Paul Riemer – President, Riemer Insurance Group, Inc.

PAUL RIEMER
We had a claim ourself where someone clicked the faulty link and shut down our organization for a couple days. And if it wasn't for the cyber insurance that we had, we wouldn't have been up and running and it would've cost us a lot more money. It would've cost us over six digits for us to get back into business.

GREG SIMPSON
On today's episode of the Built2Suit podcast, Nathan Griffis had a chance to sit down with Paul Riemer, president at Raymer Insurance Group to talk risk management, cyber insurance, and the values that drive a 48-year family business. Paul shares his insights on protecting companies and evolving threats, building sustainable growth, and why integrity matters in the insurance industry. Plus, how family and culture shape his success. Let's hear from Paul.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
You said you've been in business for 48 years. How many years have you been coming to ICSC?

PAUL RIEMER
This is my first ICSC. Not our company's first ICSC, but my first ICSC.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Oh, this is perfect. This is perfect. So this is a great lead in. So what's your first impression of ICSC?

PAUL RIEMER
It's grand.

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah. It's a big conference. It's got a lot of depth to it. There's a lot of different types of vendors that we could certainly talk to and get their feel for what the industry is looking like as a whole and how we sort of fit into that as risk advisors and insurance brokers and where we could help them mitigate risks and where they're having the pain points within all their various industries. It's not just the folks that own properties and the landlords and the tenants, but it's also the architects, the engineers, the contractors, the developers. Everybody has different needs and we're here to help serve that. And the beauty about us, it's not a matter of if they're buying insurance, it's who they're buying it from. And a lot of folks are dealing with pain points in our industry and we're here to help solve that.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Yeah. There's not really an option of whether or not ... I mean, and even being self-insured is virtually impossible. You can do it up to a certain level, maybe depending on the size of your organization, but the risks are just too high. So what specific types of insurance that are you here offering to say a developer or some of the corporate entities that are here?

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah. So for us, it's a little bit of everything. On the commercial end, depends on what type of business that you have, but we're focused on the property, the general liability, the professional liability for folks that are offering professional services. We do workers' compensation. We do cyber insurance. So everything on the business insurance front, we're able to handle. And then the beauty of that is that some people have their property and casualty people that they're happy with and they've had longstanding relationships with, but maybe they don't have a personal lines person that is focused on their home, their auto, their umbrella, their jewelry, their watercraft, their aircraft. We have the ability to do that as well. And then another thing that goes overlooked here at these conferences is folks that are offering employee benefits to their employees. So we help offer the health insurance, the dental, the vision, the short-term disability, the life insurance, and a lot of the ancillary benefits that employers are offering to their employees.

PAUL RIEMER
And we've got different support infrastructures for all of those different departments. And we're happy to help along any of those lines where we could be of assistance.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Okay. I'm going to drill in on cyber insurance. Let's do it. One of the proudest moments that we had as a firm was not that we had a cyber incident, but that we had insurance for it. Yep. And at the time, I mean, it was just something our insurance provider had ... And it wasn't super expensive, but it was a game changer in the course of that event. So for the company that's listening to this, I'll advocate for talking to somebody about cyber insurance because it's a huge deal. Absolutely. It's a huge deal. So tell the industry why they need to come talk to you about cyber insurance.

PAUL RIEMER
Well, absolutely. A lot of people don't understand the threats that are out there as it relates to hacking, to social engineering. There's a lot of phishing going on and a lot of the employees that work in any sort of corporation aren't privy to those sorts of threats. And you could do all the training in the world, but still there are lots of cyber incidents because people aren't prepared for that. So we could help sort of mitigate that risk through proper risk management, but also buying the insurance that helps in the situation. We had a claim ourself where someone clicked the faulty link and shut down our organization for a couple days. And if it wasn't for the cyber insurance that we had, we wouldn't have been up and running, and it would have cost us a lot more money. It would have cost us over six digits for us to get back into business.

PAUL RIEMER
So it was a trying time for us and thank God we had the cyber insurance and the right claims team to be able to help us. So happy to help

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Anybody. I don't sell it, but I use it. I think that's probably somebody else's marketing pitch. Let's pivot away. I love ... Yeah, I can't ... It's crazy. It's crazy how important that protection is today. And it can absolutely disable your business if you're not prepared for it. And you can have all the, don't click this, don't go to that and have all that stuff in place, but the wall that you build, it can be breached. No matter how prepared you think you are, there is a lot of people that are very smart trying to take advantage of you.

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah, absolutely. And especially because of the reliance on technology for pretty much every business out there today, we need that infrastructure and that protection in order to keep our businesses going.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Yeah. No, I think that's really important. So let's pivot back to ICSC. Did you do the new members tour?

PAUL RIEMER
I did not do the new members tour. Showed up a little late for that one. Okay.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Well, the guy who gave it is one of our BD guys. Nice. So maybe you can talk him into a behind the scenes. Phenomenal organization we've been associated with for a long time. But my takeaway from the years in the industry, conversations I've had across the last couple of days is there's some amazing people in this industry.

PAUL RIEMER
Absolutely.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
And learning the whole context of it and how big it is and how the web is built is super, super powerful to any business that's tangential. So kudos for coming to ICSC. I think it's a great organization. Thank you. We give us some props. We have a scholarship with ICSC, with our founder who was a big advocate for this particular group for a long time. And so it's a big deal in our organization and we work really well with it. So thanks for paying to be here.

PAUL RIEMER
Of course.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
So phenomenal people. So we were chatting before this conversation. What gets you out of bed in the morning?

PAUL RIEMER
It's all about my family for me. So blessed to have a beautiful wife, two children. I got Lily who's almost three years old and I've got Brett who's 10 months old and they're everything to me.

PAUL RIEMER
And fortunate to be working in a family business when I'm second generation. So I work alongside my brother Brian and my father, Steven, who founded the business almost 48 years ago.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
So let's talk about that.

PAUL RIEMER
Let's do it.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Yeah. There you go. We got to this stuff. So you're in a family business. Absolutely. There's probably some other people in this room or listening to this that are in the family business. So what's that dynamic like? When's the last time you and your brother yelled at each other?

PAUL RIEMER
So my brother and I don't yell at each other very often. It's really a great yin and yang and we have a great division of responsibilities and he's over the finance and operations. I'm over sales and HR, but we work together on pretty much everything. And my dad, we're lucky that he's there to be a mentor for us. He's 77, but still wants to take over the world. And having him as part of the business has been a real blessing for all of us. And we're lucky to have that rather that than the alternative, that's for sure.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Yeah. Because it doesn't always go well.

PAUL RIEMER
Exactly.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
It doesn't always go well. And especially when you're, if you get in any sort of power conflict or somebody gets mad at a deal, it can turn very south and it can divide some families. So kudos for figuring that out as well. So we talked about what gets you up in the morning. What keeps you up at night?

PAUL RIEMER
So what keeps me up at night is that we've just got a growing business. And for us, it's just about keeping the train moving and the train moving in the right direction. You always are afraid that something might fall through the cracks, but luckily we've got good systems in place that help prevent that. And we just want to make sure that we've got a happy house. And not that we're worried about that and that keeps us up at night, but it's something that we always want to continue to work at and keep improving on and making sure that we're building a business that's sustainable long term. It's not the same type of resources that some of these private equity firms or public companies have. We're a family business. We're owned and operated with family values and we've got to work a different type of way.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
That's probably a little bit challenging, frankly, in the insurance business because not all it feels good. I'll say as somebody who has insurance, a variety of different insurance, yeah, you don't always feel like you're getting values. It feels like you're getting abused.

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah. We have to be a good communicator, bad news a lot of times, but it's all about the transparency and making sure that you're uncovering every stone. Our job is to make sure that we're leveraging all the different parts of the marketplace to deliver the greatest value to our client. And as long as we're doing the work and we're not being lazy, we're going to keep getting our share. And my thesis on the business is that there's a lot of bad insurance agencies out there. We're good at what we do. Goods can outperform bad in the long run. And if we just keep doing the right things, there's a lot of good accounts in bad places and there's a lot of good people in bad places that might want to come over and work with us one day. And we just got to keep doing the right thing.

PAUL RIEMER
And that's part of our values. We're family first, business second. We're all about continuous improvement. We're all about loyalty, but last and certainly not least, we're always about doing the right thing.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
And as the owner of the business, you just rattled those off very, very quickly and smoothly. And I think you have to not only know them, they have to be written down, but you have to communicate them on a regular basis because they're part of who you are, but they're not necessarily part of the person that you hired. And so there's an aspect you can try to find the people that completely align, but you have to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. So that's a great part of the elevator speech.

PAUL RIEMER
Thank you.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Right? Because it has to matter. And so I appreciate the fact that you have those. Not every organization does, and I think that's a big stumbling block.

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah. With us, it's with every interview. We start every meeting Monday morning off with those values and we try and infiltrate that into everything that we do every day and try and give examples of how we're carrying out those values throughout the week, day, month, year, whatever it might be. We try and to keep instilling those values into our folks and into our business.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
So let's finish out with a small plug for the water bed. Fun fact, one of the first pieces of furniture that I bought, and it seemed like a good idea at the time was a waterbed. And it was like the old school, it was worse hundred bucks I've ever spent. It was not baffled. It did not come with a heater. I mean, it was like sleeping on the ocean every night, but I kept it because I was broke.

PAUL RIEMER
Sure.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
I was like, I'm committed now. So sounds like you found some better technology. So for the young professional, you got young kids that don't let you sleep. So every ounce of it matters.

PAUL RIEMER
Sure.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
What are you finding to get that extra dose of Z?

PAUL RIEMER
The eight sleep has been great for me.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Eight sleep. Okay.

PAUL RIEMER
Yeah, it's been great.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
So we can get them to sponsor this. That'd be awesome.

PAUL RIEMER
Eight sleep. Watch out. I'm coming for you, but you guys really do make me sleep better. Thank you.

NATHAN GRIFFIS
Awesome. Well, thanks for sitting down and delivering some water. So enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. Appreciate it. We appreciate the opportunity to shine a little highlight on the newest attendee to ICSC this year. And hopefully you'll keep coming back for years to come that'll be a great show for you and that your family business will continue to be successful for the good of the industry.

PAUL RIEMER
Thank

NATHAN GRIFFIS
You. And because we need everybody to be successful and for the good of the industry. So thanks. Thanks very

PAUL RIEMER
Much. We appreciate you and thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate this. This was such a great conversation. Really appreciate you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All