About a month ago, I was able to attend a conference that focuses on Captive ownership. The Captive Owners’ Conference is in its 18th year and has grown from 50 attendees to more than 700. The conference was created by Innovative Captive Strategies, in conjunction with Holmes Murphy, with the goal of creating an ecosystem of highly engaged owners of companies who want to influence their risk, as well as professional risk management partners (insurance brokers and consultants, reinsurance companies, claims providers, actuaries, and captive managers) who are there to help their clients achieve their goals — lower cost with more control.
The conference features educational presentations, but my favorite sessions are the sessions where clients gather to share knowledge, discuss industry happenings, and challenge us on how we can help them. They push us to consider new options or alternatives that challenge our paradigms.
I love this event and others like it. When you bring people together with the same passions, you’re bound to learn something new. I’m continually in awe at what I consider the “power of community” we have with our clients and partners.
What do I mean by that? Simple. There’s an overwhelmingly positive feeling of collaboration. People get excited to work with like-minded companies, share ideas on controlling costs and improving risk, and educate each other on simply how they could do better and achieve goals. Clients engage with each other, and it creates an environment that fosters knowledge sharing. It also provides an opportunity for businesses to benchmark against each other, learn from one another, help each other determine ways to succeed, and leverage those business-to-business relationships. I believe these are crucial in the industry we’re in, and I love that businesses are working together to better each other.
On a similar note, this got me thinking about the thought leadership and expertise we provide to our clients. My hope is that Holmes Murphy and our subsidiaries constantly have you thinking about (and engaged in) your own risk management practices and what we can do to help you understand where you sit compared to others in the industry. One of my goals for 2018 is to evaluate and determine whether a similar conference for Holmes Murphy clients would be beneficial. I would love to get us all together to engage in a dialogue and help stimulate ideas to lower costs, innovate, and increase your control over risk. More details to come on that.
The “power of community” is real…and I hope you’re seeing this with us, creating risk management plans with our staff that help you control costs, relying on our staff to help you benchmark against like-minded companies, and, in turn, reaping the benefits.
