Insurance.
You rarely feel happy when you have to purchase it, but if something ever goes wrong you are always glad you did.
Let me tell you about a time when I didn’t purchase insurance.
I was 23 years old, pursuing my dreams of putting on Freestyle Motocross stunt shows. I had just spent $20,000 to purchase stunt ramps and upgrade my motorcycle and riding gear.
Within six months I performed my first jump show. Then two weeks later at my second show, I crashed.
I wasn’t mentally focused that day. I was performing when the wind was strong, the ramps were crooked, and I was nervous to be in front of a crowd but didn’t want to back down.
On the first jump of the day, I took off the ramp with the wrong speed and body position, forcing me to make a split-second decision mid-air. I had to decide to either stay on the bike or jump off the bike, to which I decided to jump off and landed 75 ft. in distance, from 25 ft. high, without the motorcycle and broke my back, pelvis, and ribs and was instantly paralyzed.
Doctors told me I would likely never walk again, and while I was in the hospital, I had to suddenly begin thinking about how I was going to pay my bills for the next several months.
“Did you have insurance on your motorcycle, Kevin?”, my lawyer asked.
“Not exactly”, I replied.
Not a good start.
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
The good news my lawyer said was that here, in Canada, I was fortunate that even though I was injured on my off-road motorcycle, I was still deemed to have been in a motor vehicle accident and would be covered under my “no-fault” insurance policy.
That meant I had $2 million (at that time) in coverage for attendant care, rehab, medications, assistive devices, and much more which became incredibly crucial to enabling my recovery. I spent close to $275,000 in medical and rehab expenses during the four-year recovery period prior to my insurance settlement where I was cut loose to take care of myself.
While that was positive, I unfortunately did skip out on insurance along the way which can’t back to haunt me.
I had an offer to pay a small percentage of my credit card balance for balance protection each month on the $20,000 debt I was carrying. I chose not to, thinking that I needed to save the roughly $40/month and was already spending too much.
As a result, when I was injured, I was still responsible for the remaining debt that I owed, and few hundred dollars would have saved me nearly $20,000.
In addition to that, throughout my four years of coverage and when my insurance case settled, I was excluded from income replacement benefits. I was a bricklayer at the time working 40+hour weeks at $20/hr and would have received up to 80% of my anticipated income for the next 30 years had I actually had off road motorcycle insurance.
That one decision to not purchase additional motorcycle insurance (about $800/year) cost me over $250,000 in paid earnings at the time of my settlement.
It was a case of the “I didn’t think I would need it”, until I did.
Proactive Responsibility in Business
When we think about business today, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that “I don’t think we need it” or “It won’t happen to us”.
We all hope and plan for the best, but know that is not how life, business, or the world operates. We never know when we will be blindsided with a major setback or event.
For example, if you are in the food processing business you may so busy operating that you know you should be proactively making a call to obtain coverage for your new facility that opens in a month, but say to yourself “I will take care of that once we are up and running”.
30, 60, 90 days fly by and before you know it you are six months into operating your new facility and one of your maintenance technicians forgets to seal the lid on an ammonia container, causing a leak and infection within the plant.
Suddenly you are faced with a multi-million dollar claim where you must clean contaminated equipment, replace customer orders urgently, pay staff for sick leave, manage a public relations nightmare and play damage control towards your reputation as a growing company who just opened, and then closed, their brand new facility.
At what point did someone avoid doing what they knew they were supposed to do?
Or in the case of cyber insurance, perhaps you are using up to date technology and only have six employees yet manage healthcare records of a new app collecting data on 150,000 new users and have a data breach.
What happens when you get sued and hadn’t taken the time to obtain proper insurance because you were so excited and caught up in the growth of your start-up that you didn’t take time to screen your last employee. They skipped your onboarding process and missed crucial steps in your privacy policy.
Now, you are working 80-hour weeks trying to recover the stolen data and keep the company from going under, paying a ransom fee before your users learn that you had a data breach.
This is the reality that many businesses operate under thinking that “It won’t happen to me” and “I don’t think I will need it”.
The Solution
In extreme sports, crashing is common. It’s not possible to participate in the sport and not fall down.
There is a saying that “It’s not a matter of if, but when” you will crash. You just know it’s inevitable.
Business is quite similar in that if you stay in business long enough, at some point something bad is bound to happen.
The question is when it does happen, will you be insured? Will you be prepared by having taken the necessary steps far in advance? Will you wait and leave it by chance that if you get into trouble you can get out of it?
When I think back to my situation, I consider myself lucky that I had the insurance that I did have… But more so, I wish I had all the coverage I needed because that would have been saving myself completely before it was too late.
My question for you today is, in what area of your business do you need to protect yourself before it’s too late?
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Whenever you are ready, if you would like to learn more, here are the best ways I can help you:
Connect with me on LinkedIn – This is where I post my best content to help you shift your mindset to drive results and embrace change. Click here
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