Customized Service

The company may have started out as a general adjusting firm nearly 60 years ago, but they quickly morphed into becoming one of the pre-eminent claims adjusting firms in the country for professional liability.

Maltman Group International started as a general adjusting firm in 1948 by Fred Maltman, but by the late ’50s the company was specializing in the professional liability area within a broad range of professions, including architecture, land surveying and accounting. Since that time, the company has worked on more than 30,000 professional liability claims, “which is probably the single most for any independent adjusting firm in the country,” Craig Walker, director at Maltman, notes.

As the firm has evolved, it branched into the environmental area, working on impairment liability claims, claims against consultants, in addition to ski hill liability and host liquor liability claims.

While the basics of loss adjusting are the same as they were in 1949, everything else has changed: from technology, to operating procedures and customer requests, Walker notes.

Changes in technology

For Walker, technology is the biggest change — so much so that the company has brought on two full-time information technology (IT) staff to handle the increase. It’s not common for a small adjusting firm to have IT staff, never-mind two working full-time. But, Walker notes, because Maltman’s is a Third Party Administrator, they run a number of programs and in order to do that, there is a vast amount of statistical information that needs to be gathered.

Further to that is the technology issues that might arise while running these programs or compiling this data. Due to the increased technological knowledge required to be a TPA, combined with the day-to-day technological requirements in a company, Maltman’s has seen a need for two full-time IT staff for more than 10 years.

“We’ve gone from the old days of a telephone and a typewriter to fancy typewriters to telecopiers to fax machines to work processing to customer-client interface,” Walker says. “It’s been one thing after another.”

In addition to adding to the staff roster, Maltman’s has kept abreast of tech issues in the industry — talking to others to learn what is working, what is needed and what is not working so the company can avoid the pitfalls of making the wrong choice.

Currently, the company is in the process of revamping its system to move into live reporting and access. With the new system, customers can simply go online and access reports. This means in the next three to six months when the implementation is complete, much of the work done at Maltman’s will be completed electronically — reports will no longer be sent manually.

Full value service

But while their technical capabilities might rival that of a large firm, Maltman’s prides itself on being a small firm that is able to provide customized service for its clients.

“We deliver a quality product and we pride ourselves on the product that we put out the door and we strive to be the best at that,” Walker says. “The old saying that your best advertising is the report that you produce . . . so we excel and show people that we know what we do, we know how to do it and that they get extremely good value for what we deliver to them.”

The company is able to tailor a service specifically for a client, as opposed to offering a selection of pre-packaged services. They are able to provide loss trending and risk trending for clients, in addition to loss control education and training.

“The approach we take is because we are smaller, we are able to provide you with more specialized and customized service to meet the client’s needs,” Walker says. “Just because we are smaller, we don’t have the corporate infrastructure and requirements. We’re in a better position to tailor to whatever our client specifically needs.”

A small firm

Being a smaller firm means that the company’s four owners control not only the day-to-day operation, but also what changes to implement and what direction to take in the future. The flexibility allows the company to react in different ways than larger companies are often forced to.

That said, there are challenges to being a small firm, as well, especially when it comes to marketing. Large firms have multiple locations and are able to market to a wider audience. However, because Maltman’s is so specialized in terms of business offerings, they are not fighting for all the same lines of business.

Being a smaller firm also means that any changes in business can have a large impact in terms of how busy or how slow the company is. “Because we are a smaller firm, a small move makes a big dent [in how much work there is] and the kind of work that we do,” Walker says. “Plus, if we pick up programs or runoffs or things of that nature, as they come and they go, they can drastically increase up and down what our volumes are.”

The ticket, Walker says, is to properly staff the firm, which can be a challenge. Currently Maltman’s is a firm of 19, which includes the company’s four owners: Tom Dorey, managing director and president; Randy Ffrench, director; John Breese, director; and Walker, director. And while the firm wants to grow, it also wants to ensure it’s with the right people. The environment at Maltman’s is much like a family, due in part to a low turnover rate in staff and in part to the length of time many employees have been there — some in excess of 40 years. “Everybody knows everybody and it becomes something like a family,” Walker says.

Because they are only one office, Maltman’s uses the Canadian Adjusters Network (an entity of independents with a member in each province or territory across the country) as a referral system. However, with the continued contraction of numbers and the acquisition of firms by the nationals, CAN does not exist in its purest form any longer, though there are some members that can still be contacted, Walker notes.

Maltman’s also uses its membership in the Canadian Independent Adjusters’ Association (CIAA) as a means to work with affiliates across the country when needed. Additionally, being a member of the CIAA, from the standpoint of being a smaller firm, provides the company with a larger voice. “For a small firm, we have probably had the most involvement in this association over the years,” Walker says. Maltman’s founder, Fred Maltman was a founding president of the Canadian Independent Adjusters’ Conference (CIAC), which became the CIAA in 1985. All four directors at Maltman’s have held a position on the CIAA: Dorey is a past president, Ffrench was a treasurer, Walker was a past president on both the National and the Ontario chapters and Breese is a past president of the Ontario chapter.