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Flimflam artists and the sad stories of their victims are the stuff of local newspapers and police blotters. However, as business headlines attest, all the con artists aren’t working the streets. Some are doing quite well in boardrooms and corporate offices.

Insurance is far from immune to these charlatans. Whether it’s a great deal on Construction Bonds, a scheme to lower your Workers Compensation costs, or a “new” concept in Health coverage, an old adage might apply best: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

How can you tell the difference between a great deal and a scheme to pick your pocket? Before making any commitments, check out unknown entities with an organization that makes it their business to protect you from the fly-by-nights. These include your local Chambers of Commerce or Better Business Bureau. When it comes to insurance, your state insurance regulator is probably the best source of both valid information and enforcement when fraud is uncovered. To check out an insurance company, use such rating services as Standard & Poor’s and A.M. Best. These can usually be found at your local library or online.

Don’t forget one of the best ways to avoid being taken to the cleaners by a con game: Deal with reputable, professional insurance representatives, such as ourselves. We’re here for the long term, so you can trust us not to be interested in short-term scams at the cost of long-term loss of reputation and livelihood.

Call anytime – we’re here to help.

Using safety equipment that’s appropriate, well maintained, and in good shape can keep minor accidents in home construction from turning into serious – and costly – injuries. The National Association of Home Builders and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration offer these safety tips for residential builders:

Head Protection

• Make sure that your workers wear hard hats when overhead, falling, or flying hazards exist, or when there’s a danger of electrical shock.
• Inspect hard hats routinely for dents, cracks, or deterioration.
• After a hard hat has taken a heavy blow or electrical shock, replace it even if you detect no visible damage.
• Maintain hard hats in good condition. Don’t drill, clean with strong detergents or solvents, paint, or store hats in extreme temperatures.

Eye and Face

• Workers must wear safety glasses or face shields for welding, cutting, nailing (including pneumatic), or when working with concrete and/or harmful chemicals.
• Because eye and face protectors are designed for particular hazards, be sure to select the type that matches the danger.
• Replace poorly fitting or damaged safety glasses.

Foot

• Make sure that residential construction workers wear shoes or boots with slip-resistant and puncture-resistant soles (to prevent slipping and puncture wounds).
• Require safety-toed shoes to prevent crushed toes when working with heavy rolling equipment or falling objects.

Hand

• High-quality gloves can prevent injury.
• Gloves should fit snugly.
• Glove gauntlets should be taped for working with fiberglass materials.
• Workers should always wear the right gloves for the job. For example, they’ll need heavy-duty rubber gloves for concrete work and welding gloves for welding.

Fall Protection

• High-quality gloves can prevent injury.
• Use a safety harness system for fall protection.
• Use body belts only as positioning devices – not for fall protection.

Natural disasters can do significant damage to construction firms. Some suffer direct hits, while others endure massive service demands and shortages of help and supplies.

Although you might escape massive destruction and distress, what other events might cause your company to suffer a crisis? IT failure? Burglary or vandalism? Professional liability? Fire? Loss of market?

Whether disaster strikes as a catastrophic or stressful disruption, the best way to prepare for them is crisis management. Now is the time to develop a plan that will allow you and your staff to mobilize the right resources in the right order quickly to get you up and running as smoothly as possible.

How do you develop such a plan? What’s the process? Who should you include? How often should you review and update it?

We can help by providing risk management advice and recommendations, together with materials and resources tailored to your needs and exposures. Although insurance might not solve all your post-crisis problems, it can certainly provide a solid foundation for your planning should the worst happen.

Don’t wait for a crisis to uncover the gaps in your current preparations. Start now.

For years, Owner-Controlled Insurance Programs (OCIPs) were only found on large, single-site projects. Every day, more contractors are being required to work under these types of arrangements, either on smaller projects or “rolling” OCIPs that cover multiple projects. This requires contractors to identify and deal with the variety of complex issues that these programs raise.

Don’t go it alone. Our Construction Insurance professionals stand ready to help. If you’d like to do some research on your own, the Insurance Risk Management Institute (IRMI) provides a wealth of solid safety guidelines that are updated frequently. Originally created as a resource for contractor risk management information, IRMI publishes one of the best and most extensive libraries of insurance expertise in the nation and is widely used by insurance agents and risk managers in all types of businesses.

“A Contractor’s Guide to OCIPs,” available on the Construction Business Owner Web site, offers valuable guidelines on the benefits and risks of these programs, together with tips on making the most from them, and dealing with such issues as loss costs, separating Construction Insurance costs from bids, and estimating labor expenses.

Check out the guide. Then give us a call on how to apply its principles to your business. When it comes to your protection, don’t let “owner controlled” mean “out of control.

Although business management and performance are the major factors that will determine which contractors survive the downturn in construction, the size of the contractor also comes into play. As a rule, project owners are more likely to continue with larger developments because of their greater value, higher investment, and longer lead time. Smaller projects are easier to cancel, which makes smaller and midsize contractors (with work backlogs between $5 million and $100 million) more vulnerable to cancellation.

If you’re experiencing losses on a project, your first step should be to deal with overhead, liquidity, problems, and ongoing business concern. It’s also essential to communicate any problems to your insurance agent and surety company immediately! Because the surety has a strong financial interest in preventing you from default on your bond, it will leverage its relationship with the bond underwriter to help you work through these difficulties and reach a mutually acceptable solution that will keep you on the job.

However, a contractor withholding critical information about a problem situation from a surety would lead to a far different result. Concern about the contractor’s deteriorating financial condition – which makes it a riskier bonding candidate – might make the surety restrict its future capacity, leading it to make the contractor either bid on only smaller projects that pose less risk to the underwriter or postpone bidding on all projects until the business can clean up its balance sheet.

If you have any questions about working with your surety, please feel free to get in touch with the Bond professionals at our agency.