Industry News
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
The year 2025 will mark my 10th year working with landscape, lawn care and tree care professionals across the country. This long-term approach allows our team the time to learn and grow with the industry. Being able to understand landscape operations and accurately relay this information to the insurance carriers is a critical component to the overall insurance program we put together for our clients.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Landscape business leaders can now provide their management team with resources to better support their workers’ compensation program. Rancho Mesa offers its landscape, lawn care and tree care customers an industry specific Workers’ Compensation Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that can be used to help benchmark a company’s experience modification rate (i.e., Ex-Mod, Experience Mod), and the underlying performance trends that can help stakeholders stay informed.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Economies of scale create leverage for landscape businesses as they grow. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 2022 table of incident rates notes that the landscape industry has an incident rate of 3.4 per 100 full time employees. Landscape is classified by BLS under Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services; this sub class has an incident rate of 1.9. The average for all other industries is 3.0.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Lawn and landscape professionals across the country have seen the direct impact of a very difficult and challenging commercial auto market. In particular, green industry businesses who specialize in service and maintenance, which require a larger fleet, have felt more of the direct market pressure.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Having strong service partners that support your customers outside of your core operations is an important part of business. Many commercial landscape businesses have regional relationships with professional tree care companies to support the needs of their customers.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
When it comes to measuring safety, most green industry (i.e., lawn, landscape, and tree care) businesses rely on OSHA rates, the experience modification, and, if you’re a Rancho Mesa customer, your Safety KPI Dashboard. This data is important; however, it only captures lagging information. Take your safety program to the next level by measuring predictive, preventive, and proactive - leading indicators.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Three years ago, Rancho Mesa launched our proprietary safety KPI dashboard, consolidating experience mod and industry benchmarking reports to one working document. As a Rancho Mesa customer, you can now maximize the benefit of your safety KPI dashboard by completing our baseline training which will challenge the stakeholders in your organization to understand the key concepts this document delivers.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Landscape contractors have varying levels of exposure when it comes to installation projects. However, they virtually all share the same common coverage gap for trees, plants, shrubs, and lawns.
In this podcast episode Joe and Rancho Mesa’s Landscape Group Leader Drew Garcia discuss the importance of making it easy to do the right thing when it comes to safety and training.
Rancho Mesa's Vice President of the Landscape Group Drew Garcia interviewed the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) CEO Britt Wood about the upcoming ELEVATE 2022 conference event in Orlando, FL on September 18-21.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Rancho Mesa’s Safety KPI Dashboard allows businesses the ability to clearly visualize their path to an Experience MOD (XMOD) below 1.00 through goal setting.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
The Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) has proposed a 2% decrease (from $2.42 to $2.37) in the expected loss rate for the landscape class code 0042.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
Commercial auto premiums for landscape companies continue seeing heavy increases, and there is no end in sight.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
A piece of heavy equipment like a skid steer, backhoe, or excavator can be a vital tool for a landscape company and is expensive to replace, if stolen. According to the National Equipment Register (NER), heavy equipment is nine-times more likely to be stolen than vandalized and five-times more likely to be stolen than encounter fire damage. These statistics are alarming and prove theft of heavy equipment has now become a billion dollar illegal industry.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
In January 2021, we launched the Safety Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Dashboard to provide a tool for our customers to use as a bridge between their experience mod and safety performance.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
For the first time in several years the Expected Loss Rate for class code 0042 has increased from $2.38 to $2.42, a 2% increase.
Bottom line, although very minimal, this should help bring the experience mod down.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President, Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
How do you differentiate your company from your local competitors? Product, customer service, delivery, etc. The same can be said for your risk profile and insurance costs. Why are my insurance rates high when my competitors are low? This article breaks down four factors that influence your risk profile and impact pricing.
Author, Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc.
The workers’ compensation market for landscape companies in California has remained in a downward trend since 2015. As a result, landscape business owners have realized lower rates and subsequently aggressive premiums. The following are some key insights to help landscape businesses prepare for their 2021 workers’ compensation insurance renewal.
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