The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Navigating Insurance Claims with National Claims Negotiators

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Navigating Insurance Claims with National Claims Negotiators Nationalclaimsnegotiators.com About the Guest(s): Ron Snouffer is the owner and CEO of National Claims Negotiators, LLC. With over 20 years of experience in the construction roofing industry and 12 years as a licensed and bonded public insurance adjuster in Texas, Ronald has dedicated his career to helping property owners navigate insurance claims. His company, National Claims Negotiators, is well-known for providing policy analysis, insurance claim expertise, and claim documentation to ensure clients receive the compensation they are entitled to under their policy. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Boss Show, host Chris Voss interviews Ron Snouffer, the owner and CEO of National Claims Negotiators, LLC. Ronald shares his insights and expertise in the field of public insurance adjusting, discussing how his company helps property owners navigate complex insurance claims. He explains the challenges faced by property owners when dealing with insurance companies and highlights the importance of seeking professional representation to ensure fair compensation. Ronald also discusses the impact of recent environmental events on insurance claims and the need for better education and regulation in the industry. Key Takeaways: Insurance companies are a for-profit industry, and they often try to minimize payouts or deny claims altogether. Property owners should consider hiring a public insurance adjuster, especially for complex claims such as fire, flood, or tornado damage. The sooner a public adjuster is involved in a claim, the quicker it can be resolved and the property owner can receive fair compensation. Insurance policies have become increasingly complex, and it is crucial for property owners to understand their coverage and rights. The insurance industry needs more regulation and better education for public adjusters to ensure fair treatment for policyholders. Notable Quotes: "The insurance companies go, 'Okay, well let's go ahead and pay some stuff out here.' How's that work? Because of our track record? I mean, they know that we document our files extremely well and we provide enough evidence so that if it does have to be seen by an attorney, that we'll win." - Ron Snouffer "There are no bad questions when it comes to insurance claims. If you don't understand something, you're confused, or you feel uneasy about a position that the carrier has put you in, you just need to ask. We're more than willing to help." - Ron Snouffer

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. She does that so much better than I did for the first 14 years, and now she does it from here on out.

Welcome to the big show. We really appreciate you guys. As always, the Chris Foss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because she wanted her to marry Bob, or maybe him. It's an open world these days. But get on her good side by referring her to the show at goodreads.com for jessica's linkedin.com for jessica's christmas christmas one of the tiktok and

y'all's crazy places on the internet as always we have the smartest minds most brilliant people none of me of course i'm just an idiot host but we have the most amazing guests in the christmas show and we have another gentleman on today ronaldodfer is on the show with us today. He is going to be talking to us about his company, what they do, how he built it, and give you the insights to help you know how to navigate different things in business, et cetera, et cetera.

He has leveraged his 20-plus year experience in the construction roofing industry and has dedicated his past 10 years as a licensed and bonded public insurance adjuster in Texas. His company, National Claims Negotiators, is well known in the industry for taking care of property owners through policy analysis, insurance claim expertise, and claim documentation to ensure clients receive monies entitled to them under the terms of their policy.

He was an expert witness in the largest first-party claim settlement lawsuits in 2021 in the states of Oklahoma and Texas. Welcome to the show, Ron. How are you? I'm doing very well. That was a long introduction. I did. Yes, there you go. You're the owner and CEO of national claims negotiators LLC so you've been doing this for quite some time now 12 years now as of January there you go 12 years is a charm so give us your dot coms where can people find out more about you on the interwebages nationalclaimsnegotiators.com is probably the easiest way somebody can get in touch with us there you go so tell us give us a 30,000 overview what you do and how you do it is this insurance claims i guess

and you know these insurance companies don't want to pay is that how it works well insurance companies are for profit industry and i used to be an adjuster back in the day and uh switch to the other side now i only help uh, property owners with their claims and dispute. Generally, it's from a tornado, a fire, a flood, hail claim, something like that, where the insurance companies are drastically overpaying or not paying at all on a claim. There you go. And so you have a lot of that stuff going on where you get in there, you make sure that legally they pull their thing.

I know one of the big issues with insurance companies is they love collecting money. They don't like paying out money, I guess. Oh, yeah. That's so true. There you go. Wow, it sounds like my, I don't know, I don't have a joke for that. So give us a rundown of how you got into this business. How did you start this business?

Um, and, uh, maybe some of your upbringing that maybe influence your entrepreneurial journey. Uh, that's a long story, but, uh, I'll, I'll give you some short tidbits and we can chat back and forth. How's that sound? I got into the business. I used to be a contractor and one of my friends got hit by a tornado, and an insurance company came out and said they had $38,000 worth of damage.

I came out and gave her a bid for $250,000 worth of damage. Her roof got ripped off her house and wiped out her neighbor's house. Holy crap. The insurance company came out and wrote a check for policy limits to her neighbor and then told her she only had $38,000 worth of damage. She spent a summer crying because she'd get contractor after contractor come out and tell her you have $200,000 plus in damage. And her insurance company just kept telling her

everybody was ripping her off. Wow. And so she brings in you. And is this how you launched the company then? So that was the last claim I did as a contractor. She ended up hiring a public adjuster that didn't know much about what they were, who they were,

and realized that I enjoyed that side of the business, advocating for property owners in a situation like that and we've had some crazy claims in the last 12 years I'll bet there's a lot of stuff going on in the environment too that's been happening last a bunch of years well we had one in Amarillo like seven eight years ago where the guy came home from work and the police had been sitting at his house shooting tear gas into his house all day long. Because the guy robbed a bank and the suspected robber was in his house and they weren't going to raid it until SWAT got there. So they just kept shooting tear gas into the house. Holy crap.

And then the insurance company didn't want to pay for it the police department wasn't going to pay for it so we had to get help from us wow and and so i mean technically your homeowner's insurance should cover that i mean i need to write this down so that when the i get the tear gas thing at my house i know you'd be one of those guys yeah i'm a barricader that's that's what i am i'm a barricader man please come and knock on the door i ain't coming out i'm barricading don't do that people i'm just kidding um in fact i think you'd make it worse but uh yeah that would kind of suck you know if you owned an airbnb or some rental property and some some hoodlum got in there and caused a bunch

of trouble so uh do you cover yeah we mentioned you're in Texas. When you say nationwide, you cover any, can you cover any, uh, issue nationwide for customers? So being in Texas, we have a lot of asset managers that are here located in the DFW area. And generally they'll have assets. Like right now I have a client in Kentucky. We got clients in North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota. We go where we're needed. Our license is reciprocal in pretty much 45 of the 50 states. So grab a plane and go. Do you cover Hawaii?

There was a big fire in Hawaii that people are still trying to recover from. I don't uh i i actually have friends that are public adjusters on the island and i can refer them to them if they have uh i mean uh lahaina was one of our favorite places to go when we were there i was very disappointed the lahaina girl got burned up yeah and the whole town yeah yeah. Yeah, the whole town. There you go. So what are some things that people should watch out for when they have claims? Should they always turn to someone like you to make sure that the insurance company is operating on the up and up, or only if maybe they think they're getting pulled around? I think when they're ready for a second opinion they should look into getting a public

adjuster but if it's a complex claim if you have a fire uh you generally want to bring somebody in who knows what they're doing because the insurance companies know the game and a normal homeowner doesn't there you go what's the worst insurance company to try and get money on paid on claims state farm still or is it changed i believe it goes in cycles uh and then it's area to area uh so i think state farm just left your state of uh california because they were tired of paying claims yeah they're not selling house insurance anymore out there i don't think i think some people are pulling out of there in Florida, too. There's lots of companies that have left Florida.

In fact, I remember this is like decades ago. That's how old I am. I'm sure that surprises everyone. There was a decades-old thing I think in Utah where I was living at the time. There's some sort of an insurance claim, I think on a house or something or policy.

And State Farm fought the people for like 10 to 15 years, and they were old. And they fought them so long that the people finally died. Oh, yeah. And I think that was their whole game plan the whole time. Like, we'll just outlive them in appeals and i was just like i'm i think i've had we've had some people on the show state farm might not be the best i'm sure i'm gonna get attorney calls after this now i'm sure that's not gonna be the first time yeah it's not we keep them on speed dial so there you go. So looking over your website, what sort of clients do you work with?

You do commercial, you do residential, things like that. We mainly do commercial properties. We do a lot of stuff with churches. Churches seem to get denied and underpaid on a regular basis here in Texas right now. Church Mutual is up and leaving the state just like I mentioned State Farm earlier in California and so they're leaving churches high and dry on being able to get new insurance with damage they currently have.

What's the reason behind all this going on? I read something recently that part of it is it used to be that the the federal national insurance would cover everyone and so like if shit happened in florida for like flood or you know hurricane uh everybody around the nation would have to pay for their pay for florida basically which i guess happens a lot evidently and somehow they decoupled it to where each state's individually responsible for their mess or something i don't know is that is that true or am i so like i said in the beginning this is a for-profit industry and if they can figure out loopholes to not pay claims and basically in

florida what they're doing is they're taking the profits and sending them to other states and then bankrupting themselves in those states. I just read an article about United Policyholders for eight straight years. They paid out massive dividends

and now after Ian, they're broke and having to leave the state of Florida. Wow. And they paid all those dividends when they should have probably sat on them. Just craziness. Just craziness. You know, it's a weird world that we live in.

I mean, is insurance just going to fold up and no one's going to have insurance anymore? We're going to have to have Obamacare for homeowners insurance. I hope that's not the case i think uh mortgage companies will start freaking out uh in the not too distant futures when they when they see uh people who have blue tarps all over their roofs yeah because you know like in florida you i don't think you can sell your home or buy a home if you can't get it insured. That's correct. Yeah. So you're kind of really stuck if you need to move.

Or people just walk away. Oh, wow. That's not good either. Yeah. Walk away from any equity they have or, you know, it's like 2008 all over again. It is. So there you go. Yeah, we don't want to have that.

That doesn't sound good at all. What are some other aspects of your business we should talk about and enlighten people with? So like you mentioned before, the sooner you get us involved in a complex claim, the quicker we can get it resolved. But I mean, we'll get calls six months, a year, year and a half after a claim.

And the statute of limitations in most states is only two years. Some states it's only one. So if you haven't finalized your claim within that year or two years, you may be owning that damage whether you realized it or not. Wow. So you got to get on it quick. You do. And then you have a free claim review that you have on your website and stuff people can check out as well we do we'll look at anything and advise a client

on whether or not they need us or whether or not they can do something on their own is there have you rounded off an average of what you end up getting back for people as compared to what was offered to them by the insurance industry? Has he ever broke down any stats like that where you're like, you know, you get a lot more percent if you work with us and. Uh, we never really have because I mean, the claims we usually get involved with are, are severely underpaid. Um, so, um, like the claim we talked about in or that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, the 2020 claim was on a church in Oklahoma. They had three inch hail. They got paid below

their deductible. Originally, it was a $500,000 claim approximately. And the jury awarded them $2.6 million in damages for deceptive trade practices and penalties and interest and so forth. That is something else. That is crazy. That's a couple bucks there. So do they pay a fee to you to hire you to look into their claims or how does that work? So we work off a contingency. There is no fee up front. We're going to charge based on what we get recovered from the insurance company

and those fees vary depending on the size of the claim and the complexity of the claim there you go and uh so does how many of them end up having to go to court to settle or do they when they involve you uh they you know the insurance companies go okay well let's go ahead and pay some stuff out here how's it work because of our track record i mean they know that we document our files extremely well and we provide enough evidence so that if it does have to be seen by an attorney that will win generally the insurance company would much rather deal with us than an attorney. So we probably get about 90% of our stuff settled without it having to go to an attorney.

But you still have that chance of having to go see an attorney for them being difficult. Wow. There you go. It's an interesting business that goes on. And I guess maybe we need more regulation. Is that what we need? of us that live in the entire state and we have one of the largest uh places in the country for for damage i mean just yesterday there was an ef3 tornado in houston caused probably 100 million dollars worth of damage and there's not very many of us out here wow maybe you should like start a maybe you should start a franchise company or or I don't know, training school to teach people how to do it. There's an idea.

Well, when we originally got in this business, there was no training, and there's still very limited training out there when it comes to becoming a public gesture. So that may be something we look at. Yeah. I mean, that would be a good idea if it's underserved. And, you know, the climate change that's going on right now is getting worse. I mean, it's really getting hard to deny it when you've got hurricanes hitting California and a hundred year things and, you know, just crazy.

It just keeps getting crazy in the weather. And you're just like, well, there's something in the air. Something's going on. You know, I remember, what is is it six months ago or something a hurricane or something yeah i think a hurricane came in off the shore and hit california 130 year event and you're just like what the fuck i lived i grew up in california like we didn't have hurricanes it wasn't florida um so yeah it seems like there's probably going to be a lot more environmental things happening, tornadoes, lions, tigers, and bears sleeping together, fornicating.

There's going to be all sorts of weird shit going on. So, yeah, there's probably going to be more damage and more insurance companies don't want to pay and more public adjuster need. So there you go. So when you get involved, you take a look at what they're doing. You probably go through the paperwork and make sure that the paperwork matches what they were promised from the insurance company originally. Yeah.

So when I got in this business 15 years ago, an insurance policy used to be about 10 pages long. Yeah, so when I got in this business 15 years ago, an insurance policy used to be about 10 pages long. Now they're 150, 200 pages long. Oh, yeah. Lots of exclusions, amendments, addendums, so on and so forth. You've got to be an attorney almost to read these things. And so we'll review everything from the policy for the property owner and make sure that they have coverage for stuff or

maybe they don't have coverage that they thought they had there you uh it's it now do you what about the new arbitration clauses that everyone sees you putting in their contracts now do you end up having to fight through those or is there a way to circumvent those still and go to the court if you have to or so in te Texas, we're actually fighting against those because the arbitration clause we have on surplus lines down on the coast send the arbitration to New York or Virginia. Well, those laws are not consumer-friendly. They're policyholder-friendly.

And your policyholder versus spending a little bit of money here in Texas maybe spending $1,500 an hour for an arbitrator up there with no incentive to to help them get it paid quickly from the other side because they're getting paid by the hour yeah that seems like a broken way to do things how is that supposed to be better than the other so uh there you go the insurance company is just one of difficult so that policy holders will give up and and not go after them so what is the deal if if they if they give you a check and you cash, does that clinch the deal if you cash a check where it's shorted on what they should really owe you? Should they consult with you before they cash the first sort of settlement check they're given?

No, just because they cash that check doesn't mean they've settled on anything. That's a first offer. They can cash that check, put it in the bank, start repairs. What do they need to do with that money? If it's a water loss or a fire loss, they're going to get some ALE money in order to be able to set up housing and buy clothes and stuff like that. That's their money. They're allowed to do whatever they need necessary in order to move forward with the claim. That doesn't mean they've stopped negotiating at that point in time.

Ah, there you go. Yeah, pretty interesting how this whole business works out. So anything we haven't discussed about the business and what it does? Well, you mentioned how long it takes in some cases. You know, if people don't get proper representation in the beginning, Hurricane Katrina, they were still settling claims from that last year. That was over 15 years ago. Wow. Wow.

There needs to be a law that says these people can't just extend things forever and ever and ever. So, yeah, that's, well, you know, I guess the lawyers in the government win in the end. So, the sad thing about that was when I first got into the business, you know, a claim that if it had to go to an attorney might take three or four months. Now they take over a year. Then that's because they've been able to slow down the process where before they would sit down and negotiate on a whole bunch of claims together that they're hammering out each one because the attorneys for the insurance company, they get paid by the hour and the longer they can delay that thing, the more money they make.

That is just freaking crazy. So what are some of the challenges you've found in building your business and starting a company and building it and building a culture? I don't know if you have a lot of employees that work with you or if you work alone, but what are some of the challenges you've had to overcome? So, like I said, in this industry, there's really not a lot of information or education out there when it comes to how to become a PA and what kind of claims to take and how to settle claims and how to look at damage and how to review policies and so on and so

forth. We had to learn all that stuff on our own. I think there's organizations now like the Texas Association of Public Insurance Adjusters and the National Association for Public Insurance Adjusters and CAPIA, which is the California. All those associations now are pushing for better education to their members so that they can be better public adjusters in the industry. Because unfortunately, our industry, most public adjusters don't last 24 months. They'll get their license and then they're out before they renew. What's the reason for that?

Poor education. They don't know how to run the business part of things. don't know how to run the business part of things. Don't know how to run the business part of things. Because you're taking stuff on on contingency, you may have to wait three, six months, a year to get paid on stuff. And if you don't know how to manage your money and understand that it's a cash flow thing and you're not properly funded,

you're going to go out of business pretty quick. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, if you don't have the cash flow and stuff, you're going to have a problem, especially when you're going to wait for payouts to take up to 15 years. Those are big payouts, though, if they take 15 years. I'll bet. I mean, I'll bet.

So you get paid on a percentage basis? Is that bet so you get you get paid on a percentage basis that how it works i get paid on a percentage basis uh like i said it depends on when we got involved how much damage it had and uh how much work we believe we're going to do in in the claim process there you go and then you guys don't do the repairs right there's a contractor that has to be hired to do that yeah i think the only state in the country that allows a public adjuster to work both as a public adjuster and a contractor is Illinois. We all know all the screwed up laws in Illinois, right? The whole nation is screwed up. Once we're done, we get them the money,

they can hire any contractor they want to do the work. Generally, we like to have a contractor involved while we're involved so that we know what all work they're going to do and so forth. Yeah, there you go. Well, this has been really insightful. Give us your final thoughts as we go out and tell people where they can get to know more about you, ask questions, reach out to you, take your free thing, all that good stuff. So I always tell people that there are no bad questions when it comes to insurance claims. You need to ask. If you don't understand something, you're confused, you feel uneasy about a position that the

carriers put you in, you just need to ask. We're more than willing to help, but if you're not asking the questions, we don't even know what to help you with. There you go. It's important to make sure you advocate for yourself, as it were. I would agree 100%. Too many times we see homeowners that just go on down the road or get a

second line of credit for their house to make repairs when they should have gotten another opinion on it. Wow. So important folks. So important to look at. So give us your.coms as we go out so that people can look you up on the interwebs. Nationalclaimscom there you go uh thank you very much ron for coming on

the show we really appreciate it i enjoyed it thank you very much for having me there you go thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortes chris voss linkedin.com fortes chris voss and all those crazy places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time