Profile: Toward the Greater Good

Even the fiercest of competitors can pull together to achieve a greater good. Fred Plant, president of Plant Hope Adjusters in Moncton, NB, says he learned this lesson over the course of his own day-to-day business; he is hoping to share what he has learned as president of The Canadian Independent Adjusters’ Association (CIAA).

Plant has first-hand knowledge that the business environment is not static; he knows one must adapt in order to survive. The merger of a family-owned adjusting bureau back in the 1990s with another independent firm is a perfect example. He says the melding of these two firms proved to be a recipe for success.

Now he’s hoping to use the example to inspire the fragmented adjusting community to band together and advance the profession, by adapting to a business climate that sees more and more insurers dealing directly with contractors and eliminating the adjuster from the claims equation.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Plant’s career in adjusting unofficially began in 1978, when he spent a summer working alongside his father at the family-owned firm, Plant Adjustment Bureau. For Plant, his father’s Moncton firm served as a second-home of sorts. He fondly recalls his father bringing him along as a young boy on Saturday and Sunday morning calls.

“I grew up with a great deal more knowledge about the insurance business — and in particular, the claims business — than most people did,” Plant says. “It interested me from the beginning. I spent a summer working with my dad and just came to love the business that much more.”

That was the summer of 1978, Plant says. In the fall, he moved to Nova Scotia to attend university. Within a year and half, he was drawn back into the field when he accepted a job with Marsh Adjustment Bureau.

“After spending some time with that company, and getting my feet wet and learning a great deal with them, I went back to Moncton, to my father’s firm, and worked strictly as a field adjuster until 1997.”

Over the years, Plant’s father (also Fred Plant) had developed a special bond with the son of an owner of a neighbouring firm, Hope and Associates, which had been in business in New Brunswick since the 1930s. Gregor Hope, laughs Fred Plant (the son), “and my father are of the same vintage and they became very good friends.”

The friendship developed over a span of many years, despite the fact that the two men were in some respects competitors. When the time came for both Plant Senior and Hope to consider retirement, both men wondered what would become of the businesses they had worked so hard to develop. The answer seemed simple: Take the two firms, each staffed with “an excellent crew of people,” and combine their strengths.

“So, in what proved to be a great strategy, they merged their two companies in 1997 and handed the reins of responsibility of running the company to those of us who were going to carry on, although the two of them stayed on until 1999,” explains Plant. “When the time came for them to retire, there was no clunk. It was a seamless transition.”

SHIFTING ROLES

Plant is following in his father’s footsteps by running the family business. He will also be following in his dad’s example by assuming the role of CIAA president this fall: His father manned the CIAA helm in 1988.

What is his main goal? “To be able to stand in front of a group of people and speak without losing my lunch,” he chuckles.

Joking aside, Plant notes the role of the independent adjuster in Canada is in a real state of transition — a transition that has been happening for roughly a decade — and he fears the profession has been slow to react to the shift. “We had a traditional role in what we did for insurers and that role is evolving into something much more narrow,” he says.

Insurers are more inclined to partner directly with service providers to provide claims service, thereby eliminating the need for an adjuster when it comes to dealing with smaller claims, Plant observes. He feels the trend has created a ripple effect of negative ramifications.

He concedes the trend is partly because the job demand and volume of business has decreased. Even so, he says, the real tragedy may be that people who are entering the adjusting profession are losing that pool in which they can get their feet wet.

It’s a lose-lose situation he contends. “In the long term, it’s going to have a negative impact on insurers at a point when those of us who have been in the business for a long time are going to die or retire,” he says. Plant predicts the crunch is likely to come sometime during the next 10 to 15 years, when senior adjusters retire and take their knowledge and expertise along with them.

Plant says the adjusting business is learned primarily through experience, and the “training facility” for adjusters is in handling small property claims. But “without new people coming into the industry and learning on the ground,” he says, “there’s not going to be an opportunity to get people from coming in the door to being able to handle complicated casualty and property claims in the field. The training room is closing.”

Plant believes that while this shift was occurring, the independent adjusting community sat in a state of denial. According to Plant, the adjusting community was telling itself that the insurers’ transition to direct relationships with service providers would “never work. [The insurer] will have to come back and hire us again.”

Somewhere along the line, Plant argues, the adjusting profession either stopped providing value to its customers, or provided value on only a sporadic basis. “If someone feels there is less value in something they are buying, then they stop buying it,” Plant says. “I think as we slipped away from our traditional roles in the field of assessment and verification, and we abrogated some of those responsibilities to others in the field, there came a time when insurers looked and said: ‘Adjusters are adding expense, but they’re not adding value.'”

CALL TO ARMS

Given this context, the CIAA has embarked on a very ambitious project of repositioning itself, and repositioning the place of independent adjusting in the marketplace, Plant observes. First of all, the association must determine where, exactly, independent adjusters fit within the overall scheme of an insurance claim. The questions, “What do insurers need?” and “What services can adjusters provide to get back to the point where insurers value our service?” need to be asked.

“Instead of saying: ‘This is the service we provide and you should buy it,'” Plant says, “we have to understand what [insurers’] needs are.”

One of the difficulties in doing this, he says, is that adjusters are trying to provide a generic product to many different insurers at a time when insurers are trying to get away from providing generic services to consumers. Each individual insurer, Plant notes, wants to implement policies and processes that distinguish it from a competitor. “Our challenge is to identify with each individual insurer, each individual case, and provide the product the way that they want it delivered,” he says.

OUTREACH AND REACHING WITHIN

To survive, the adjusting profession must head in three directions, Plant says.

First, it must talk to insurers. Adjusters must understand what insurers need, so that the adjusting profession can be advanced, Plant says, “and to make sure that we’re still here and relevant in 15 years and beyond.”

Second, adjusters must communicate with independent insurance brokers. Plant says a natural affinity exists between the two professions, but when a broker sells a policy and the claims service is poor, it’s the broker’s reputation that takes the hit. “So it’s really important for these [brokers] that the companies for which they are selling policies are capable of delivering claims service. We need to identify where independent adjusters can add value to help the broker and insure r shine in the eye of their customers.”

Third, adjusters must engage in dialogue with their own colleagues. Plant often hears members of the association asking: “What’s the CIAA doing for me?” Plant says the response he wants to give is “the JFK-shoot-back,” which is to ask: “Well, what are you doing for the loss adjusting profession?'”

More support is needed from within the association, but also from those in the profession who do not support and participate in the association, he maintains. Many dedicated people within the CIAA work tirelessly to advance the profession, he says, but the results of their hard labour are often intangible. Other members “just don’t see the association is out there on the street working on their behalf, but it is.” The selflessness of the association members, he says, humbles him greatly. “I compete with these people daily on the street, but I admire them intensely for what they’re doing for the profession.”