The HUB Q&A: How BeachLife Festival Harmonized Risk Management

Long before selling a single ticket, music festival promoters must plan for numerous risks: the possibility of bad weather, issues with talent, construction concerns, attendees' health emergencies and security headaches.

And for a multi-day music festival, those risks are only multiplied. Mona Grabowski , Vice President, HUB Entertainment & Sports, spoke with BeachLife Festival Founder and CEO Allen Sanford on the risk management issues facing his company and why it needed to consolidate its numerous insurance brokers to HUB.

Mona Grabowski: Your business involves managing several risks unique to organizing live events. How does this affect your insurance.

Allen Sanford: In this business, you really only focus on insurance when something bad happens. But when that occurs, most people find themselves learning about their insurance policy then, versus understanding beforehand what’s going to happen. We often lean on the underwriter — and I’ve learned over the years that’s not good business practice.

Mona: Why did you decide to make changes to BeachLife’s insurance program?

Allen: There were two catalysts. One was the consolidation of risk management. I had one agent doing this policy, another agent doing another policy and so on, and it became extraordinarily difficult to manage.

The other catalyst was the COVID-19 pandemic. We found out there were exceptions for COVID-19 in our cancellation policies but didn’t realize it until it was too late. We needed a true partner — a partner to point out these types of edge cases instead of focusing on commissions.

Mona: For a small business, how difficult was it to deal with multiple brokers?

Allen: I would be so tired of talking about insurance with multiple brokers that when it came to other issues, I couldn’t focus. The new arrangement has given me one hose to drink from versus 10.

Mona: What have been the benefits of centralizing your insurance needs with a single broker?

Allen: We’ve been able to identify gaps in our processes. More importantly, we have an increased awareness of these gaps, which really helps the team understand best practices in managing risk. Using a single broker has helped us reduce risk, which is the point of all of this.

Mona: What’s a good example of how you’ve been able to reduce risk?

Allen: One that comes to mind is equipment handling. As a music festival, we deal with a lot of other parties’ equipment that’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, like audio equipment. There’s several nuances to risk, like determining responsibility if equipment gets stolen from our stage versus from their truck.

Now when my operational production team goes through our load-in and load-out processes, they have that in mind. They know when we’re accountable versus when we’re not accountable. So that results in them saying, “Hey, you know we need to add security here because if it does get stolen on the stage, it’s our fault.”

We’ve been able to identify those kinds of gaps in our processes because we’re working with a team that understands this trade well.

Consolidating their brokers helped BeachLife Festival develop a more effective risk management strategy. Want to learn more? Start a conversation in the comments below or contact a HUB Entertainment insurance specialist to see how to address insurance and risk management issues in entertainment.