Restoration industry needs to focus more on everyday events
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This video first ran in October 2011.
Narrator: Art Johnson, Operations Manager at Canstar Restorations in BC, says it’s important for the insurance and restorations industries to plan and prepare for the small, day-to-day events, and not just on the rare, big loss, cataclysmic events. Art explains.
Art Johnson: A lot of people lean towards thinking, ‘What happens if we get something like what happened in Christchurch, or in Japan?’ But it’s not that that we necessarily have to be ready for. It’s the things that can happen and go in cycles like river flooding or microbursts like we had in White Rock a little while ago where the whole town was devastated.
We have to be ready for those things on a daily basis. As a restoration company, we have to foresee what some of the challenges will be so that we can be ready. But at the same time the insurance companies have to know that we know too, and that we are ready for that.
I wrote an article not very long ago asking the question: Do the restoration companies and the insurance companies have their book shelves fastened to the wall? Do they have the back up plans? Right down to the brokers; are they ready to answer the phones for these people?
And again, you don’t necessarily have to go and look at the large losses. It’s the small, everyday things we need to plan for. In fact, we just did a major water loss due to a very small fire that burst a sprinkler head, but nobody knew how to shut the water off. It became an overwhelmingly large catastrophe because someone didn’t know where the tap was to shut it off.
So again, we can talk the big picture, but it’s really the everyday things. We can reduce claims dramatically by just having a good risk assessment plan, a good strategy for when these events happen.
