Mastering Risk Management and Insurance for Businesses
Today’s chosen theme: Risk Management and Insurance for Businesses. Explore practical strategies, real stories, and actionable tools to protect your company, negotiate smarter coverage, and build resilience. Join the conversation, share your experiences, and subscribe for weekly insights.
Start with a Clear Risk Strategy
Articulate how much financial volatility, operational disruption, and reputational exposure your business can tolerate. A concise risk appetite statement anchors decisions, supports underwriting discussions, and helps teams prioritize controls without slowing growth.
List each risk with its owner, causes, potential impacts, existing controls, and proposed actions. Include financial estimates and qualitative notes. Make it accessible, versioned, and reviewed so it evolves with your products, headcount, and market conditions.
Turn Uncertainty Into a Map You Can Read
Make Claims Less Painful and Losses Less Likely
Create a one-page checklist with contact numbers, policy details, photos, invoices, and incident logs. Notify your broker and carrier quickly. Preserve evidence, document decisions, and maintain a clear claim diary to improve outcomes and reduce disputes.
Make Claims Less Painful and Losses Less Likely
After every incident, run a simple root-cause analysis to identify failed controls, missing training, or vendor issues. Implement corrective actions, update procedures, and share learnings across teams. Close the feedback loop by verifying changes stick over time.
Make Claims Less Painful and Losses Less Likely
A loose bolt shattered a sprinkler head, flooding a warehouse. Because the team had a claims playbook, they contained damage, documented losses, and recovered quickly. The fix—a tamper-resistant guard—cost pennies and prevented a far costlier repeat.
Contracts, Compliance, and Transferring Risk Fairly
Align indemnity clauses with your insurance coverage. Avoid promising obligations your policies exclude. Push liability to the party closest to the risk, and ensure mutual fairness so deals close faster and relationships remain strong under pressure.
Cyber, Supply Chains, and Other Emerging Perils
Practice a tabletop exercise where systems lock on a Friday evening. Walk through backups, isolation steps, notification obligations, and legal counsel engagement. Document every decision and refine your incident response plan based on gaps you uncover.
Cyber, Supply Chains, and Other Emerging Perils
Implement multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, offline backups, vendor risk reviews, and least-privilege access. Show evidence of patch cadence and training. Strong controls not only reduce loss likelihood but also unlock better pricing and policy breadth.
Crisis, Continuity, and the Calm After the Storm
Identify critical processes, recovery time objectives, and alternate suppliers or sites. Pre-stage contact lists, manual workarounds, and decision rights. Test restoration of data and facilities, and tie continuity playbooks directly to your insurance coverage.
