Continuity, Stability and Protection
To ensure proper, sensible & proactive detail is given to securing company operations, security and profitability against unforeseen circumstances. To ensure all legally required schemes are in place such as employee pension schemes and to give added value to staff remuneration packages.
How Staff and Company Benefit from Proper Corporate Planning
If you are not offering pensions, life assurance, disability cover, critical illness insurance and medical insurance to your staff then you are not maximizing potential added value a) for your employees and b) in your staffing capital investment.
An appropriate cost/benefit analysis of the various corporate planning options for your particular set of employees should be properly carried out. In many cases your employees will perceive the value of the benefit to be much higher than the actual cost of providing it, which makes such benefits a very useful tool in remuneration negotiations with individual staff or groups/unions.
The benefits not only accrue to your staff, but also assist in the efficient management of the company by providing cover for certain risks.
KEY PERSON COVER
As a company you insure your cars and your equipment against disaster like fire and flood and include compensation for loss of profits as well as asset replacement. But do you insure your company's cash flow against loss of key members of staff to death or disease?
Draw up a list of your Key People, who, very broadly, are those whose skills are such that no one else could step into the breach should they die suddenly of a heart attack or the like.
In most companies the Directors are Key People, as are the star salespeople, business drivers, and possibly certain technical staff.
Ask yourself what sort of damage their loss would entail. This can range from the catastrophic (in the event of the death of an owner director this can result in the calling in of all debts, bank overdrafts etc and subsequent failure of the firm) to the difficult (the death of the top salesperson may cause a new business famine and subsequent cash flow difficulties) to the merely expensively inconvenient (hiring a consultant locum at £500 a day for several months while a new person is recruited).
If you consider that you have a potential problem then you can insure against it using Key Man policies. These are not prohibitive in cost, although generally they will not count as a business expense.
DIRECTOR SHARE COVER
IMPORTANT NOTE TO MANAGING DIRECTORS: YOU SHOULD PROTECT YOUR COMPANY AND YOUR FAMILIES WITH DIRECTOR SHARE COVER.
In the event of a director of your company dying or suffering a critical illness it is imperative to protect both the company and the director's family. Simple and effective plans are available to provide complete peace of mind so that both the company and family survive such events.
INCOME REPLACEMENT PLANS / PERMANENT HEALTH INSURANCE
When you have to let a valued staff member go because of ill health it can be a very difficult decision; being almost as stressful for the manager, who feels that he is condemning a friend to State Benefits, as it is for the ill employee.
If however the staff member has got disability cover as part of their package everyone knows that their salary will be largely replaced by income from the insurer. This makes for much better management, working relationships and added value for your employees.
CRITICAL ILLNESS INSURANCE
If one of your staff gets a serious listed illness (but not necessarily immediately fatal listed illness e.g. cancer , heart attack, stroke) , then they get a lump sum payment (typically equal to two years salary). Again it helps to resolve the issues inherent in either paying unproductive staff or letting people down when you would really like to help them.
CORPORATE/EMPLOYEE PENSIONS AND LIFE INSURANCE
Death in Service Protection may have less direct benefit to the firm, but still offer effective ways of providing employee benefits. If as an employer you have five or more employees you may fall under the Stakeholder rules and need to set up pension schemes for those employees. That's the law. Gerard Associates can assess your business situation and provide advice and appropriate cover.
Company Seminars
Gerard Associates are to happy hold employee/employer seminars at the workplace in order to explain these areas. These meetings can provide excellent opportunity to both employer and employee when seeking clarification on these important areas.
