Headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA, BurgerBusters Inc. is a privately held company that ranks as the 5th largest Taco Bell franchise operations in the United States with locations in five states: Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. BurgerBusters Inc. currently owns and operates 94 Taco Bell restaurants and 7 Steak ‘n Shake restaurants generating over $165,000,000 in annual sales.

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, our company, BurgerBusters Inc., experienced wild swings in regular insurance commodities. As part of the original twelve company group, BurgerBusters decided to form a new captive insurance company to attempt to curtail its exponentially growing costs. From that group’s efforts, FIG was created.

After living with many years of constant insurance increases, BurgerBusters found that, even after just the first year, our insurance costs had decreased. At that point, Tassos Paphites, BurgerBusters Inc.’s CEO, implemented a plan through his Human Resources department that laid the foundations to further decrease our costs via loss control. Per FIG’s recommendation for best practices, several years later, BurgerBusters hired its first Loss Control Specialist. The Loss Control Specialist position has allowed BurgerBusters to properly oversee the entire claims process, while, at the same time, looking for ways to reduce our costs. This position has proven to be invaluable to our company—one that has paid for itself many times over.

Since FIG’s implementation, while our total exposure has gone up 131%, BurgerBusters has reduced its insurance cost per $1,000 in revenue by 46%. Much of the credit for these improvements goes to FIG’s structure and systems. Sharing best practices and resources has been crucial for BurgerBusters. From safety programs to shared knowledge on problems that other members are facing, we have improved our ability to handle claims in an efficient and cost-effective manner. While it would be impossible to do away with all claims, the processes and standards that FIG has established enables us to greatly reduce our cost per claim. The knowledge we have gained from FIG and other FIG members has allowed BurgerBusters to either eliminate or largely mitigate numerous potential risks and claims that otherwise would have proven extremely costly and time-consuming.

These cost reductions have been a total team effort and would not be possible without our Operations team buying into our methodologies and working hard to implement them. We have simultaneously been improving the culture within our restaurants as our employee and customer incidents have been reduced. Now our people can focus more on running profitable restaurants and less on claims.

Finally, BurgerBusters continues to develop new restaurants at an exponential rate. Part of the reason we can grow this rapidly is the reassurance FIG membership provides, knowing that we can keep our premiums at manageable levels and having programs in place to ensure that those premiums remain that way. Without FIG, our development plans would be much riskier. Thankfully, we can build without constant insurance concerns about increased exposure. BurgerBusters is able to focus on strengthening its business, not on insurance claims.

JK&T Wings, Inc. is a franchisee of Buffalo Wild Wings. We operate 41 Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants in Michigan, Louisiana and Massachusetts and have been in business for 22 years. Our relationship with the FIG organization has provided a very high quality resource and one that is simply not available through traditional insurance plans.

As our company grew, we recognized that a Captive Insurance relationship made sense in terms of premium savings, however the group that we joined was not homogenous and included trucking companies, and other non-restaurant groups. We were introduced to the FIG organization in 2013 and formally joined in 2014. We quickly recognized the value of an organization that represented restaurant groups exclusively. Regardless of the type of restaurant, we all experience the same type of issues as they relate to W/C, Property and Liability claims.

We were introduced to the FIG organization through fellow franchisees and were carefully vetted by the selection committee. FIG members must be committed to working together as a team in order to minimize the overall risk of the group, become vested in the safety programs that are developed so that the entire group is working consistently to not only keep premiums lower but to work together to develop and implement systems that minimize and prevent the incidences from taking place.

FIG has proven to be a perfect fit for JK&T Wings, Inc. Although our company was always very committed to safety programs, the cohesiveness of the FIG organization together with all of our fellow specialists has created an environment for Risk Management success. We have greatly improved on our existing systems and implemented all of the recommendations from the FIG group. This was all accomplished with no additional staff as FIG provides all of the back of the house support in the areas of Insurance Expertise, Workers Compensation Claims reporting processes and Legal direction and solutions,. All areas are continually monitored and measured. We have implemented Safety Programs with “Safety Culture” in mind and our group of over 3,000 team members are fully embracing the programs.

Working with traditional insurance carriers in the past, I am continually impressed with the extraordinarily committed professionals that make up FIG, the interactive Specialist Meetings that keep the group cohesive and allow us to all share Best Practices, the ability to enjoy lower insurance premiums and share in premium credits and develop a Risk Management infrastructure that has positioned us for growth