortunate enough to build, we went from 11 employees to 80. So we hired a bunch of new but experienced people. And we went from this small boutique firm to a very large firm that was handling a lot of stuff.

And I remember the first time you know, we had all these people and the flu came through. And you know, you would say it's just the flu but when you when you think about it, the flu came through and the way it worked was this person sick. This person sick, this person sick, this person sick. We also had a lot of people related to each other in accompany we had a lot of people that kind of sat and everyone sat in the lunchroom at lunch like back then, you know, everyone did all these things.

And by the way, it's funny I saw my son yesterday and seven people that worked with him all went to the liquor store to get food and candies and goods or whatever, come back to the office was really funny. Like I saw him all coming back. So it's kind of like that version of the lunchroom. But either way, I remember sitting in my office, after about five days of this, like people being sick, not sick. I was so frustrated. I took Lysol and I took a you know, a cloth, I went through like offices and just started cleaning every aspect of everything. Because you have to figure out how to how to get it out of there, you have to figure it out. Sure, when you think about a pandemic, you think about COVID-19, it's the same problem. So even if you view it as it, it's not going to affect you, or you view it as it's something small and silly. If it creates the unfortunate opportunity for your business to not fail, but to to not act on all cylinders to not be just clicking forward and doing what you want to do. You have to figure out how do I fix that gap? And you know, you can't just hire temporary people. So you have to figure out how you divide and conquer. Like you can say, "Oh, I don't care if it gets me sick." Great. And you can have every employee that says the same thing. 

But that's the reality is it doesn't it doesn't matter what you are, I think what matters is you these are the facts. The facts are yesterday, another pandemic? Yes, there's still COVID-19. You know, we put a lot of band aids on things we've we've done things for, we've had, you know, artists on tour that have come to us and said, "Hey, can we do something?", and we, because , we're a small company, so we can only take like what we consider a band aid or moment in time. Like we can't, you know, I can't do the Rolling Stones, you know, $80 million in revenue, I can't ensure that, but I can ensure you know, XYZ artists who make their living on, you know, making, you know, $20,000 at night, five guys, you know, five men and women out there performing, and all of a sudden five of their shows are gone, and they just lost literally, you know, a whole month's worth of income, because of those five nights, I can ensure that moment in time, other people can take control of it and put a contingency fund in place and figure out this is what we're going to do. And if they're forward thinkers, they'll go, alright, we'll even do it ahead of time, we'll take half of our you know, our upfront money. And we'll we'll put that aside. And we'll use that as our contingency plan. For every event, we'll take 10% off or 8% or some number so that we can prepare for those nights that one of our performers has COVID and none of us can go on. 

[Bruce Silverman] I talked about in just about every single episode, that the fact that insurance is usually considered such a black and white industry, but you come at it from a very creative standpoint. And you talked about band aids a moment ago. And I think it's a little bit more than that. I think that's a simplification of what you really do. It is your creativity, to look at a situation come up with the solution. And because this is your industry, and because you've been in it for so long, and you've had so much experience, that you can not only take care of that moment in time, but you can look to the past to figure out what the future may or may not be like to be able to develop insurance platforms and insurance strategic strategic situations for insurance to be able to minimize as much risk as possible. He's Jeff Kleid, the founder of Victoria insurance, 800-979-0176, jdkleid@eliterisk.com, and the website is vclrisk.com. And this podcast is called "Managing Risks for Tomorrow, Today" with Jeff Kleid. Jeff, another great conversation this time about COVID-19. I look forward to our future conversations and our future episodes. Always a pleasure to spend time with you. And I know I learned a lot with our conversations and a lot from you know what we talked about with insurance because there's a layperson. Again, talk about it often. Insurance is a confusing situation. But when you work with a professional like Jeff, who really has an understanding of business and how to mitigate those risks and manage those risks for tomorrow today, just keep getting that, that name of the podcast in. It's a good situation for your business. So Jeff, appreciate the time and we'll see you on the next episode.