
Author: ARMR

Production Opportunities in a slow market
by: Dustin Helmenstine CIC,AINS
In this time of uncertainty, it is common for me to hear that new business pipelines are drying up. This makes sense because for as long as the insurance industry has been around, the main way to generate growth was through in-person networking. Just because that has been the model does not mean you cannot find new ways to generate growth.
As a millennial I find myself missing the traditional way of networking, who doesn’t love a happy hour, but it is important to realize just because the traditional way of generating growth has changed, doesn’t mean you cannot adjust and develop how you generate growth.
At the company I work for, American Risk Management Resources, we specialize in engineered environmental insurance placements that we sell on a wholesale basis. Through this pandemic we have been busier than ever because the retail producers we work with have done two things:
- Used this time as an opportunity to review a client’s existing insurance program, and
- Used this time to reach out to old connections to review their current insurance program to discover gaps in coverage created by exclusions for various contaminants that are universal in property and liability insurance policies.
Dustin Helmenstine joined American Risk Management Resources Network, LLC in 2015. He works as an insurance broker specializing in environmental risk management and insurance. He works on insurance placements ranging from contractor’s pollution liability contractual requirements to the transfer of contaminated properties and the cleanup of superfund sites. He has provided support in the design of multiple insurance programs. Dustin is the lead researcher in support of expert witness engagements and risk management consulting projects with project values exceeding $10,000,0000. He has analyzed insurance coverage on over a thousand insurance policies and the financial stability of large, Fortune 500 companies as it pertains to their environmental risk exposures. Past clients include Minnesota’s Department of Commerce, the Michigan Department of Attorney General and Contractor Connections, the largest contractor insurance referral network. Dustin graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in personal finance. He has completed his Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC) designation, Associates in General Insurance (AINS) designation and is working towards his Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) designation. He is currently a committee member of the IIAW Emerging Leaders and volunteers his time to the Sons of the American Legion and coaching youth basketball.

COVID-19 WORK: IS IT WORTH RISKING YOUR BUSINESS?
Offering COVID-19 services is taking on additional risk in your business. Here’s what you should know about insuring your company against those risks.
The word “risk” is a very broad term. To be in business, risk is always present. Business owners choose what risk they want to take on, avoid, or transfer. Offering a new service or taking on a new job is what us insurance nerds call taking on risk. Simply put, to avoid risk is to not take on the new service or job. To transfer risk is to purchase an insurance policy where you pay a small percentage of premium for the coverage amount purchased.
On a macro scale, offering COVID-19 services is taking on additional risk in your business. What increases the risk is that there is not enough data to predict how detrimental taking on these new operations could be. What we do know is it is not economical to determine if a virus is present or not. It is expensive and very small to detect. Since we do not know if a job site has active viral particles present, all jobs would need to be treated as contaminated due to the high risk of unknowns.
The natural response would be to transfer this associated risk to someone else, i.e., an insurance company where you pay a premium and in exchange the insurance company covers the associated risks. Without a hefty amount of actuarial data, insurance companies will run for the hills since the unknowns are too high for them to confidently insure the associated liabilities/risk, leaving business owners to self-insure or avoid the risk altogether.
An additional complexity is the quality of liability insurance purchased. There are sneaky exclusions in standardized General Liability policies that could very well deny coverage for a claim, such as a communicable disease exclusion. This is due to standard General Liability never being intended or created to cover risks from a viral pandemic, leaving business owners uninsured for CVOID-19 jobs they take on. If a consumer tries to use a product for something it was never intended to be used for, why would we think it would work?
There are a few insurance carriers who are not running for the hills; however, they are taking a very cautious approach to covering COVID-19-associated operations, and the insurance landscape changes every single day. Our environmental insurance brokerage firm has been tracking the offering of associated COVID-19 liability coverage from the start. The solution is for every business offering COVID-19 services to purchase a specialized contractor’s pollution liability with affirmative coverage for COVID-19 operations. This is easier said than done. The coverage is extremely difficult to obtain as the prequalification includes extensive jobsite experience related to biohazard work, prior training for biohazards, and multiple certifications held by key employees. Additionally, all field personnel must be trained in the knowledge of The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Report for Professional Cleaning and Restoration Contractors, Third Edition, May 28th 2020 or more recent versions, and special legal contracts must be in place for virus decontamination work.
In summary, is providing COVID-19 services worth risking your business? In my professional opinion it is a choice specific to your business and should be approached as a long-term service offering. If your business is contemplating taking on the risk without biohazard experience or training prior to the pandemic, I would caution you pause and evaluate if taking on that much risk is worth the potential reward, as it would be nearly impossible to transfer the risk to a third party if something goes wrong.

Property Insurance Coverage for COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
(Where the Hell is My Business Interruption Coverage?)
Author: Randy C. DeLopst, CPCU
Taurus Insurance & Risk Management Consulting, LLC
608-203-6357 Office
608-282-5854 Mobile
The Short Version of this Article
For a property insurance policy to provide coverage for claims arising out of a virus like COVID19, the following conditions must exist:
1. The state where the claim occurs must be one where courts would hold that the presence of a virus on insured property is “direct physical loss or damage”. Some states do and some states don’t. If the actual presence of the virus on the property is not verified, it will be very difficult to show there was a
“direct physical loss”.
2. The virus must be physically present on the Covered Property for loss of Business Income & Extra
Expense and Dependent Properties coverages to be triggered. It is very difficult to confirm the actual presence of a virus on a property. There are no simple tests. For Civil Authority coverage, the virus must be on property other than the properties at the described insured premises.
3. The state where the claim occurs must be one where courts would hold that a virus was not a “pollutant” under the policy’s pollution exclusion. Some states probably would and some probably wouldn’t. Is there is any case law on whether or not a virus is a “Pollutant” in property insurance policies? I could not find any such cases.
4. The policy does not have any separate exclusions for viruses, microbes, microorganisms, microbial matter, microscopic organisms, biological agents, contamination or similar terms. Such policy exclusions would probably exclude coverage for virus claims. You will most likely need to look to the Environmental Impairment/Pollution (EIL) insurance market for reliable property coverage for virus claims. This EIL policy will need to clearly state that coverage is
provided for virus claims and be adapted for indoor use.
or those who want to dig a little deeper into the reasons for why a property policy is not reliable for a contamination- driven cause of loss like a virus, hang on to you hats, ingest lots of caffeine and read on.

Testing Methods for Coronavirus Cleaning and Disinfection
Certified Mold-Free Corp (CMF) has extended its services into Coronavirus training as well as Coronavirus disinfection services.
What challenges are faced in developing a Coronavirus-Free Disinfection Program?
The main questions contractors asked:
- What are the methods available for Post Remediation Verification (PRV) testing for Coronavirus?
- Do they work … are they reliable?
- Can I get insurance for Coronavirus disinfection and what are the restrictions if any?
- What are the risk/reward tradeoffs? Certainly we would like to differentiate our company’s services from others that do not and cannot provide a Proof of Coronavirus Disinfection but would this pose a legal risk?
- What would the contract language look like to provide Proof of Coronavirus Disinfection? Any changes required to our current CMF contract language guaranteeing that remediation is Mold Free?
We answer these questions in a free training PowerPoint called: Testing Methods to Prove Coronavirus Disinfection Success. This is available online/anytime.
Course Purpose
- Evaluate different methods for testing for the success of coronavirus disinfection. Also called Clearance Testing or Post Remediation Verification testing. Why?
- In order to provide a Coronavirus-Free Warranty/Guarantee/Clearance Certification
- In order to reduce your liability. Someone gets sick and perhaps dies in a facility after you disinfect, if you prove it was perfect when you disinfected, then it will be hard or perhaps impossible for the plaintiff to find an attorney to take the case on contingency.
- Because you want to know that you did a perfect job. And have left the facility 100% safe
“One of the biggest problems we have had in developing risk management strategies for the contractors in the virus decontamination business is figuring out a way to reliability verify that the contractor has done a good job, on an affordable basis. In the liability insurance game it is all about having a legally defensible insurance buyer.What Dr. Rosen has come up with is a break through. His prescribed method works, and it is very inexpensive compared to the alternative methods of verifying clearance. Certifying site clearance from virus contamination is what building owners are going to want see from the cleaning firms that they hire. For them cleaning is all about avoiding liability.
In the hands of an articulate marketing rep selling the benefits of verified clearance, contracts for cleaning services will be won or lost over the legal defensibility of the cleaning services they provide.
David Dybdahl
President ARMR Specialty Holdings

How To Insure Your Virus Cleaning and Disinfecting Services
By David J. Dybdahl
July 10th, 2020
COVID-19 has put the cleaning, restoration, and insurance businesses on a wild ride. As you’ve heard me say time and time again, the vast majority of restorers are not adequately insured today for biohazards in general; coronavirus just made things worse. Special insurance is needed to address the risks associated with the coronavirus. Below I will layout a strategy to get your firm insured for the coronavirus risk.
The past few months have been like living the Wild West for contractors; awaiting the arrival of some authority to ride into town and provide direction. As many restorers were laying off entire staffs due to the government-driven shut-downs, other restorers were advertising that they could “vaporize viruses”, while insurance companies accelerated the pace in issuing biohazard exclusions anywhere they could.
As these market trends were unfolding, the potential to have unprecedented demand for professional cleaning services loomed on the horizon for the idle cleaners and restorers.
Insurance agents have been on a wild ride as well. Most insurance agencies were already paperless, so working from home was not a big issue for them. But insurance agents had another problem arising from COVID-19 that we had to deal with: none of the insurance policies we had in place on our customers were designed to cover coronavirus risks or losses arising from a pandemic. That turned out to be a big problem for cleaning and restoration firms who were needed to decontaminate buildings. New insurance coverage needed to be invented, but to create that needed coverage was like trying to buy flood insurance during a flood.
At this point, I knew the policies we had in place were not adequate to deal with the risk of a pandemic, so I started the product R&D work to create specialized environmental insurance to cover virus decontamination work as soon as flights from China were stopped. That turned out not be enough lead time. Although we had affordable affirmative grants of coverage for virus decontamination work in place for our current customers within days of the virus-driven shut-downs, no one had good options to offer for first-time buyers of functional biohazard insurance.
The New Normal
Because no insurance policy in force today was originally designed to address COVID-19 pandemic risks, new coverage extensions needed to be created. Those insurance coverage solutions for cleaning and restoration firms are coming online quickly and are available to firms that meet the qualification criteria of the insurance companies. The choices for insurance offering the essential Affirmative Grant of Coverage for virus related services are very limited, and availability will vary depending on the services mix and qualifications of different companies.
Managing the risks of coronavirus is the new normal. A well-designed General Liability + Contractors Pollution Liability + Professional Liability insurance policy that has been endorsed to cover full spectrum biohazards including virus is the most reliable coverage design. Other insurance coverage designs can work, but the coverage is not easy to verify.
Read More COVID Articles and RESOURCES
The amount of information on the Coronavirus is overwhelming and is constantly changing. We are adapting to those changes in real-time offering current and reputable resources to our hard-working cleaning and restoration contractors. Best of all, it’s FREE to all!

Ask the Expert: Liability Insurance Recommendations for Coronavirus Cleaning
Dave Dybdahl of ARMR Network answers three questions related to liability coverage and cleaning during the coronavirus pandemic:
- What is the #1 question you are getting from your restoration clients?
- What are some of the “must haves” for liability insurance if you’re doing coronavirus cleaning?
- What are some helpful documents out there for contractors right now? (This is obviously the place to mention the RIA/IICRC doc)
Diving deeper into the discussion, here are some risk management tips for restorers going out in the field to conduct virus decontamination work:
- Job #1: Protect the workers. If your employees have not been trained on personal protection equipment, if your firm does not have the equipment and experience working with bio-hazards, this is not place for on the job training.
- Follow the guidance and advice offered in the new RIA and IICRC Preliminary Report for Restoration Contractors Assisting Clients With COVID-19 Concerns. This document was produced s specifically to help contractors mitigate risk. DOWNLOAD HERE.
- Get your insurance coverage in order. At a minimum, contractors should review their general liability, contractor’s pollution liability, professional liability, and workers’ compensation policies with an insurance agent or broker with specialized knowledge or access to specialized knowledge in restoration contracting and bio hazards. There is no training available for insurance agents on the specialized needs of restoration contractors. Which explains why more than 90% of restores are inadequately insured today, not just on biohazard work. If you do not have a Contractors Environmental or Contractors Pollution Policy with its own insuring agreement section, stop all biohazard jobs. Job site coverage extensions on the General Liability policy do not fulfill this requirement.

Opening My Business Again after the COVID-19 Shutdown.
Do I Have Liability
Insurance Coverage if a Customer Gets This Virus?
Who We Are
For a deeper dive into this issue, let’s analyze how a Liability insurance policy may respond to a bodily
injury claim arising out of COVID-19. Many Liability insurance policies use Insurance Services Office (ISO)
policy forms to provide Liability insurance coverage. As such, this is a reasonable place to begin a
discussion of how Liability insurance policies respond to COVID-19 claims

Insurance industry jargon can seem like a whole different language, but I’m here to help with an explanation of seven terms!
Have you ever been speaking with your insurance agent or insurance company and found yourself completely confused? Don’t worry; you are not alone. Insurance industry jargon can seem like a whole different language, but I’m here to help with an explanation of seven terms you’re likely to hear when planning and handling your company’s insurance policy needs.
By Kari Dybdahl in CleanFax

Creating Opportunities from the Toxic Misperceptions of Environmental Risk Management
What are the toxic misperceptions held by insurance producers and how can you use them to your competitive advantage?
Extraordinary new business production opportunities are created by common misperceptions about environmental risks and insurance. The biggest challenge for new business producers is how do you create a competitive advantage in a business where your competitors likely have forgotten more than you have had time to learn in the insurance business. There are few lines of coverage where that deep experience of the incumbent agent works against them. Environmental insurance is one place where that holds true.
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