(upbeat music) Entrepreneurship, small business creation, home ownership, and collaboration have always been the backbone of our local economies. With all of that under threat and communities fighting against further division, conversation mill turns on the mic for everyday difference makers in our local communities. Whether they be farmers, mayors, builders, creators, or doers. Every week, join me, Rebecca Dale, here in conversation. (upbeat music) The conversation continues this week around the ongoing liquor liability issue here in South Carolina. But my guests and I today do not solely converse on just this topic. In fact, we often break off to chat about the real root causes of high insurance costs across industries. And not just across industries for small business, but for personal insurance products as well. This probably will not be a spoiler alert, but greed is the cornerstone to many, if not all of these insurance and legislation issues we discuss today. Greed is ancient. And surely our conversation today will not solve it or frankly make a dent in it. But our conversation hopefully will motivate you to look at individuals and companies' motives a little bit or a lot closer. And we hope that it inspires you to participate in local government. I left this conversation understanding more about insurance in general. And I think Andy's way of clearly and concisely walking us through what he views as the main contributing factors to the current situation we find ourselves in here in South Carolina and contributing factors to insurance costs in general, help remove some of the fogginess or over complications regarding insurance or liquor liability questions. Please join me and my guest, Andrew Reyna, now in conversation. (upbeat music) - Do you mind just starting by introducing yourself and what your business is? - Yeah, yeah. My name is Andrew Reyna. My business is called the Ragnar Group. We're based in North Charleston in South Carolina. And what we are is we are a whole service, financial services company. So it's basically comprised of four different arms. We have a wealth management arm. We have a property and casualty insurance arm. We have a benefits and health insurance arm. And most recent one is a payroll arm. It didn't start out this way, but what I inadvertently did is like create a local version of ADPR paychecks. - Yeah, that's kind of cool. I was gonna ask you kind of about that. What did you set out to do? And then kind of how did you get to hear? - So I started out with the intention of building a wealth management company. And through that wealth management company and building those relationships, what I realized was is that there's a need for kind of one integrated solution. Our wealth management clients, they have questions about health insurance or life insurance or disability insurance. They have questions about car insurance or homeowners insurance. And the payroll arm really came about as a way to work with more small businesses. So one of my biggest pet peeves when I was in wealth management was always the insurance agents don't really have a complete picture of what's going on. So how are they making the insurance recommendations that are making if they don't know all the moving parts? From our side on the wealth management side, we do know what all the moving parts are. We know what your house is worth. We know what you owe on your house. We know what your spending habits are on cars or boats or whatever it is. So it actually makes a lot more sense to start with wealth management and fill in the gaps outside of that. - Yeah. So let's back up a little bit. What was your career path that led you to starting this company in the insurance? Well, wealth management space, but now in insurance as well. - Sure. So when I was in school, when I was in college, I went to school thinking that I was gonna be an engineer. I actually started out in civil structural engineering. And at the time, my stepfather was a vice president for Morgan Stanley in New York. And he said, "Hey, you know, you should really think "about doing wealth management." It's all math, right? It's just how you apply that math. And he convinced me to do that. So when I graduated college, it was like, all right, well, let's start down this wealth management career. And I'm originally from upstate New York, but one of the things that I've always been really conscious of is I didn't want anything given to me. So what I did is I moved to Charleston. I picked up all my stuff and moved to Charleston because I didn't want anybody to ever look back at my career and say, you only got it because somebody gave you the job, right? So I said, I'm gonna come build this myself. And it was a struggle the first couple of years. Started out, slinging, essentially life insurance in New York life ended up working for a smaller investment firm on Daniel Island in South Carolina. And after I left there, I started my own firm. The name of the firm that I started was Veritas Wealth Management. And I, are you familiar with the meaning of the word veritas? - Somewhat, but give me the reason behind why you picked that. - So Veritas is the Greek goddess of truth. People are more familiar with her daughter, virtue. That's why you wanna see true virtue. And I wanted to start it as a way to kind of break down the communication barriers between wealth managers and their clients. So I chose Veritas as a way to signal, "Hey, we're gonna be an open book. "We're gonna be sometimes painfully truthful with you "if you're one of our clients." - You had Veritas, how long did you run that for or did that turn into your current company? - Yeah, we had Veritas for maybe eight years before it really kind of morphed into what it is now. Still own Veritas, it's just under the Ragnar umbrella. And we started, the second business we started was the life insurance and disability insurance company. And that in 2020, actually February of 2020 is when we started the property and casualty agency, which is a fantastic time to start a business was we literally started the paperwork to start the agency a week before everything shut down. - Ah. (laughs) - So it was a good time to settle in. - Yeah, yeah. (laughs) - What's the meaning behind the Ragnar group? Why did you choose that? - So Ragnar was actually my nickname growing up when I was, when I was in high school, I had a football coach, gave me the nickname Ragnar and he pulled me aside one day, he said, "Hey, have you ever read the stories about Ragnar?" And I was kind of laughed. I was like, "No, I have no idea what you're talking about." And the story behind Ragnar and more people are familiar with who he is now because of all, and I call everything Marvel. I don't know if it's actually Marvel, but I call everything Marvel because of the Marvel stuff, right? But in kind of Nord's and Viking folklore, Ragnar was the guy that picked the fight with England. So I got the nickname for my coach because I was always the guy picking the fight with a bigger guy. That was just, that was what it was then. And as you can tell, that's still who I am now. - Yeah, and we're gonna get to that in a symphony. Before we get into that, I wanna kind of ask about, what were some of the biggest challenges? You mentioned like how it was a struggle to get started, whether it was starting Veritas or then creating this bigger umbrella company, what are have been some of the biggest challenges? - Sure, so the first company we started Veritas, the biggest challenges in starting your own kind of wealth management or financial services sport firm is really all the regulation that you have to go through. It is a process, an absolute process. The amount of agencies that you have to register with, the amount of states you have to register with, all the contracts and disclosures that are updated nonstop. I tell people all the time, I'm very, very fortunate that we started the wealth management company when we did, because starting it now, it's just gotten so much more complicated. And honestly, I honestly believe it's by design, right? If you can make things so hard and so expensive to start a business, you're less likely to start one and just more likely to work for somebody else. So myself and my partner at the start at Veritas, we're very fortunate to start it when we did. And we're at the spot now where we can take those adjustments and we can take the additional charges on the chin and still operate, right? But somebody trying to do it now, good luck, I feel bad for them, right? - Yeah. What kind of education or certifications or degrees did you need to start whether wealth management or insurance? - Sure. This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves about the industry. The one of the biggest problems with the industry is it's a very low barrier to entry, right? There is no set degree you need. There is no set training that you need. Yes, you have to pass a series seven or six or your insurance license exams. They're honestly not that difficult. They're not that difficult to do. So what they do is the whole industry does this. They basically hire as many people as they can and just see what works out, right? So the barrier to entry is very small, but the ability to succeed is very difficult. It kind of should be the other way around because you're dealing with people's money, you're dealing with their future, you're dealing with their assets. The barrier to entry should be incredibly high and companies should be investing to make sure people stay around, but that's not the case. - Let's start to kind of get into it, right? Many of us have a pretty poor opinion of insurance companies specifically, right? Just speaking for myself, I'm a healthy person, I eat healthy, I work out, I do things to take care of myself and then I pay out all this health insurance to go to the doctor once in 10 years for something, right? And that's just one example. And then you get into car insurance and in a minute here we're gonna get into the liquor liability insurance issue. Our insurance companies now too big to fail or too big to change, so to speak, because it seems like just more things are getting insured, things are getting more expensive. And it's like, well, you better get insurance for that, you better get insurance for that. And it's just like, how am I gonna have a hundred different insurance companies by the time I'm ready to retire to ensure my whole life against lawsuits or damage? - Yeah, so insurance companies are definitely too big to change in any sort of meaningful way at this point. It's a similar analogy would be like a boat, right? Jatsky, it's a lot smaller, it can turn a lot quicker, it can change a lot quicker, it's more nimble, trying to turn around a cruise ship and it's a completely different story, right? So a lot of these insurance companies have become so big that trying to fundamentally change anything, any part of their business operation takes years, in some cases, and that makes them very, very hesitant to do things that are different or new, as we'll get into this a little bit with the liquor liability. So it's really tough. Are they too big to fail? In theory, no, in all practicality, yes. One of the questions that we hear from time to time, and I started my career in 2008, so it was a really big time that you have in the conversation about financial stability for insurance companies. In all reality, insurance companies never go bankrupt. What they do is they become financially distressed and another insurance company buys whatever portion of that insurance company they want. That's in reality, that's what happens. And then what happens is you get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger insurance companies and they control more and more and more parts of the market. A good example of that is the company Berkshire Hathaway, are you familiar with Berkshire Hathaway? - Yes, yeah. - Berkshire Hathaway actually lists all of their subsidiary insurance companies, and it's got to be in the 20s. They don't say Berkshire Hathaway on them, but they're owned and operated by Berkshire Hathaway. So what the general public sees is 20-something different insurance carriers. They're not. I mean, legally they are, but they're really not. And they don't compete against each other. The Berkshars don't compete against other Berkshars. And they know if you are one. So, not necessarily too big to fail, but definitely too big to change. People's distrust of insurance companies and insurance agents, it's warranted and it's justified. It's, and honestly, it's probably so much worse than you actually realize. People need to realize that insurance companies sold jobs to not pay out claims. That's how they make money. If they were a charity, then they would pay out all the claims all the time. - Right. - They're not. They're for-profit enterprises. So it's their job not to pay out claims. And they spend a lot of money making sure they don't pay out claims. Unfortunately, that's the way it is. - So let's get into what kind of brought us together, which is the liquor liability issues happening here in South Carolina. So first, how did you get pulled in on this? - Yes, it's kind of a funny story. Back in mid December, late December of last year on a very good friend of mine that owned several restaurants around town. He basically called me up and he said, "Hey, I know you own this insurance agency. "Can you help me with liquor liability?" And I knew just enough about liquor liability that my knee-jerk reaction was no. I don't want to get involved, right? The analogy I like to use is that it's like getting involved in homeowners insurance in Florida. Nobody wants to do it. - Right. - It's the nightmare, it's a pain. Yeah, jump through all these hoops and the payout usually isn't all that great on the other side of it, right? - Uh-huh. - So I told, I initially told them no. And it's a slow time of year. At the end of the year, it's always a slow time, a year for the wealth management business. You know, nobody wants to talk to their financial advisor between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Nobody does, it's just slow. So one day I was like, well, you know, let me look into this a little bit. Let me start digging into this. And what I found was kind of crazy. This, the whole notion that there are two carriers or three carriers, honestly, it's kind of BS. And I found this out by calling pretty much all any insurance carrier that would pick up the phone. I said, hey, you know, can I talk to somebody underwriting? And I had conversations with dozens and dozens and dozens of underwriters and found that there were a lot of companies out there that were writing this product that seemingly nobody was using. And the only, the only reason I can figure why a lot of agents and agencies who are using them was because honestly the contracts that they offer and the compensation they offer the agents is kind of below market. I mean, it's not material, materially below market, but it's definitely not as high as other carriers pay. That's only, that was the only logical reason I could come up with is, hey, you're going to make one or two percentage points less. Now for us, it wasn't a big deal because it's not a, it is a business that we do, but it's not our core source of revenue. So I look at it like, hey, I wasn't writing the business before. Would I care if I'm getting paid 2% less of the business? I wasn't writing before this. It just doesn't bother me, right? Plus I think insurance companies are scumbags, so whatever. So we started doing that and I started writing a lot of restaurants around town where kind of started spreading. So we went from having four restaurant clients to begin the year, and I think we're up to 47 now. And that's through six months. - Wow. - And I do no advertising. I don't know how to advertise. I've tried to do it on Facebook and LinkedIn and all that other stuff. And honestly, I'm sure there's got to be a button. I'm not pressing because I never get anything out of it. So it's been all word of mouth. And that's when we started looking at it going, hey, there's something here, right? And I used to bar 10 in town a long time ago. I'm kind of old now, but I bartended around Charleston for about 10 years. So I knew a lot of people in the industry and I was able to have some pretty front conversations with them to learn, yeah, this is actually a pretty big deal. And it's something that's really on the top of their mind a lot, right? So we started just kind of grassroots in it, so to say. And then we started seeing things change in the marketplace, started seeing some carriers leave, starting to see some carriers change their appetites. And it never really made a lot of sense to me. It never made sense why they're making the decisions that they were making. So we started looking into that too. - Okay, so let's back up just a little bit. So how, because this is really interesting to me because what we've been told, and I'm not an expert in this, I've just been talking to other people who are digging into it, right? That's kind of my advantage is I get to come in and ask questions as like an everyday citizen in South Carolina 'cause I am who's heard about this. I feel like I get the option to dig a little bit deeper. But what we've been hearing is, oh, there's only a handful of carriers. Now there's only two to three, but it's always more dire. And so what you're saying just to clarify is there are other carriers outside of those two or three are handful that will write policies, but the insurance agent who's going between the restaurant or the bar and seeking out carriers as being like, oh, this one will get me the biggest commission. - I think that's a decision that's made, yeah, that commission decision and that contracting decision, that's typically made on the agency level. So somewhere there's somebody that owns that agency or is the general manager of the agency that's in charge of contracts and agreements, somewhere that person's making that decision, right? The agents, they're essentially just minions, right? Their job is literally to be a paper pusher. That's what their job is. They take the paper from the client and they send it to whatever carriers that they're appointed to sell with. And that appointment part is the big difference. Right now, what they're doing is and I'm sure this isn't in every case, right? But in the majority of cases, what we're finding is that they're really all shopping the same two or three carriers because they're all going through the same two or three aggregators, right? So it appears to be competition, really isn't competition. You're really just shopping the same three carriers because those are the ones you have access to. I know of six right now that are writing like your liability in South Carolina. I know of six. It used to be seven, one of them left a couple of weeks ago. Well, they didn't leave, they're suspending new business. Which is just a fancy way to say and we wrote too much. We need to back off. So yeah, it always kind of bugged me a little bit. Whenever I hear, oh, they're only two or three. It's like, no, there are really only two or three that you're appointed to sell with. Does that mean that there are six insurance carriers that will give you a quote for all businesses? No, no, it doesn't. There are some that have tighter underwriting, I will say. Yeah. But you should be getting back at least four quotes. If you're really exhausting the market, you should be getting back for. Gotcha. Are they gonna be cheap? No, but you should be getting back for. And so when you started doing that for these clients, you were getting back for the six quotes or something. And then you were still seeing those high premiums. However. Yeah, so a couple of the carriers, the ones that were really being, I would say the most aggressive with their pricing, it wasn't that they were coming back cheap. What they were coming back as is the similar premium that a lot of these restaurants and bars were paying two years ago, right? So two years ago was still expensive, but right now what we've done is we've entered like the egregious territory. Right. So it's not that it's, you know, some amazing deal. It's just amazing relative to what's out there now. Right. Okay. So now let's kind of talk about the more you got involved in this and the more people you started to help and the more you kind of dug in. I know there's like kind of four things that you identified as the problem here, right? We're trying to get this SC Justice Act passed to solve some issues. It's not passing. They're not doing special sessions on it. But let's walk through or walk me through first, just like what did you identify as those four issues? And then we can, or for causes of where we're at with this liquor liability. And then we can dig into each one. Sure. So it I'll be very upfront about this. And so upfront that I actually make this public and I put it on a website in order, in my opinion, what problems with liquor liability insurance, where it stands now, the biggest person, the biggest group of people to blame is a legislation, the legislators, right after that is the lawyers, right after the lawyers is the insurance agents and agencies. And then the last group is actually the restaurant owners themselves. So I guess we should probably start with that first group, right? The last group. Yeah, let's start with those lawmakers. Yeah. And isn't it so funny that the first three of those groups, those people, nobody likes those two people either. I wonder why, yeah. So one of the advantages that I have in kind of going down this rabbit hole was actually my wealth management experience. Through the wealth management experience, I actually had access to probably more people than an insurance agent off the street would have had. Just from the circles that I was running in at the time and still am running in. So I was able to get kind of more information than I probably should have been given at several instances. But the biggest problem with the legislators are, is there a lot of more lawyers, right? So they could put on the website, the SC Justice Act failed and it appears to be that it failed by a narrow margin, but it only appears that way. There are 46 senators in our state Senate, right? When they did the last vote, the vote that finally killed it for their session, three of the senators were absent. They had an excuse, absence for that day. So that means that there were 43 people that voted. 20 voted yes to pass the bill. 23 voted no to kill the bill. Of those 23 people that voted no, 17 of them were attorneys and 16 of those 17 attorneys actually list one of their primary areas of practice as personal injury or DUI cases, right? No, the notion is, oh, well, we were only three votes short, not really, because two out of the three people that didn't vote are also attorneys and they're also personal injury attorneys. You really failed the vote by five if it really came down to it, right? Oddly enough, of the 23, this is one of the only times I've ever seen this. This is one of the most bipartisan issues you will ever see, meaning that of the 23 people that voted no was perfectly split between Democrat and Republican. There is no party affiliation or party reasoning behind this. So if you think about this cynically and you say, hey, why are they voting this way? It's clearly not a party issue, right? 'Cause everybody likes to dig in their heels, Democrats are gonna do one thing, Republicans are gonna do another. But that's not happening here. So the only logical reason is that they're doing it out of personal interest, right? They're legislating to protect their own personal incomes. That's the only thing I can come up with. That's the only logical reason I can come up with. There was an attorney down here named Dave Yargro. He put out a whole thing about why the SC Justice Act was a bad idea from the start. But again, you have to realize he's one of the guys that's settling the largest tort lawsuits in the state. So of course he's going to come out with something like that. He's protecting his own self-interest. The 17 people that voted the same way, that's exactly what they're doing. That's exactly what they're doing. There was another bill that was going on at the same time the House side, and that was the Fair Access to Insurance Act. Sure. That was the one that said, "Hey, if you close at eight o'clock, "you don't have to do the million. "If you're a nonprofit, you don't have to do the million. "If you do the tip-certified, you have to do the million." It was that one. That one failed in similar fashion and almost for the exact same reason. There were 34 lawyers that voted on that bill. And they voted no. That was the exact same scenario, the exact same scenario. I feel like I need to do some research on our other states and what percentage of the legislation in those other states is made up of lawyers. 'Cause this feels like a very heavy, lawyer-heavy legislation or legislative body that we have here in South Carolina, and I'm just curious to know if it's like that in other states. You know, I don't know. I've never really thought about it before. I guess you just kind of are like, I mean, listen, we've always had, you know, our first handful of presidents, we're all lawyers, right? Or we're farmers and then lawyers, you know? I guess those were the only two professions at the time, right? Like they all were studied. They were all studied people, if you will. I just would be curious to see if it's that heavy in other states. - No, and I don't know the answer to that. You know, I think if you generally live your life with the general idea that, hey, if you can figure out what financially benefits a certain person, you can generally figure out where their motivations are and how they're gonna act, right? When you look at the way that our state government has set up, the compensation that we pay reps and senators, it's really small. It's, I think it's $10,700, some dollars a year is what it is. Plus a per diem of, and don't call me on these numbers, but it's roughly 170 bucks, right? So every day they're in session, they get another 170 bucks. If you don't live within 45 minutes of Columbia, you're getting a hotel room, right? That's gonna be, that's gonna eat up your entire per diem. Then you look at all the time you spend up there, and if you're a business owner, or in another successful industry, you look at that and go, am I really gonna take all this time out of run of my business for $10,000 a year? The answer's gonna be no. - Right. - So you have to try to find why people are participating in the state legislator, and lawyers make a lot of sense. They're essentially writing the rules of the game that they're playing and being paid to play. So they get kind of an added benefit, not just the 10,000, they get the added benefit of all the other stuff. That's not to say all of them are like that, right? There are some people there that generally care about their communities and generally want things to be better. But at some point the numbers don't lie, and that's kind of what we're seeing right now is, hey, the numbers are telling you this is going on. It's tough to disagree with it. - Yeah, it's kind of a bigger thing to have just our sort of greed obsession as a society. It feels like over the last couple of decades. I mean, there's always greed. There's always people working for themselves and not in the best interest of others. But it almost feels so overwhelming now. When we talk about something like this and it becomes pretty clear that there are certain hands in the pot that are just for themselves. And then we look at it on a national level too, and we see that play out, you know, with whether it's presidents or senators or whatever at the national level as well. It almost feels like everybody ends up who becomes a politician, end up just falling victim to, well, I'm not gonna get anything done for my constituents. So, well, I might as well just, if I can't beat 'em, join 'em almost. It feels like that sometimes. It feels a little defeatist when we start talking about this. - Yeah, you know, not to be too political on either side, but it's kind of one of those things where I think you have to look at the personalities of the people that are more drawn to these positions, right? They tend to be more alpha, either alpha female, alpha male. They tend to be the personality we call them as drivers, okay? I think those people are just generally drawn to more personal, successful endeavors and how they get to that personal level of success doesn't really factor into the decision about them being successful, if that makes sense. - Yeah. It's interesting because there used to be sort of this trickle-down effect from wealthy individuals to the rest of the country, right? There was always this idea of like, okay, well, capitalism is good because if I go out and I make millions and millions of dollars, I'm gonna pay my employees more and I'm gonna give them educational opportunities and then they can go out and follow that American dream and do the same thing. And I think what happened is, well, I don't know, this is just like, there's a bunch of things, right? But I think one of the things is that trickle-down works really well when it's a small business in town that is really successful and they have one or two locations, maybe, maybe a couple more and they can start promoting people to management positions and they can promote people to regional managers and they can teach people skills and they can go open another restaurant or cross town that serves a different type of food. And it's like this localized, not billionaires, trickling stuff down, it's maybe the millionaire trickling down success who wants to stay in their community, benefit their community. Like that's where trickle-down works incredibly. But then when we get to these other levels, that's where I'm like, the greed comes in, right? That's where I'm like, well, now we just got these people in our legislative bodies or on the national level and they're not trickling anything down. They're not to their constituents or from their businesses or from their endeavors. It's just how much more can I get? And I got to kind of keep my pile. - Yeah, and especially on the, I would say the state and the local side of stuff, right? Like the national elections, they get all of this press. Everybody knows what the main issues are on the national level. You can't turn on your TV for 20 minutes or not hear about two or three of them, right? But on the state and local side, what you see is not a lot of participation. Just don't see it. When you look at some of the primaries that just went through, right? There's a big primary push and Sheila and the SE venue crisis was very active in trying to promote the primaries. You know, the voter turnout's atrocious. It's awful. We had a pretty contested one here in Charleston. And I think the person that won got like 1,400 votes in an area with probably 40,000 people. It's like, it's like, it's just not, it's almost like people are still blinded by the national issues. They don't even look at what's actually going on in front of them. - And we gotta bring more awareness to that because it's those people at the state level that are affecting our day-to-day lives or our potential day-to-day lives. - Yeah, and this is, again, not to get political one way or the other, right? This is something that George Soros, right? Whenever you hear that name raised, everybody has a visceral reaction one way or the other. - Yeah. - Let's get that out of our mind right now, right? You do have to give the guy credit for something that he figured out before everybody else did, which was, hey, I can take the same amount of money and influence a lot more cheaper local level stuff and get the same result naturally, the dump of the money into it. That is a brilliant move. Hate the guy, love the guy, it doesn't matter. You have to give him credit for being the first person to figure that out and do it in a very efficient way, right? And that just goes to show you, hey, this is, this door is wide open to change the way states are legislated and the way local municipalities are legislated. It's, 'cause there's just not a lot of turnout. There's not that same level of excitement. Even with this liquor liability issue, I wasn't even keenly aware of how big of an issue it was until six months ago. - Right, yeah. - And I'm very involved with a lot of our business clients and it just, it never really popped up in my radar until some money randomly brought it up. It's tough for me to blame people that are voting in it because probably a lot of them don't even know. - Uh-huh. - They don't know. What does the 80 year old grandma that lives in the neighborhood up the street from me? What does she know about what's going on in the Barn Tavern Association? - Probably not a lot. - Right, right. But she's the one that's likely to vote. - Uh-huh, what are really good, really, really good point and you know, we're gonna move next into the number two cause of this problem, lawyers here in a second. But I kind of like that we're talking about this because that's really, I mean, we can talk till we're blue in the face about how we feel about lawyers or insurance companies or whatever, but it does come down to getting other people motivated to go out and vote in local elections and to take some time to like, actually, 'cause that's another thing, right? And when I lived in Florida, I felt like this happened a lot where they'd be like, hey, we're trying to outlaw the dog track, right? Be sure you triple read how it's written because it's written on the ballot in such a way that you're not sure if you should put yes or no. Like yes, I am against this ish, I'm against dog thing, but no to whatever the question is, right? So me, everybody that wants to vote, yes, outlaw it, vote no on the ballot, everybody though. And then, you know, like that isn't even clarified, right? So it's really important, I think, that we keep talking about local elections and getting people, I mean, frankly, a little freaked out about what happens when you don't pay attention to these things. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. - Okay, so let's talk about lawyers, which we kind of identified as the second issue here with liquor liability. - Yeah, and it kind of bleeds into the first issue too, right? Because a lot of lawyers make up, well, legislators. The other thing that lawyers are really good at is they're really good at organizing. You know, when I was talking about, and I don't know if we'll get into this later on or not about the insurance product that we designed, but I'm very fortunate to have a friend that's a lawyer. So we are able to have some pretty open and honest conversations. And I was telling them about, hey, you know, I want some of this to, some of these profits to go to funding tort reform, special interests, right? And he laughed, and he said, you're gonna have a hell of a time because the South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association, South Carolina Bar Association, they're going to fight you every step of the way, and they have deep pockets. Their lawyers are great at organizing with other lawyers. They're also great at setting unrealistic expectations for victims. They are fantastic at saying, hey, you're in this wreck, we're gonna get you a million dollars. And that's how we get clients. They get people to file these frivolous lawsuits over and over and over again. All it does is clog up the court system. That's all it does, right? And they're greedy. So when you look at the way the settlements are kind of divvied up, the lawyers are getting between 30 and 40% of it. So when you look at somebody that's filing a lawsuit for a million dollars, one, they're never gonna get the million dollars, almost never, right? Two, the victims only gonna get 600,000, 650,000 before it's all said and done with. The other 350 is gonna go to the lawyer. Honestly, they would've been better off going to the business owner and saying, hey, just cut me a check for half a million right now. We can cut the lawyers out of this, cut the time out of this. They'd be better off doing that. But lawyers kind of make it seem like you absolutely need them. You don't absolutely need them. They're just greedy and they make things convoluted and they make things more difficult than they need to be. I think the analogy that I gave you is all lawyers think that they're gonna be Harvey Specter from suits, but in reality, all of they are is opportunistic ambulance chasers. That's really what they are. And again, not all lawyers, there are some great business lawyers and great estate planning lawyers. I consider those people real lawyers. The ambulance chasers, you are just an opportunistic piece of crap. That's what you are. That's what you are. And when you really look at it, that's the driver, not only behind your liquor liability insurance increase, that's the same driver behind your auto insurance increase. That's one of the reasons why your homeowners is going up. Same exact reason. That's one of the reasons why your health insurance is going up because they file the exact same firmless lawsuits against doctors. They do the exact same thing, so. - Right, right, yeah. And that's the, you know, we're just like a soo happy nation now. It's like, are we actually soo happy or are people marketing to us to make us soo happy, right? Like they're playing into the high costs of everything. Here's some way you can get money fast and play up mistakes that were made. Or listen, really bad things happen. Businesses, individuals owe other people money for jacking up their cars, racking their property, hurting their physical health, hurting their emotional state, sure, yes. But is it $2 million worth? Or is it the price of fixing up the injury or the thing, right? - Exactly, I got into a car wreck. I didn't even get into the car wreck. Somebody rear ended me. This was several years back. And I was fine. I got out of the car. I'm like, hey, you know, are you all right, blah, blah, blah. Got to the office the next day. And I was telling a lawyer buddy about it. He's like, why don't you go in the ambulance? Like, what do you mean, why'd I go in the air? I was fine. He goes, if you go in the ambulance, I guarantee you'll get $10,000 just for going in the ambulance. And it's like, you are such a scumbag. Like that is like, I was fine. I actually golfed at the end of the year. I actually went golfing. That's where I was going. And it was like, you know, you start putting that stuff out there and all it's going to do is drive up the costs for everybody else. And they're the ones laughing all the way to the bank. That's what's happening. So that's why that's why they're number two. They're, um, they're the drug dealers of the liquor liability and liability insurance world. Now let's talk about number three, the insurance agents. Is that specifically you? Okay. Yep. They have all agents, agencies, whoever, whatever, however you want to call yourself. And if you look at the group of people that benefits the most after the lawyers financially, it's the insurance agents. Insurance agents are compensated by a percentage of the premiums. If your insurance premiums went from $5,000 to $50,000, for example, which is happening to a lot of the bars, right? Fairly speaking, they'll get 10%. Let's just use 10% commission as a rough number. So that agent made $500 when it was $5,000. But now that it's $50,000, now they make $5,000. Their income increased 10 full and they didn't do anything different. So what, what is this? Why is this the case? Why, when I was talking to one of the guys I was writing the, the Access to Insurance Act, and I had to know one of the co-sponsors. We were talking about it. If they asked, they're like, well, is there a lobbyists group about this? Because when we were writing this, this bill, we didn't get a call from any lobbyists and that's very odd. I said, I said, well, I go would be either the independent association of insurance agents or want somebody out there. It's the insurance industry. They have lobbyists, right? And the only answer I can think of is, is because they're all making more money off of it. Why are you going to fight something that you have invested interest in? And they actually called me out, the legislator called me out. He goes, well, why are you doing it then? And I said, well, it's not a core part of my business and I just have a moral objection to what's going on. I just think, I think it's messed up. I have a moral objection to it. So the insurance agents are being grossly overcompensated and they're not doing a very good job either. And they do some really shady things. One of the shady things and your listeners can go to their insurance policy if they have a liquor liability policy and they'll see it right off the rip. One of the things insurance agents are really popular for doing is putting a quote unquote broker fee on a policy. Well, most egregious one I've seen is $5,000. What it is, is in addition to their commission, they will charge you a fee for using their services to find you an insurance policy, which correct me if I'm wrong, is your damn job. There doesn't need to be another fee associated with it. You're being compensated by commission, but we're seeing more and more brokers do it. So in this one instance, the insurance premium was gonna be $182,000, which was already crazy, right? The broker then put another $5,000 fee on it. It's like, wait a minute, you're gonna make 18 grand in commission. Now you're gonna put another $5,000 on for what? And a lot of people don't even bother to look. They just see the bottom number and go, oh, that's what my insurance is. Look at it, I'm willing to bet if your listeners are gonna go and pull up their policy, I'm willing to bet half of them have a broker fee on it. The other thing the insurance agent's doing right now that's incredibly not helpful is they're lying, they're lying to underwriters. They're all materially false information on insurance applications in order to get them approved, right? One of the examples that we ran into recently was an insurance agent underreported alcohol sales at one restaurant by $1.2 million a year. And we knew they did it as soon as we saw the carrier. The carrier that they were using was the Hartford, right? And I know the Hartford won't write anybody that's got over 30% alcohol unless they're a quote-unquote fine dining establishment, right? And this was not a fine dining establishment. And their alcohol percentage sales rate was closer to 50, 50%. So by the agent not putting the accurate information on the application, one, they committed insurance for all because they lied on an application. Two, they put that business owner at risk because if there was a big claim, the insurance company is going to do their investigation and find out, hey, you told us you were doing X amount of sales but you were doing $1.2 million more. They're either gonna flat out deny the claim because you committed fraud or they're only gonna pay out a portion of it relative to what you're reporting, right? - The other thing that insurance agents are causing by doing this is they're giving underwriters really bad information to do their risk models off of. I think the analogy that we talked about earlier is that, if you had a hundred restaurants that are all 30% alcohol sales, the insurance company is like a casino. They use the law of large members. There's a loss ratio that they're expecting out of those hundred restaurants. - Right. - But if 10% of those restaurants aren't actually 30% alcohol restaurants, they're actually 50% alcohol restaurants, what the insurance company is gonna do is they're gonna make a knee jerk reaction when there are more losses than they're expecting and they're either gonna pull out of the market altogether, which is happening or they're going to jack up the rates for everybody, which is also happening. So insurance agents are causing some of the problems and it's because honestly, 'cause they're greedy and they're lazy, that's really what it comes down to. And they're not adult enough to have a conversation with a business owner and say, "Hey, "your premiums are going up, "but I don't really control that they're going up. "I can just tell you, "hey, this is what you need to ensure your business." - That is so good. So I love how you walk that through us. I won't ask two questions kind of backing up. The first one is on the broker fee. You're a small business owner. I coach small business owners. I've worked in a management company. You have to charge enough to cover the costs of doing business, right? All in, plus whatever profit margin you wanna make, right? Profit on top of that. So you have to price your services or your product or whatever to that model. If you don't, you're a company that usually ends up going under, right? And that's obviously what our restaurants and bars are dealing with because with these huge insurance creases, they either have to pass that price to the consumer, which we're already like, we're already paying $14 for a mixed cocktail. We're not paying 25, right? Well, we probably still will. If we're forced to, (both laughing) we don't want to, right? - I see all that to say, would somebody who's putting a broker fee on top of their fee say, oh, I have to put that on to cover my overhead, plus my profit margin to run my business. Is that, would that be their argument back to you? - It would be a horrible argument to make and the reason being, let's use that example that $182,000 won, right? So two years ago, that same policy was $40,000. So you were making $4,000 two years ago in commission. You are now making $18,000 in commission. If your argument two years ago, was, hey, I have overhead and this isn't very big commission, I got to charge a fee on top of it to keep the lights on, to do all this stuff, great. Fine, I understand that. But your commission has increased fourfold in two years. Your expenses have not increased fourfold in two years. They haven't. So it's a pretty crappy argument. It's one they can make, but if you look at it logically and strictly by the numbers, if you have to put your broker fee on top of a four X commission growth in two years, then you are a crappy business owner. You are doing something else that is bleeding money at a rate that is indescribable, I would say. So yeah, two, three years ago when the commissions were a lot smaller, by all means. Yeah, absolutely, I get it. But you can't make that argument now, not in this market. You can't make that argument, watch this. My second question is, I know we're kind of referencing restaurants with 30 or 40 or 50% alcohol sales. This obviously affects restaurants, but it's also affecting bars, right? Or music venues that have bars. And there's one right up the street from me here that I need to get in touch with the owner 'cause I'm just curious how they're making it, but they put on concerts and then when they have concerts, their bars open, right? So obviously they're making money from ticket sales of live music and alcohol and liquor sales. So they're probably, I mean, 75% alcohol sales and 25% ticket sales, right? Because we know like they're paying out that ticket sales to the act, right? For them, how did you even not even really how would they even cheat the system? Because it's just like, that's all they do. And then are they seeing, are they the ones seeing these four, five times increases where do restaurants have a little bit of a reprieve from that 'cause they have food sales and things like that? - Yeah, so restaurants are definitely able to play games with numbers more than a concert venue would, right? The concert venue, they're actually not even gonna be the same type of policy that restaurants have. They're a totally different class code all together. But yeah, they're gonna get crushed even more than a restaurant would in terms of the rate increases. They absolutely will be. That venue, I'm sure when you talk to them, I'm sure a four to five time increase over the last three years is pretty realistic. That's why you have, we call them stadium beers, eight dollar Budlights. We call them stadium beers around here because that's what it costs when you go to a football game. - Right, and let's clarify for our listeners, which I'm sure they know now if they've listened to our other episodes, but I think it's still good to reiterate it. Those premiums are increasing so much because if I have a drink at your buddy's restaurant in Charleston, and then I go to the bar across the street and I have three drinks, and then I go walk to another bar and have a drink, and then I get in my car and I drive home, and I wreck something, God forbid, kill somebody, whatever. Each one of those bars can get charged for a million dollars for a person in it. - Yeah, well, they're all equal liable. - Even though the first venue, the first bar restaurant, whatever, served me one mimosa with my breakfast, they're still liable for the million as is the one who served me three and the last one who served me one. - Yeah. - Yeah. So what happens is instead of filing one lawsuit to encompass the total loss, what the lawyers are able to do is they're able to file in that instance, four separate lawsuits, separate of each other, right? You're referencing to the joint and severable liability laws, and that's what you're referencing. And insurance carriers hate that. They absolutely hate that. Insurance companies love them, hate them. It's a little bit like George George. Love them or hate them. They do something really well, right? And insurance companies are really good, for the most part, at identifying risk. What the law is currently doing is this is making identifying risk pretty foggy because they're not underwriting the risk for the restaurant that they're ensuring. They're essentially underwriting the risk for the entire industry or even the bars around the bar that they're underwriting, right? And they don't have any control or say over that risk. So that kind of goes back to the point where if an insurance company can't identify the risk to an acceptable level, they will either jack up the rates or they will just leave and say, "Hey, this is a Wild West. "We can't predict our losses. "We don't have a model that works for these losses. "We gotta go," right? And that's what's happening. - Gotcha. Okay, and then the last one, the businesses, the restaurants themselves, the bars themselves are the last kind of piece that's a part of what we're dealing with here. And why is that? - I'll say it, they're kind of to blame for this too, but obviously it's a smaller portion of blame, right? The hospitality industry makes up, and it depends what study you read. The lowest one I've seen is 11, the highest is 16% of the total economy in the state. - Mm-hmm. - I have never seen, and I don't think anybody's ever seen it, where one industry controls that much of the GDP of a certain area and has absolutely no say over how that area is legislated. In the state of South Carolina, by almost all available metrics, hospitality is a bigger industry than education. Could you imagine the teachers union or the, I don't know, college professors have a union? I probably do. Could you imagine those unions getting taken advantage of like this and not doing anything? The bar and restaurant owners are somewhat to blame, and I know it's gonna make me unpopular for saying that, especially with them, right? But they're somewhat to blame 'cause they're really bad at organizing. They're horrible at organizing. And from my experience, bar and restaurant owners kind of fall into three categories. The first category is business people, and they're a small portion. These people make business decisions. They're not emotional. This is a business and they're running like a business, right? Those people are very easy to go organized 'cause they understand it. Then you have the other two groups of restaurant owners, which are broken down into former front-of-house and former back-of-house people. Former front-of-house people, those are the people that were the bartenders or servers that liked what they were doing, and they decided, hey, we can do this, and they started a bar or restaurant, or music venue, whatever the scenario is, wherever their passions were. And they started a business, but they actually have no business training. They have no idea what they're doing, right? And they tend to be very friendly, and that allows them to get taken advantage of because people that they think are their friends probably aren't actually their friends, right? This is gonna be who the insurance agents really loves because they're easy to convince to do stuff, right? And it's always, oh, it's my buddy. It's my buddy, not actually your buddy. The next group of people are the back-of-house people. Those are the chefs, right? They're the former chefs, they were an executive chef or something, and they had a passion about a certain type of food, and they wanna make the best food that they possibly can. And those people are stubborn. They're like every character Clint Eastwood has ever played in the movie, right? They're getting their ways, they stand their ways, they're not changing no matter what. And it kind of makes this whole thing more difficult to get people organized and to kind of get the message out that, hey, you guys can do something about this. It makes it very difficult 'cause you're dealing with multiple personalities, and if you guess wrong on which personality it was, they generally just kick you out. - Yeah, I like that breakdown. I think it's important, like I said, I've been coaching people, been hiring and firing people for my whole career, really. And it's important to be able to have hard conversations with business owners and say, "Hey," and I joke about this sometimes, but sometimes I'm like, "Oh, instead of coaching this person, "I just wanna say you are destined to be "the best employee someone ever had, "but you shouldn't be running a business." And that's not to say, I'm not saying that about any, I don't have any particular bar or restaurant owner in mind when I say that, but I like what you're saying, right? Like it is good for us as small business owners to realize where my strengths and weaknesses are, and we're gonna have to admit, like we need help, and I'm gonna have to do something uncomfortable, which is organize with other people or go down to Columbia or go to a vote in a primary, or sign money on a petition or get on a podcast and talk about my challenges or whatever, I gotta get uncomfortable for this to change, right? And that is hard 'cause it's more comfortable to just stay in our business doing what we love. Like if you love being behind the body, you know everybody and you're the owner that's buds with everybody, of course that's what you wanna do, I get it, but we need you to come out from behind the bar and take action on this particular issue, but also in your business, right? - Absolutely. - Yeah. What are some of the things that bar and restaurant owners are doing that's contributing to this issue specifically? - I would say it's what they're not doing, they're not being active. Honestly enough, some of the bar and restaurant owners are, I live, they're actively participating in the insurance fraud in some instances, but it's more of what they're not doing, they're not being engaged, they're not being active. I can tell you right now we've had a very difficult time getting our messaging not about that product we designed and it's just we're just meeting it with such resistance and it's like I don't think you guys are fully understanding here, you have an issue that's not going away. There is a solution and right now it's this and it's kind of the inaction that's really what's holding them back. They can fight back, they can make a difference here, but they kind of have to use their size to their advantage and they're just not. - So walk us through that product that you've designed in this initiative that you're trying to bring these bars and restaurants to help with this issue. - So like we discussed earlier, my background's actually in finance, it's not really an insurance at all, but insurance is really just large numbers, which fits really nicely with somebody that understands large numbers. So a few months ago I started looking at some of the quotes I was getting back and some of the questions that we were having to ask on behalf of the insurance companies to place this business and it was clear that there was a fundamental disconnect between what was going on in the marketplace and what the insurance carriers were asking and especially how they were assigning risk to certain things. So I started digging into it a little bit more because that's just kind of my nature. And what I found was is that insurance companies are trying to make everything so quick. They're trying to make you check these boxes, make a quick decision on your business and on your risk and they're missing the point. One of the things that I find to be kind of crazy is the whole percentage of alcohol sales, like you were alluding to the $14 cocktail, right? I don't believe in the data supports me that percentage of alcohol sales isn't a main driver of risk. It's a quick way to measure risk but it's not a very efficient way to measure risk. The reason being, if you look at a restaurant right now and you look at their cost of goods sold, the cogs is what the computer is, right? You're gonna see that their food costs have increased tremendously over the last few years. The example I always give is chicken wings 'cause I love chicken wings, right? There's not a bowl of chicken wings that I can't finish. Chicken wings have gone up and costs so high that now restaurants are kind of stuck at this $2 per wing mark. So if you get somebody like me that says, hey, I want a dozen chicken wings, I'm not gonna pay you more than $18 for a dozen chicken wings. The cost for the restaurant may actually be $16 for those $18 chicken wings. Their margins on food has gotten so squeezed but they have fixed overhead. They need to find the margin somewhere else. A bottle of Fleishman's vodka, House vodka, the trash vodka, everybody drinks but no real myth to drinking it. Bottle was probably $8 two years ago. It might be $9 now, but they're able to charge instead of $5 for that alcohol drink. They're able to charge $7 now and they need to charge it because they need to make up the margin that they're losing on the chicken wings. - Right. - What they're inadvertently doing is making themselves look like a higher insurance risk. In my mind, you haven't sold any more alcohol than you did two years ago. You're just charging more for the alcohol now than you were two years ago. So the idea of using a percentage of alcohol sales as the main driver of risk is kind of flawed because it's not taking into account macroeconomic changes. I'm much more concerned about the volume of alcohol you sell and everybody's PLS system can pull this report. They can pull how many drinks they sold in the last year, the number of drinks. I don't almost care less, but you're charging. I don't care, I care about the volume. You don't get any more drunk on a $14 Cosmo and you do off a $350 Bud Light. You are the same amount of drunk. So what do I care that the ratios look different because you're selling more mixed drinks than you are beer? It's a fundamental misunderstanding. So that's one of the things that our product takes into consideration. It's a slower process to underwrite it, but it's a more accurate way to underwrite it. The other thing, some other things that we're doing a little bit differently, there's absolutely no data to suggest that having a pool table materially increases your risk. There's no data to suggest that. Is there data to suggest that pool halls are a higher risk? Absolutely, it invites gambling, it invites us all. There's a whole, that's a whole different crowd, right? That it's you have a pool table in your bowl. It's a different, it's a different risk, but insurance companies view them very much the same. And I'm saying that's not the case. Your live music venues. For some reason, insurance companies believe that there is a fundamental risk to having live music. My stance is, is there's a fundamental risk to certain types of music? There's a big difference. The guy's name and he'll laugh if he hears this. His name's Matt Jordan. He's a local guitarist, he does that. Sometimes his brother calms, whatever. Sometimes his kids play with him. That is not a risk. Right. It's Matt Jordan, we're playing house EDM music. All right, that's a risk. We're now entering a risky type of behavior. So our product is really looking at a number of factors like that and saying, hey, these factors have been fundamentally misunderstood. The other thing that our product is doing is we're calling it community underwriting. I'm much more concerned about the atmosphere that you have at your location and not as concerned about the actual numbers, so to say. An example that I was using recently is, have you been to Charleston before? - Yes, yeah. - Well, Shem Creek, you must have gone to Shem Creek. - Sure, yeah. - So all of those restaurants on paper, they all look the same. They all look like the same risk. Waters Edge, which is more of a restaurant, is a fundamentally different risk than Red's Ice House is across the water. - Sure. - So you need to actually start looking at these locations and say, what's the difference between them? - And that's where this community underwriting thing comes into play. So where if we have, I'm not as familiar with the bar scene in Greenville, right? - Let's say a bar in Greenville. So, hey, I'm interested in participating in your insurance product. What's my rate gonna be? The very first thing I'm gonna do is contact other bar owners out there that are part of my association and say, hey, do you know this venue? Do you know the owners? What type of business operation are they running over there? Is it a high risk operation? Are they notorious for selling to underage people? 'Cause we all know those bars exist and we all know which ones they are, right? Is it that place? Are they notorious for having fights? Are they notorious for over serving people? Stuff that you can't quantify on paper, everybody in the community knows who they are and they know not to be associated with them, right? So that's what we're doing. We're taking a more holistic approach to underwriting these products. And I think it's the only way that things are actually going to change is by isolating the bad actors and kind of letting them do their thing. If you wanna partake in that high risk behavior, by all means you're business owner, you can make that decision. I think it'll also be really helpful business owners for them to accurately be able to figure out what their expenses are knowing that, hey, I know if I sell X amount of beer or X amount of drinks, my premium's gonna be this. If I sell this many drinks, my premium will be that. They can start pricing their things accordingly so they know what their profit margins are gonna be instead of just this kind of Wild West guests out there that, hey, once a year they gotta talk to their agent and go, I hope it's not too bad, right? They'll know going into it. And the last fundamental thing we're doing differently is we're allowing the business owners that get the product to participate the profits. This goes back to aligning everybody's goals, right? If you're a business owner and you hate paying for insurance and I'm a business owner, I hate paying for insurance and I sell it to myself, I still hate it, right? It takes the sting off of paying that insurance bill. If you know at the end of the year, hey, nobody had any claims, you guys are gonna get some of that money back. It makes it more aligned and it'll make the bar owners less likely to partake in risky behavior, right? Because if they do and there's a big claim that's less profit for everybody, it makes them have a vested interest in who's participating in the insurance product as well. So it's just a little something that we're doing differently. - That's awesome, isn't it? Oh, sorry, this is your sentence. - Oh, I was gonna say full disclosure because I'm a big fan of that. My motivation's in doing this is yes, I will make a lot of money off of it if it works. I will. To me, it's fair. I made the solution that the market was looking for, so I guess it's only fair that I'm the one that makes the money off of it, right? Just full disclosure 'cause I know somebody will comment, yeah, but you're just gonna make it. Yeah, you're right. I am gonna make a lot of money off of it, but I designed it as mine, so. - Yeah, but there's also that trickle down effect we just talked about, you just explained. Hey, I'm gonna put in a ton of unpaid work behind the scenes to create this holistic community-based solution. And in this case, the community is the entire state of South Carolina and anybody who owns a bar or restaurant, right? This community solution, and if you participate in it and we hold each other accountable and we don't participate in risky behaviors, you're gonna get some money back so you have a little bit more predictability or you end the year and go, oh, sweet, we're gonna take that money, that profit and pay out some staff, right? Or whatever you wanna do. That's the trickle down effect that I'm talking about, right? You didn't have to offer that part of this community solution, but that's the type of trickle down that we should be implementing when we come up with these types of solutions. So yes, of course you're gonna make a lot of money if you're creating this program, but you're tripling it down. Also, if it solves problems for business owners, you're going to make more money as the business owner. Right now, I don't know you, I'm not trying to promote your product, but I guess I would look into it as a solution because from the surface of what you're saying, it sounds good. So there's no harm in checking it out for free and finding out what is this guy really talking about? What does this involve? What do I gotta do? What are the risky behaviors he's mentioning, right? So I would encourage people to dig in because it doesn't hurt to investigate something, right? And we could, you know, we've already talked for over an hour about this topic and I love that we kinda ended on a solution, right? - Hopefully. - And hopefully. (laughing) - How do people get a hold of you to learn more about the solution and dig in? What should they do? - Yeah, so I actually created a whole separate website just for this. That's sclickerliability.com, like South Carolina Licker Liability.com. And on that website, I go over in more detail, some of the problems with the legislation, a little bit more detail about who it is that's not voting in the restaurant owner's interests, some of the other problems that are going on with it. And there's also a whole page that's dedicated to a very high level overview of what this product is and how it'll work. And there's even kind of a quote feature on there where somebody can go in and put in their information and it'll spit out, hey, you know, if this actually comes through and we get all the data and we get all the participation we need, we think this is gonna be about what your premium is. And we're doing that right now and it doesn't cost anybody any money. Right now, we just need the data to validate essentially my math. That's essentially what we need the data to validate. It worked off the 47 restaurants that are my clients, but we need, right now what we need is 400, about 400 restaurants to give us their data. We're not sharing the data with anybody. We're not blasting anybody's data out there. We're really just collecting it to make sure that what I'm saying is going to work on a larger scale. And that's coming from the banks. The banks wanna see it on a larger, larger scale. But yeah, SC liquorliability.com and I mean, my direct contact information is all over there too. I am more than open if somebody has a question. Call my cell phone, send me a text message. I mean, email. I'm not married. I don't have any kids. It doesn't bother me when you text me eight o'clock at night. - You're right here, folks. I am old, I am old though. So I do go to bed at about 9.30, but. - Well, thank you so much for joining me and having this conversation. I feel like I have so much to process. I made so many notes here on kind of my question sheet to just kind of follow up with on my own, but it was really nice to learn more about this insurance issue to kind of hear your perspective and also to hear a solution because we haven't heard a ton of solutions and the solutions that have been brought forward obviously have not passed on the state level. So thank you so much for taking the time out. Thank you for putting in time to come up with some kind of solution. And frankly, thank you for your honesty, right? Like we're gonna have to all be transparent, you know, somebody, I think Sheila dropped some comments in one of the, someone had posted about the show or I did or something. She was like, oh, hey, I did a quick fact check on what this guest said. Here's some like updated facts. I'm like, awesome teamwork makes the dream work, right? Like I said, I'm here to kind of play the citizen that doesn't know anything and ask the questions. Other people have things to say, reach out to me like, like Andy did and say, hey, I wanna be on the show and tell my side of the story. Like, cool, this is about conversations. This is about what's happening at the local level in our towns and on the state level. So thank you so much for joining us. - Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. (upbeat music) - As a wrap up to our conversation today, I wanna share something that Andy wrote to me post our conversation. So his email says, last night I hosted a session with six state officials. Licker liability did come up. And I will say that I had a fairly productive conversation with a representative that's a lawyer that is not currently on in quotations the other side. There does seem to be some lawyer representatives on the other side that do have some interest in finding a workable middle ground. I know I hammered on lawyers during the podcast and I still largely stand by that stance, but I also feel that when there are exceptions, those people should be acknowledged. There will always be situations where two parties will never fully see eye to eye, but it's comforting to know that there are some that are willing to actively find that middle ground. I agree with Andy's sentiments in this email, can be frustrating when things aren't getting done at a pace that we want them to get done or seemingly not getting done at all, or something happening that we just fundamentally disagree with, but it is very comforting to know that there are some that wanna find that middle ground like Andy said in this email to me. And it is important to highlight those representatives that do so. So while we continue to fight for tort reform here in the state of South Carolina and pay attention to what's happening in other states with liability laws and similar things that affect small business, we need to celebrate those that want to help small business, that want to help put more money in the pockets of everyday citizens and those building our local economies. As always, thank you for being a listener of the Conversation Mill podcast. Thank you for joining me in conversation. To learn more about the show or to support our efforts to elevate our local economies by advertising or sponsoring the show, please visit conversationmill.com. The business practices discussed on the podcast and the opinions shared by guests and your hosts are for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. There are no silver bullets in business or life and what works in one market may not work in another. Always engage legal or expert advice when making decisions in your business. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
