Rancho Mesa's Lauren Stumpf and Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group, discuss rising auto premium costs and how it is affecting the landscape industry.

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Director/Producer/Host: Lauren Stumpf

Guest: Drew Garcia

Editor: Lauren Stumpf

Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “News Room News” by Spence

Transcript

[Introduction]

Alyssa Burley: Hi, this is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa's, Media Communications and Client Services Department. Thank you for listening to today's top Rancho Mesa news brought to you by our Safety and Risk Management Network, StudioOne™.

Lauren Stumpf: Welcome back, everyone. This is Lauren Stumpf, Media Communications & Client Services Coordinator at Rancho Mesa. I will be filling in for our regular host, Alyssa Burley, as she is taking a well-deserved vacation. Today, we are joined by Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group with Rancho Mesa. We are going to discuss the rising auto premium costs and how it affects the landscape industry. So, with that being said, Drew, thank you for joining us.

Drew Garcia: Lauren, thanks for having me and I echo, I hope Alyssa is enjoying her vacation. Well-deserved.

LS: Commercial audio premiums for landscape companies continue seeing heavy increases and there is no end in sight. What can business owners be doing to stay on top of these changes?

DG: Yep, I think that's a big pain point right now in the landscape industry is auto premiums and I wanted to address it with a couple of things today, and the first piece is going to be understanding the metric in terms of finding a way to constantly manage this cost. So, at Rancho Mesa, I think our customers are aware of cost per unit. That's a term that we use, C.P.U. And that basically just means take your auto premium and divide it by the number of power units that you have on the policy, that's going to give you relatively a cost per unit of 1300, 1400, 1500, 2000, whatever that is and, you know, you're going to varying levels of vehicles on your schedule, really heavy trucks, lighter trucks, but just for the sake of tracking this and using it as a number that you can continue to measure against that renewal, this is a good way for landscape business owners, CFOs, people in upper management to really budget and forecast fleet related premiums. And then the other piece to this is really just honing in on fleet safety and figuring out ways to minimize activity. The auto market in general is really difficult. So, companies even that aren't experiencing claims are seeing rate increases as a way to cover the cost that has been incurred by the carriers on the auto side. So, you can look at safety really from two different ways. You've got proactive risk management and then you've got reactive risk management.

LS: Can you tell us a bit more about what these two techniques are?

DG: Yep. On the proactive side, that's going to be stuff like routine MVR checks, continuous driver monitoring, and then ongoing driver training. So, you want to just kind of hone in on those things that are all kind of preventable pieces to incidents that are accidents from occurring. Those are things that you can control. On the MVR checking side, most companies do this annually at renewal, but you can bump this up if your state has a DMV program. You can participate in that so you're constantly getting notifications if any of your employees have any driving infractions while working for you or while over the weekend driving personally, and then there's some other systems out there where you can continue to monitor your drivers with MVR checks that are given to you, like on a monthly basis or weekly basis. So, you can keep watching those, and then on the reactive risk management side, you've got to make sure that you're reporting, analyzing and correcting both near misses and then post accident incidents. And one thing that we're really excited about, we've been very vocal about over the last six months is people that are working with Rancho Mesa, our landscape companies that are working with Rancho Mesa, we offer them when they do have an incident and they report that accident to their account manager here at Rancho Mesa so we can submit the claim, our client services department ends up taking that information, reviewing the incident, and then sending trainings back out to our customer so that they can really loop out that accident and they can provide some training to that driver that had the incident so that we can hopefully prevent that from occurring in the future, and those trainings are both in English and Spanish. It can include stuff like accident prevention, defensive driver training, distracted driver training. There's a whole lot of different things that we have. But really, we're just trying to take the burden off of our customer from having to look into the risk management center or find a training that can round out any kind of an accident that their driver might have and really help them on the reactive side so that we're minimizing that type of occurrence in the future.

LS: Absolutely. This is very beneficial to our clients when an auto accident occurs. Rancho Mesa's Client Services Department, which includes myself, will analyze the incident and recommend specific trainings back to our landscape customers, encouraging proactive safety and helping to mitigate future accidents. Drew, if listeners have questions about how to control rising premium costs, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

DG: Yep, absolutely. They can reach me on my office line at (619)937-0200 or my email, its drewgarcia@ranchomesa.com.

[Closing Music]

LS: Drew, thank you for joining me in StudioOne™.

DG: Thanks Lauren.

AB: This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne™. For more information, visit us at ranchomesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.