Flipping the Insurance Script with Tanner Hackett of Counterpart
On the latest episode of Risk Management: Brick by Brick, Jason Reichl is joined by Tanner Hackett, CEO of Counterpart, a management liability insurance provider supporting small businesses in their insurance needs.
In this episode, Jason and Tanner break down how Counterpart provides tailored management and professional liability insurance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), especially in the current volatile state of the economy, as well as what their recent small business insights report has discovered about SMBs’ approaches to risk management and new technologies.
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Trying Times for Small Businesses
In the corporate world of today, there is a lot of volatility. From managing inflation, layoffs, and just surviving the wider economic climate, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for SMBs to simply stay at a steady state.
Today, a small shop owner has enough on their plate to worry about the legislation changes that might change the way they manage paying their employees. After all, they have to keep up with balancing their books and staying on top of their inventory.
This is where companies like Counterpart help out. They have access to all of the data and jurisdictions that affect these SMBs, so they are able to guide them through these trying times.
However, there’s not currently a good relationship between the SMBs and the insurance companies, so they are having to work on flipping the script. Tanner explains, “There’s zero trust right now between customers and insurance companies. If you get a call from an insurance company, you’re automatically thinking, ‘What have I done wrong?’ How do we flip the script into ‘Oh, cool, they want to give me something to help me do better, because it’s advantageous for both of us’?”
The Small Business Outlook
Counterpart recently surveyed over 300 CEOs of SMBs to understand their priorities.
Of the findings, one of the most interesting was their attitude towards AI and other new technology tools. Around 90% had used AI in some capacity, but had discovered their staff were not designed correctly to fully utilize it. Instead of just stopping to explore it any further, there is now a focus on restructuring businesses around team members that can, and do, embrace the new tools to help the businesses grow in the volatile environment they find themselves in.
They are also far more proactive about their risk management than expected. They now are becoming pretty knowledgeable about their risks and leveraging agents to help them with the parts they do not understand or may not have visibility on.
With increasing economic volatility, Tanner sees it as insurance’s place to help out small businesses in finding ways to create more value and assist them in their risk management, saying, “These small businesses, there’s no other solution, right? Like you, they are just going to continue to face more volatility, more complex regulations. This is the general trend. And so I see it as this obligation that we have in insurance to step up and find ways to create more value.”
To find out more about insurance and SMBs, tune in to this episode of Risk Management: Brick by Brick.
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