Outsourced Chief Risk Officer
An outsourced risk function for companies that don't have one, or want a second set of eyes
In many mid-size companies, responsibility for risk is spread across the owner, the CFO, HR, operations and whoever handles the insurance, and the insurance itself gets bought once a year, 30 to 90 days before renewal. I fill that seat from the outside, all year. If you already have someone in it, I'm the second set of eyes.
What that looks like
I would rather sit down with your loss runs and your mod worksheet than hand you a quote. Even in successful companies, claims are friction. They slow growth and send costs straight to the bottom line.
The goal is a safer, steadier operation that wins more work, keeps more of what it earns, and stops getting surprised. We measure progress through the year and document it for renewal. What that does to the premium depends on the losses, the program and the market.
Your team knows your operation. I see hundreds of others, across many industries, so the problem in front of you is usually one I’ve already watched another company solve, or fail to. And I don’t come alone. Behind me is a risk management team of more than 60, covering claims, HR, safety and fleet safety. They do the work. I lead them, and I stay accountable for the results.
The work follows the Risk Profile Improvement Process I have used with clients since 2004. It has saved them more than $70 million in premiums and overcharges.
What I do all year
- Test whether your safety program changes behavior or just fills a binder
- Watch the numbers that move before a claim does: turnover, near misses, overdue fixes
- Work the carrier's loss control rep through the year, so the report the underwriter reads says what you fixed
- Read contracts and leases before you sign them
- Manage claims while they're still open
- Design coverage to survive a catastrophe, and manuscript it when the standard form falls short
- Find other ways to carry the risks insurance won't touch or prices too high: retentions, deductible and retro plans, captives, contract transfer
- Build the renewal story 120 days out, so the market sees a better risk
- Keep a multi-year improvement plan, reviewed through the year and adjusted as you grow and your budget changes
If you reach out
What happens after the first call
A conversation first
By phone or in your office. You tell me what's going on. A premium that jumped, a claim that won't close, a contract you aren't sure about. Or nothing in particular, just a feeling that something is being missed.
What I'll ask to see
Five years of loss runs, the current mod worksheet, your policies, and any contract or lease that worries you. If they aren't handy, we can get most of it from the carrier.
A first read
What I see in your numbers: where the cost seems to be coming from, the blind spots worth a closer look, and where I would start. If I'm not the right fit, or you don't need me, you'll hear that too.
If we keep going
We agree on the scope and how the work is paid for, then do the detailed assessment. From there, a written risk plan with priorities, owners and dates. Progress meetings through the year, claims reviewed while they're still open, contracts read before you sign them. The Executive Briefing for leadership at least once a year, and a renewal strategy that starts 120 days out.
What an assessment produces
The assessment connects what we find to what it means for your business, what to change, who owns the work, and how we will know it is working.
Illustrative example, not a client result.
| What we found | Why it matters | What changes | Who owns it | How we measure progress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strains keep recurring among new warehouse employees doing the same lifting task. | Injured employees miss shifts. Experienced staff cover the work, and the claims raise future workers’ comp cost. | Review the task and the lifting equipment, revise onboarding, and have supervisors confirm safe practice before new employees work on their own. | Operations and HR, with our risk team. The real plan names one owner and a completion date. | Injuries per hours worked, injuries in the first 90 days, lost days, and corrective actions completed. |
The action plan gives each priority a responsible person and a date. The Executive Briefing keeps leadership informed about progress and cost as the business grows.
Why an outsourced risk function
What the big companies have, sized for yours
Large companies have a Chief Risk Officer, a risk team and an internal audit department down the hall testing whether the controls work. A sixty-person manufacturer, a school bus contractor or a home health agency spreads that work across the owner, the CFO, HR and operations, and each of them sees a different part of the risk. I connect those views: claims, staffing, contracts, fleet, recovery plans and how the business pays for a loss. We test whether the controls work in practice, agree on what needs attention, and put a name on each next step.
Does the program work in the actual job?
Manuals, training and inspection logs matter. The test is whether people have the equipment, time, staffing and support to do the job safely. I look at how the work is actually done, whether modified duty gets used during recovery, and whether reported problems turn into finished fixes. That usually explains the loss runs without blaming anyone.
Coverage adequacy belongs in the boardroom
Jennifer Geary, a former bank Chief Risk Officer, in her book How to be a Chief Risk Officer, lists inadequate insurance as a named risk on the corporate register and writes that “insurance cover, and its adequacy and value for money, should be subject to regular discussion and review, at both executive and board level.” For a family company that means the owner and the CFO. It is a governance decision, made on purpose, once a year at least.
Watch what moves first
Loss runs and the experience mod reflect prior losses. Turnover by department, reporting delays, near misses and overdue corrective actions can give you earlier signals. We line those up against the claims to see where to step in before the next loss.
Four small problems, one bigger exposure
Turnover up in one department for two quarters. Three overdue safety fixes in that same department. A new contract that added a shift. A supervisor job still open. Each one looks minor by itself. Together they're a warning. Looking at them side by side tells us where to investigate first, and seeing that combination from the outside is most of what I do.
Decide, then write it down
Not every recommendation is worth the money, and I will tell you when one isn't. When you decide to keep a risk, we record the decision, the reasoning, who owns it and when it gets reviewed. That gives you, and whoever runs the company next, a record of what was considered and why.
A target you can actually hit
The program has to fit your operation and the people who will run it. We build on the controls you already have, agree on the priorities, and phase the work to match your budget and capacity. I won't sell a sixty-person manufacturer a Fortune 500 risk department.
How the work goes
From the file to the fix
Find what the underwriter already sees
Loss runs, the experience mod worksheet, old inspection reports, prior submissions, your contracts and certificates. Read together, they show connections that are easy to miss when each one sits with a different department.
Look for the repeat
Most companies don't have a claims problem. They have a repeat problem. The same injury, the same kind of vehicle loss, the same sidewalk. I separate frequency from severity, because they need different fixes, and show what the top two or three claims are costing you across three years of mods.
Find the blind spots
Loss runs show what has already happened. They don't show the contract that took on someone else's liability, the lease that makes you insure the landlord's building, the subcontractor with an expired certificate, or the key person with no backup. We review those separately, before a loss tests them.
Fix the process behind it
Hiring, training, return to work, fleet and driver selection, safety culture. Whatever is producing the repeat. This is the part that actually lowers cost, and it usually makes the company run better too.
Move the risk you shouldn't be carrying
Contracts, indemnity language, certificates, and the structure of the program itself: guaranteed cost, deductibles, retros, group captives. Keep the losses the business can fund and manage. Transfer the ones bigger than it can absorb.
Tell the story, then keep score
Renewal work starts 120 days out with a clean submission and a narrative the underwriter can believe. After that we keep reviewing during the year, not just at renewal.
Who I work with
Industries where I’ve seen the claims before
School bus and transportation
Insurance cost shapes what a contractor can bid and deliver. We work on driver selection, fleet data and coverage, the things that shape how the carrier sees your operation. Telematics, CAB scores and the blind spots in the program.
Manufacturing
A lost-time injury slows the line and loads extra work on the rest of the crew. We trace the repeat to the task behind it and work with your team on the fix. Machine guarding, lifting and repetitive-motion injuries, product liability, and the property and business income limits that decide whether a plant reopens after a loss.
Construction
A mod above your customer’s threshold can keep you off the bid list. We find the claims driving it and the changes that move it. Subcontractor risk transfer, certificates that don't say what you think, and work comp frequency in the trades.
Home healthcare and senior living
An injured caregiver is a visit someone else has to cover. We work on lifting and transfers, driving between visits, and suitable work during recovery, so fewer injuries turn into staffing holes.
Workers' comp and the experience mod
Your mod is built on several prior years of losses and payroll. We work on what goes into the next ones. We go through the worksheet with you, separate repeat claims from one-off severe losses, and show which changes can move future renewals.
Municipality, school district or authority? See how I work with public entities
When a program needs to be placed or restructured, that work runs through Duncan Financial Group, where I am Chief Risk Officer, Executive Vice President and a partner.
Questions owners ask
Why good operators wait, and what it costs them
We're happy with our insurance agent. They've always responded when we need them.
A responsive agent is what you want when something goes wrong. A machine shop owner I interviewed for Insured to Fail had that too.
Fire destroyed his plant. His business income coverage paid the bills while he rebuilt, and not one employee missed a paycheck. The insurance company paid what his policy provided.
But his insurance program had never really been stress tested before the fire.
He reopened just over eleven months later, running at less than half the business he had before the fire. Within another month, the insurance checks stopped. The customers who did return wouldn't pay invoices for those first orders for another 60 to 90 days. Payroll, debt payments and other bills couldn't wait.
He put in his life savings. He sold the family vacation home. Sixteen months after reopening, he was forced to sell the company he had spent 32 years building.
He had insurance. It paid. He still lost the business.
I work through that timeline with your team before a loss, so you can see whether your insurance program would carry you beyond reopening and back to the profits you and your family depend on.
Our agent knows us and our industry and has worked with us for years.
Ken Clifton would have said that. His agent had worked with him for more than fifteen years and was known as the expert in his industry. Nobody could touch his price.
What started our conversation was a set of questions about his business that no one had asked him before.
We looked at the whole operation, not just the insurance. His employees' injuries were costing him more than he realized. Fixing that lowered his costs, and the savings helped pay for what his business would need if the plant were destroyed.
Three weeks before his plant burned, his employees ran their first evacuation drill. When the roof came down five minutes after the alarm, all 33 were already outside.
The loss reached $8.3 million. Ken rebuilt, and kept most of his customers.
The price hadn't been the reason to change. What we uncovered about his business was.
Your team knows your operation. We see hundreds of others, including what helped them survive a serious loss and what left them struggling. I bring that experience to the questions we work through together.
Renewal isn't until next year. Why not wait until then?
A manufacturer we started working with had replaced an old, unguarded machine four years earlier.
Insurance companies had been declining to offer coverage because of concerns about machine safety.
Underwriters were looking at an inspection report from years before. The equipment was gone. In the insurance companies' files, it was still there.
We caught it before taking the account to insurance companies for quotes.
I think about what an underwriter will question before they question it. That gives us time to address concerns and show the improvements your business has made, before coverage and pricing decisions are made.
Waiting until renewal can leave no time to do that work.
Our claims have been paid. Our insurance program seems to be working.
A building material dealer I now work with would have said the same thing.
One of his yard employees unloaded a truck by hand instead of using the forklift and hurt his back. The insurance paid a little over $100,000 in medical bills. He returned to work, and everyone moved on.
Over the next three years, that one claim added more than $130,000 to what the company paid for insurance.
The claim was paid. But what led him to skip the forklift that day?
What would watching the work reveal that the claim paperwork doesn't?
I examine that with your team, including the costs that never appear on the insurance company's claim check.
We've had very few claims. We run a safe operation. What would a review tell us?
Kirsopp Auto Body went 37 years without a fire.
For years, every time the insurance was quoted, the building limit carried over from the year before: $274,000. Nobody had a reason to question it. Nothing had ever happened.
Then one night in November, the building burned to the ground. The insurance company's own contractor put the cost to rebuild the old building at $865,000. Bringing it up to today's codes would cost far more.
Jack Kirsopp kept his business. All 18 employees were paid for the nine and a half months it took to rebuild.
What 37 quiet years couldn't tell him was what that one night would cost. Something else did, before the fire.
A clean record shows what has happened. I help your team see what a serious loss you haven't faced yet could cost your business.
We already have safety training, a safety committee and loss control support. What would you add?
A home healthcare agency we now work with trained every caregiver they hired.
They were still having sixteen injuries a year. Their workers' compensation renewal came in at $421,000.
When we lined up the claims by how long each injured employee had worked there, a pattern emerged that the training records alone hadn't revealed.
Within a few years, they were down to one or two injuries a year. Their workers' compensation premium came down to $172,000.
The training was already there. What we found changed what they did next.
I work with your team to uncover why injuries keep happening despite the training and safety work you already do.
We shop our insurance regularly. Our pricing is competitive.
Duda Cable Construction had four workers' compensation quotes to compare. Every one was higher than the policy that was expiring.
The owner was about to accept the best available quote when we met.
We recovered $86,000 in past premium errors. Then our work with his company cut his workers' compensation premium by 41%. Together, that put nearly $200,000 back in his pocket. Every quote he had before us would have cost him more.
He had compared prices. But those quotes hadn't shown him what could change the price.
I work with your team to find what's driving your insurance costs, including what another round of quotes won't show you.
We never use our insurance. Can we cut back?
An HVAC company we work with asked the same thing. We had already worked with them to bring down their injuries and their insurance rates. Years of premium, and only a handful of small claims to show for it.
We had raised the idea before. They wanted to be sure the new results would hold.
Much of what they paid each year went to cover losses they could easily handle themselves.
We changed how the company pays for those smaller, more predictable losses. In good years, as much as 40 to 50% of the premium they paid into the program can come back to them, depending on its results.
They continued to insure against major losses that could threaten the business.
I help your team decide which risks to keep, which to insure and how to pay for each.
Where would we even start?
Start with what made you pause on this page. Rising premiums? An injury that keeps happening? Renewal quotes that came back higher than you expected? A question about whether the business could recover from a total shutdown?
In our first conversation, we discuss that concern, what you've already done and what you want to improve. I explain what information I would need to examine it and what further work would involve.
You can then decide whether that next step makes sense for your business.
Straight answers
Questions that come up in the first conversation
How are you paid?
Usually through the commission on your insurance. Sometimes a fee, sometimes both. It depends on the work and on what you prefer. Some insurance companies don't offer policies without a commission, so when a fee is the better fit, the commission can offset it.
Can we work with you and keep our current agent?
Most clients start with an assessment at no cost. We review your operation and your insurance program, then walk you through what we found and what we would change. If you like the plan, you appoint us as your agent and we put it to work. As your agent, we can coordinate the risk work with your underwriters, loss control and claims adjusters directly. That is where much of the result comes from. If you decide not to go ahead, you're under no obligation, and the detailed plan remains our work product.
If you'd rather keep your current agent, we can work on the risk side only, for a fee. A one-time assessment with an improvement plan is priced differently from ongoing support. The trade-off is that only the agent of record can work directly with underwriters, loss control and adjusters, so the results haven't been as strong.
Who will we work with day to day?
My team has more than 60 people with different specialties and experience, in claims, HR, safety and fleet safety. Once we know what needs work, I choose the person best suited to be your implementation point. I lead the work and stay accountable for the results.
What does an outsourced Chief Risk Officer do?
An outsourced Chief Risk Officer works with leadership, HR, operations, safety and the insurance team to coordinate how the business manages risk. My work includes identifying recurring losses and overlooked exposures, examining contracts and recovery plans, evaluating insurance and helping your team carry out agreed changes. Leadership receives priorities, assigned responsibilities and measures of progress as the business changes.
What is an experience mod, and why should an owner care?
An experience modification factor adjusts workers' compensation premium using your claims history compared with expected losses for your payroll and types of work. In Pennsylvania, the PCRB calculates it. At a 1.25 mod, the premium the mod applies to is 25% higher than it would be at a 1.00 mod. It does not mean your total premium is 25% higher than another company's. Each year of claims stays in the calculation for several renewals, so one claim can affect your premium for years. Reviewing the worksheet shows which claims are affecting the calculation and where further investigation could be worthwhile.
What is a CAB report?
CAB stands for Central Analysis Bureau. Its reports bring together information about a trucking operation, including roadside inspections, violations and crashes. Insurance underwriters use that information when evaluating the operation. Reviewing the report before renewal gives your team time to examine what it contains and whether it reflects the business accurately.
Results
What clients say
“Working with Duncan we were able to enhance the safety culture in our organization and reduced our Workers’ Compensation costs by over $300,000 a year.”
Gary Bowser, IIBowser Automotive Group
“David Leng is very knowledgeable about Workers’ Compensation and a pleasure to work with. His knowledge allowed our company to reduce its Workers’ Compensation premiums by almost 55%.”
Mike SpitznagelJetNet Corporation
“David’s knowledge of Workers’ Compensation blew me away when he came in and uncovered $42,000 in overcharges.”
Alex YawneyOdyssey Communications
“I took the opportunity to meet with David to discuss better ways we could handle not only our Work Comp claims, but how we needed to drastically overhaul our HR processes. The benefits have been multitude. I have great confidence in David Leng and his ability to help businesses turn around their HR practice in ways that ultimately can make a company more profitable.”
Colleen MaizeKasto, Inc.
“First, he found and recovered $86,000 in errors that my old agent allowed to occur over two years, which no other agent saw. Second, David and his team overhauled our employee hiring, training and management processes. His approach reduced our workers’ compensation premium by 41%, in addition to correcting our premium errors. David and his team did a remarkable job. He literally kept us alive, and now is helping us to thrive!”
Mark Duda, PresidentDuda Cable Construction
“The Duncan Group came in seven months prior to my renewal and took the time to meet with me and my staff, understand my business, and identify the risks I had in my operation. They put together programs to address these risks and then helped me to avoid those I should not have, let me keep the ones I could afford, and then designed my insurance program to address those risks that needed to be insured. And, they reduced my insurance costs as well. … My business is thriving and I am now able to hand this company over to my daughter and eventually my grandsons.”
Jack Kirsopp, OwnerKirsopp Auto Body
“Within a few short months you have already exceeded my expectations. To start, you improved our insurance coverage and uncovered and corrected a mistake in our Work Comp policy which allowed us to receive a credit of $23,453 from our prior policies and a reduction in our renewal premium of over $40,000. Your hands-on, pro-active approach is helping Kehoe Construction become a healthier, more profitable company.”
Steven Kehoe, PresidentKehoe Construction, Inc.
“Your extensive knowledge of the Work Comp system helped us realize there are effective ways to significantly reduce our Workers Compensation cost without having to solely depend on an insurance company to provide us a cheap quote. Even though our payrolls increased, we are enjoying a $13,000 premium savings compared to last year.”
Burdumy Motors, Inc.Authorized Volvo Retailer
“After working with your team for just about a half a year, you dramatically improved the safety of our operation and very quickly reduced our injury frequency. Most importantly, you negotiated with our insurance company and took us from a 15% surcharge to a 15% credit. That’s a 30% drop in our rates!”
Bob Mincin, PresidentMincin Insulation ServicesMoving from a 15% surcharge to a 15% credit is a 30-percentage-point change.
“Nine months ago I hired Duncan to implement their Risk Solutions Program. They met with me and my employees, toured my facility and put together an aggressive plan. Working together, we have now taken back control of what was an “out of control” Workers Compensation Program. I saved 42% of my premium at my very next renewal.”
Robert Gottlieb, PresidentGottlieb, Inc.
“In addition to making my life easier by helping to manage our claims, your team helped us create a very strong safety culture. Our injuries are down significantly, but more importantly, you helped reduce our work comp premium by over $80,000 a year.”
Lori BodnarC. Harper Automotive Group
“I just can’t thank you enough for finding and returning to us the $27,438 in overcharges from our last two years of audits. More importantly, you provided us a process so that we can avoid being overcharged in the future by the insurance companies.”
Ralph KempELK Air Conditioning
“Throughout David’s career he has always been on the forefront of thinking. His understanding of insurance and specifically workers compensation allows him to see things and establish practices that others eventually follow. David takes an entrepreneurial approach to problem solving resulting in both savings and added protection for his customers.”
J. Kieran Jennings, Esq.Siegel Jennings
Results depend on each company's operations, loss history and market conditions.