Today, I purchased a group podcast episode number 15. We continue to explore our 4 cautionary tales dedicated to my cohost, Mister Murphy. And now you're on part 3, and we're all introducing you to risk risk management. Why you need to create your own risk mitigation strategy? Before bad things happen, and no. Having everyone sign a waiver is not the only thing you need to do. By the way, Mister Murphy just called, he's suing you for gross negligence. You have insurance. Right? Right? Uh-oh.
Thank you for joining me for the emergency or podcast. I'm your professional recognier, your teacher, your merchant of dirt, your host and believer that the secret to getting ahead is getting started. Kyle Bondo. Our website is merchandisinger.com. And if you're new to the merchandisinger podcast, welcome aboard. This is your personal trail guide through the complex world of record engineering, where I help you simplify
the business of off road race promotion. And that means that we're gonna make the art science behind building, promoting, and directing off a race is understandable,
which is really important. And alongside me, the man of the hour, and to whom the whole month is dedicated to, the fictional lawyer, a maker of laws, and allegedly the creator of the demon demon. I didn't know that. But cohost, everyone loves to hate Mister Murphy, and together we're on a mission to teach you how to build better races.
Welcome to part 3 of our full month of cautionary tales dedicated to topics Mister he wants to talk about, or in this case, doesn't want me to talk about. And then today's spin of Mister Murphy's Wheel of Woe, it has to do with risk. To be specific risk mitigation. And what you need to be thinking about, if you wanna protect your company and your livelihood from things that can go wrong, So to understand risk mitigation, you really have to understand
another term we're gonna get in there. A lot of terms today, so we get ready. It's gonna be talking about risk management. Risk management is the process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to those risk factors throughout the life of your race. So a proper risk management implies control of possible future events. I mean the key to risk management is being proactive, not reactive.
So in other words, it's doing things before they happen, not after they happen. So why do we do risk management? Well, it has some purpose, and there's a reason we're gonna talk about this today. Because when it comes to race promotion, You need to understand risk just about as much as you need to understand your finances. So risk is that important to doing a race promotion. So what is the purpose of risk management? Well, the first off is to identify possible risks.
Oh, that seems pretty easy. Right? We wanna reduce and allocate those risks That's our mitigation. We want to see what we can do, solve the risk problem, get rid of the risk, and we're gonna provide irrational basis for better decision making in regards to all risks. And of course, we also want to do this so that we can plan better. I mean, assessing and managing risk is the best defense you have against Mister Murphy. And, of course, race day catastrophes.
How do we go about this risk management? Well, first off, we have to go into evaluating our contingency planings. So we can find potential problems and develop a way for how we're gonna address those par those problems. We'll improve our chances of having a successful race as long as we can understand what the problems are.
And we do this through this continuous process, and there's something we do on an annual basis, So by doing a risk management annually, we're ensuring this high priority of risks are aggressively managed. All risks are cost effectively managed throughout our race because some risks can actually hurt us financially. And we need to manage that information to very requiring it to make informed decisions on the issues that are critical to our race success.
So you don't actively attack this risk or attack risk, they'll actively attack you. So risks are important to be managed, to be aggressively managed, to be effectively managed, and to make sure they're actually informing our decisions rather than us just making decisions in the blind. That is the importance of risk management. So what can you do about risk? Well, first, you have to problem solve.
You work through each risk and think about what could possibly happen and how the results could impact you in your business. And some of these are really easy. Things like, what if it rains? What if no 1 shows up? What if the part closes? What if my permit gets gets canceled? What if someone gets hurt? What if I win a $1,000,000 and don't show up tomorrow? These are all risks. Some of them have possibilities.
Some of them are not even remotely possible. Well, I don't know. What a $1,000,000 would be too bad. But when you think about risk, You need to consider how to best deal these risks. You have to work through each risk and think about what could possibly happen, how that result could impact you and your business. And once you do that, you can then do something called a risk response. Seems pretty simple. Right? Okay. Let's go through risk responses. What things can you do about risks?
Well, there are 3 kinds of risk responses that you can do when it comes to actually managing your risk. The first is avoidance. This is eliminating that specific threat altogether. This is usually eliminating the cause. So what's the cause?
Park permit gets gets canceled. There's a cause. That's a risk. How do you avoid that? When you're constantly working with the park manager to make sure that that doesn't happen, that you eliminated all the other possible events that could take place in that environment so that your permit is not of any kind of threat of being canceled, you're doing everything by the book. That would be an example of avoidance mitigation. This is reducing the expected monetary value of the risk.
So what's an example of that? We're reducing the probability of this occurrence. So a mitigation would be someone gets hurt. Well, what would be the expected monster of value of someone getting hurt? They sue you for 1,000,000 of dollars. So how can you reduce that probable of occurrence? How do you mitigate that? By insurance,
that's a pretty simple thing. You know, as long as you're not you know, grossly negligent that you cause injure yourself. I mean, they say they hit a tree. That's a total accident. Right? You do mitigation strategies like sign a waiver. Hey. You should have known she was there. You have insurance. Hey. I know. You know. Here's some money. That's a that's an example of mitigation. And then, of course, finally, is acceptance,
accepting the consequence of the risk. This is often an accomplished By developing a contingency plan, you should execute when the event of the risk event occurs. So example of this is rain. So you have to accept rain because can you stop it? No. So how do you you accept the rain? So what do you do as a strategy for accepting rain? Bad weather, snow, bad winds, whatever it takes, even hot sun in some places.
Well, when you accept that risk, what you're saying is I accept the fact that it could rain and I'm gonna build in a rain day. I'm gonna have another date so that if my race gets canceled, we just shift it to that other date. That's an acceptance of the risk. And it could be a type of mitigation too. But in this case, the acceptance usually has things to do that you accept the consequences of that risk. You know people are gonna get hurt. You accept that consequence, you buy insurance because of that. And if you work on an association to get to
to be sanctioned, they expect you to understand that risk too. So there are some gray areas as these 3 move along, but those are the primary things you understand in what when you talk about risk responses and what you can do about a risk. This is the primary way you develop your contingency plan for each of these risks. You engage in this problem solving process.
So let's talk about that. When you hear the words problem solving, you have to think of the process as I'm going to think about what could possibly happen, how that might impact me, things I can do about it, or can't do about it, and what to do if, you know, in the when the risk is finally revealed, that has 4 steps. The first is, of course, identifying the risk. This is a brainstorming. You're gonna go through that war game. You're gonna find how the risk
exists within your process, within your race, within your environment. You need to know what they are. So you make a big list of them all. Right? I think you analyze them. You determine how best to manage these risks. There are some risks. You have no control over. There are some risks. You have complete control over. There are some risks that have very little impact to you. Oh, and I forgot my stopwatch.
Well, just what happens, I have a smartphone and I have a wristwatch. Other people have stopwatches on their phones. So that's a pretty minimal risk. I forgot the computer for registration. That's a bigger risk. So that would you manage those risks. So it works kind of like in this in this grid. To where you manage the likelihood of the event versus the severity of the event on your x and y axises.
So then after you have analyzed the risk, you develop a risk response, then you assess the possible remedies and manage the risk or the possible prevent the risk from occurring. So that's what you're gonna do. You develop that response. You go back to, can you avoid it? Can you mitigate it, or can you accept it? And what are the remedies for those things? And how can you possibly
prevent the risk even from occurring in the first place? And finally, you develop a contingency plan or preventative measures for the risk. You take the ideas, that you have what you have to reduce or eliminate the risk likelihood, and you convert them to the process which you can place in a moment's notice.
This is risk management in a nutshell. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. It's simply doing some analysis, finding out your risk What they are? What are their severity versus their their likelihood? We're going to develop a response. Can you avoid it? Can you mitigate it? Can you accept it? And then develop a plan in order to either get rid of the risk altogether so it doesn't happen.
So we're gonna put things in the way to check boxes and and gates to make sure the risk doesn't happen, or we're gonna convert it into a plan that if it happens, we're ready. And that's it. Not that complicated. So in the next segment, I'm gonna get into how each contingency plan can help you ensure that we can quickly deal with the most the most likely problems that will arise. And we'll get into the 6 things within a race where
you're most likely gonna find risk. It's not a complete list, but it will definitely help you conceptualize what thinking you need to do in order to build your risk mitigation strategy.
Now let's start to talk about how we bounce back when everything goes wrong. I'm gonna do that by telling you a quick little story. Once upon a time, Virginia had a very wet spring. So wet in fact that it caused several race cancellations throughout the state. And this included the Adventure Addix Racing, a Drill N Rush 12 Hour Venture Race in Front Royal Virginia.
Now AAR, race promoters, Andy Bacon, and Michelle Foscher found themselves in a position that all race stretchers dread having to postpone a race just days before an event. And as they pointed out in the statement to bum racers, the reason they had to postpone the general rush was mainly due to the conditions at the Shenandoah River Park And when the condition is actually on the river itself, in addition to the trails in the park becoming completely saturated with all the rain, the Shadow River
was running 8 feet above normal, making any kind of paddling very unsafe. Between park managers worried about trail damage and the river that was sure to get 1 or more racers killed using a canoe. Bacon and Fosher had to do the 1 thing that would both protect their race, their racers, and protect the park, and that was canceled their race. And that had to be a very
very tough thing to do. As most race promoters find out, when you start when you have to cancel your race, it's very emotional because you have this big fear that no 1 will come back to you, that no 1 will come to your rain date when you have a reschedule. If you can even reschedule because there's no guarantee that the rain date you set won't have rain or bad weather also.
So that's a very, very, you know, trying moment for a race promoter when you have to go and tell your racers, it's not gonna happen. What's the cost of that? What's the financial impact of that as well? Well, for that race, the average cost of venture racers like a $135. So the fallout from a weather related postponement is very costly. Mean, considering how many small event management companies like AAR
use pre registration fees to pay their overhead costs. I mean, you're talking about equipment permits, post race food, venue set up maps, all that stuff. You can imagine how a large refund could directly impact a vital cash flow. When racists were postponed, refunds are unavoidable.
There'll always be a percentage of your registered racers that will not be able to make your new race date, and they'll actually request their money back. And just because you postpone the race for very good reasons does not mean that some racers will be happy about it. The end result will be akin to starting over again with new racers, new marketing strategies, and a new plan. It's a whole new day. It's a whole new race.
But if you have already built in all the your risks and your risk mitigation strategies for these eventualities, the exposure to postponement can be mitigated with the tools They're related to what's called contingency planning. However, if you consider the cost of holding a race that resulted in a major injury or worse a death, because you decided the risk was worth it. The cost of disappointing a few racers
will seem as a drop in the bucket in comparison. Disappointment is cheap. Injuries are expensive. This is why contingency planning is probably the most important risk management process there is. It solves potential issues before They become problems, and it's how a race promotion company stays in business. Developing your risk mitigation strategy is all part of the contingency planning process.
You troubleshoot these ideas. You just like we talked about in the earlier segments. You have to identify those risks before the rates ever happens. So when it comes to off road insurance races, that was a venture racing mountain bike racing trailer running, what have you? There is obviously inherent risk that can't be overlooked. The primary role of any race promoter is to 1st, do no harm, just like a doctor. Do no harm. However, avoiding customer disappointment race injury, lawsuit.
Obviously, do no harm is not always possible. People get hurt. People get upset. People sue. You can't get away from that. That's kind of the litigious nature of American life. This is why all race voters need to create a risk mitigation strategy. And you're thinking, risk mitigation strategy. What the heck is that, Kyle? That sounds really complicated. Well, like any strategy,
A risk mitigation strategy is a tool. Only this tool is built from decisions that you make during your contingency planning process. This means that your decisions will be different than another race promoter's decisions because each person has a very customized version of the risk mitigation strategy.
The advantage of going through this preplan contingency process and discovering what these actions are or that you can do quick action when the contingency takes place, when the risk happens, when it materializes,
and it will protect your company or reputation most importantly, your customers, your races. This is the power of having fully thought out risk mitigation strategy before bad things happen. So let's talk a little bit about contingency planning. In the contingency planning process, And how does that connect to your risk mitigation strategy? Well, first off, it's something that you include in your annual planning strategy, usually around January.
When the off season and, you know, a lot of times, snow is on the ground, but not necessarily. It's whenever you decide during the year, it's time to do some strategic planning. January is a great time, beginning of the year, new years, resolutions. It's a great time to kinda clean the dust off your your strategies. And find out if you still need to do any thinking, any changes, and any updates. This will help you keep your risk mitigation strategy, in particular,
up to date from season to season. You should need to revisit any of the parts of the strategy during the year, except to share it with your staff and your volunteers because chances are you're gonna have new people show up. Also wanna make sure that you've updated any sections if the incident is taking place. In order to confirm whether or not the process you have there actually solves the problem. That actually mitigate or avoid or accept the risk. If it doesn't,
then you need to review that and update it. But inside this process, so contingency planning is just like we talked about before, it's the analysis of what risks are possible
how to analyze them, the severity versus their likelihood. We do some analysis and troubleshooting about what we can do about it. Can we avoid it? Communicate it? Can we do accept it? And then how do we or what choice we made? How do we do 1 of those things? For avoiding it? How are we avoiding it? For mitigating? How are we mitigating it? If we're accepting it, how are we accepting it? What kind of process policy
is in place that we can go back and follow, that you can pick off the shelf and say, hey, Hey, Bob. Here is the risk mitigation strategy that has our contingency plans in it for these eventualities. And teach new people who come into your organization, those things. And that's a system for your risk management. And for the sake of this conversation, we're gonna talk about 6 key contingency planning processes
that you need to consider that connect into your risk mitigation strategy. So if you think about the risk mitigation strategy, it is the umbrella. And inside it, I've selected 6 things that you should definitely be considering in order to manage your risk. So the contingency plans are each 1 of these topics. So let's let's find out what those are. 1, injuries seems pretty obvious.
2, liability risk. 3, cancellation risk, 4, venue security risk, 5, acknowledgment waiver risk, and 6. Customer behavior. But we're gonna get into each 1 of the following 6 contingency planning process steps that will inform your overall risk mitigation strategy in a document you'll be able to read, review,
share, and make it better every year and every time you use it. So let's get into each 1 of those. The first step in your risk mitigation strategy is to do continuously planning around injuries. So step 1 obviously is injury mitigation thinking. And this is the first part you plan when you're gonna direct directly war game out how to deal with injuries,
small ones, and big ones. And this focuses on understanding the process that you'll use to communicate an injury to you and your staff or your volunteers, and what they need to do when it is reported. Most times, when injury occurs, It's not in the transition area close to the medical. So your injuries and off road racing are sometimes miles away and difficult to reach and remote locations. So your initial plan should include answering
questions like, how will you know where your racers are? These are the ones that are still in the race. You wanna know where they are too. Right? And how will staff the volunteers let you know an injury has occurred? Who responds to injury and who makes that call? How do you respond to that injury? And how do responders get there? Who's coordinating that event? And what happens to the race during and after injury?
Is being responded too. Because although someone's hurt and you have to focus your attention on them is hurt and someone's hurt, there's still, you know, possibly hundreds of people around you. Still out in the woods, still doing things. So the risk is not, you know, this is an injury. It's not meaning you are not focused on other things going on. There's still a people management thing going on. That you need to be aware of. You should have when you go through this war game of how to manage these people and where to go and get people emergency response, and get the injured person some help. The end result of step 1 should be what's called your emergency response plan. And in the last episode, we talked about how you build your emergency response plan. So that's really, if you build a emergency response plan, that is your contingency plan per The first step of your risk mitigation strategy, how you deal with emergencies.
Pretty simple. Right? The second step in your risk mitigation plan strategy is liability risk mitigation thinking. This should be directed towards figuring out how to minimize the financial impact
that an injury or other thing can have on your company. This includes in protecting you, your staff, and your company by having liability coverage. Race promoters are responsible for protecting their customers from gross negligence, and there's a legal term gross negligence for you go up and punch somebody. You hear that's gross negligence.
Someone falls down because they tripped over rock. That's not gross negligence. So there's a difference in legal terms for for what a racer can expect you to have to cover and what is inherently risky in behavior that you may not have to cover. So you're offering often protected from hazards that could have been reasonably avoided, you know, running a tree falling off your bike. Unfortunately, Each 1 of your your races is potential
legal disaster waiting to happen regardless if it's your fault or not. So we all hope it doesn't happen. But you need to be prepared for win eraser
does get seriously hurt. And the question is of when, of course, this will happen, not if. And this requires you to take into consideration the following questions before you ever host a race. First off, do you have liability protection insurance? Do you even know what that is? You should probably you should probably do some research and find out what liability protection is and what good coverage looks like because you need to figure out what coverage does your liability insurance you do have it, where does it protect you from? I mean, is it a $1,000,000 worth of coverage? What happens you get sued for 2,000,000? Who pays the extra 1,000,000?
Bonus round? It's you. Is your company protected? Or can they come after the company, take it apart, sell off the pieces in order to pay the debt? Do you have additional insurance? Or do you need insurance provided to you by a race association?
A lot of companies will get liability insurance for their company and they get sanctioned and use the sanction insurance to cover them double. So you'll have sanctioning insurance to cover races and your racers, and then liability protection to cover the company in case someone tries to go after you can sue you. And then what level does your venue require? Some parks and some properties require you to have a legal
liability coverage insurance level Above a 1,000,000, could be 5,000,000, could be 10,000,000. You don't know. You may have to have a bond. You may have to have certain money in a bank in order to cover those expenses. So the end of result the end result of step 2 should be, first off, probably the purchase of insurance policy. That provides your company enough liability coverage to survive a lawsuit. But you definitely, within step 2, war game out, what are the potential hazards of a lawsuit? And there is tons
of research data on companies, race companies being sued for liability for people getting hurt during races. So get smart, get educated, go find out information. That's part of that strategy piece for you to understand what you could possibly be sued for. And protect yourself from that. Okay. The 3rd contingency plan, you need to be considering its cancellation risk. So in step 3 of your risk mitigation strategy, you need to be thinking about what you can do when it comes to cancellations.
This is the party plan you should be directed towards other events that you have no control over. So, yes, we're talking about the weather. Let's face it. The weather is the most unpredictable force a race broker will ever deal with. If you ask 5 people the weather be like tomorrow, you'll most likely get 5 different answers. I mean, this is true even with modern technology and weather prediction that 1 source will tell you it's gonna be sunny and another source will tell you it's gonna rain. Well, who's right?
When the clouds start to appear and the skies get dark, you need to be ready for how you plan on dealing with the possible cancellation.
They either did see coming or didn't see coming. So you need to ask yourself these questions. What happens when it rains on race day? Do you have a strategy for race day? Do you have venue set up for contingency plans? Do you have a venue that can allows you to have water saturated trails that they can be used for a race? Do you have a rain date that is part of your permit? Do you have to go to another permit? Did you save back at least 50% of your preregistration money in case 50 of free funds? When do you tell your racers that you're canceling your race? How Do you tell your racers that you constantly erase? What's your communications plan for when cancellations happen? When this how about this 1? When the clouds appear in the sky,
and it's obviously gonna rain where the eraser is at, but not at the park. And they're like, oh, man, race is gonna be canceled, pouring down rain here. 10 miles away, sunny skies. This happens in Virginia all the time. They say it's a hot air, it comes out of DC, makes the clouds part. But this is something you need to consider. Is there are people who live in Metropolitan Areas who work 40, 50, 60 miles away from the event venue. It's pouring down rain or snowing or it's ice in their area.
Where your vent is perfect or vice versa. AC sunny skies, your vent is covered in water. How do you communicate those people? So the end of result the end result of step 3 is you should have thought out your bad weather policy. That how you post that? Do you post your website? Do you send them an email? Do you send them a tweet? You make sure everyone has a chance to read that policy
when they pre register for your race. So they understand what's gonna happen, what's your process is, so they understand how they're gonna get that information. And it should also push you to create processes on how to check the weather before race day and how you decide if and when you cancel a race. And what you will do with your customers' money if you have to hold a race on their rain day. Okay. And step 4, the contingency planning process of your risk mitigation strategy is venue security.
And when you're doing venue security risk mitigation thinking, you're probably thinking Not really sure I've done this before, and this might be I mean, it's the military mind of me. But talking to guys who do Exteras and marathons. This has become an actual real thing, and it has happened after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The subject of event security has become kind of this hot button topic within race promoters that no 1 really kind of talks about yet. But should be paying attention to.
I mean, should your event require security? Does a 100 mountain bikers Need an armed guard or an off duty police presence? Did it make a difference in Boston? May not the point in your fingers, but the Boston Marathon had hundreds of police officers on duty before and after the bombing. So if they had difficulty with terrorism or with someone who wanted to ill harm to to racers,
your little 100% event with 1 police officer who knows. So the chances are that you and your company will not be responsible for causing our feelings to prevent it. But if your event requires that level, you know, a level of security and there's still an incident, you need to understand there's a risk there. How do you prevent that? And the chances are that the decision to provide security at your event is totally up to you.
But you need to have it at least considered it by asking these questions. And the first 1 is really easy. Is there a risk to customers? Mean, is there is there security in the area that you can leverage to protect your customers? And this might not be I mean, terrorism and extreme thing. Let's get down to, like, small petty theft. I mean, how many times you've been to a race where someone stole some of your stuff, your water bottle, your sunglasses. Your better 1 stole a bike.
Was it 2 years ago, 2015 in Richmond when they had the big cycling rest of the race, the UCI cycling rest in Richmond, There was a report that someone had $210,000 bikes stolen right out of the parking lot. Security everywhere. No 1 knew who took the bikes.
So are parts of your venue unsupervised during the race? Meaning the parking lot, registration, timing tint? How many times have I seen and, oh my gosh, this is, you know, pet peeve time. How many times I've seen her at race, where everyone's watching the start line, registration's empty, and the cash box is still sitting right there on the table. Someone could just walk right up and walk out. No 1 ever stopped them. Here's another 1. This is a scary thought. If someone walked up to your venue with a handgun and said, give me your cashbox, Guess what? They've got your cashbox.
Now, would security prevent that? I don't know. Maybe a guy walking up sees security be like, maybe not. So you have to think about these things. How about alcohol? Is alcohol being distributed event? Do you need security to prevent minors from getting alcohol, because maybe you're not doing such a good job, checking IDs, or when people start drinking, people get dumb, So you might need a security presence at a venue if you're serving alcohol.
I mean, do you think your customers will appreciate a security presence at your venue? They might. I mean, seeing an, you know, an off duty police officer there, might make them feel better, might they make them feel a little secure. Sometimes there's a customer service angle to this. So Think about that. At the end of step 4, you should know how to approach your venue security policy.
And you should certainly be telling your racers of any part of your venue should be considered at your own risk. Okay. Now on to step 5, your contingency planning is your acknowledgement waiver. Okay. When it comes to this part, it's time to get real. Let's face it. Some razors
are just played dumb. Either dude, they'll fall their own. You know, the tree jumped out in front of me or because they attempted to do something they should not have done, you know, jumped over the Rocky Creek bed and missed. My favorite is, hey, guys. Watch this. It's usually what it right before something really bad happens. So just like those videos, like, I jumped off the thing. It's like, just then Bob realized that that was a bad idea. So he must be prepared before
people do this, before accidents happen. These are definitely definitely it's kind of accidents. But you need to be prepared before that. Right? And we're talking about waivers. So welcome to the need for a realistic liability waiver. Most insurance companies and sanctioned organizations already require racers to sign. And this is and quotes, I know this is dangerous, but I plan to do it anyway.
Unquote, waiver form. Why did they do that? Well, this is like the first line of protection that shows that your customers were informed of their risks before they stepped onto your course. Pretty simple. This is legal lawyeries 101. The first thing they're gonna ask you was,
hello, defend? Were you informed of the risks before you participate in the event? And the razor will be like, no. No 1 ever said anything. No 1 ever said mountain biking was dangerous. No 1 ever said running in the woods could be potentially harmful. And they'll go, oh, okay. Boom. Judgment for the for the defendant. And then guess what? You're the plaintiff. So guess who's paying? That would be you.
So the label viability waiver is that 1st line of protection. It doesn't provide a 100% protection, however, from litigation. And this gets where this is where waivers kinda gets kinda sticky, but it will aid in your defense against fraudulent and the frivolous lawsuits. And that's really what the waiver protects you from. Predicts you from the, you know, like, you didn't tell me there'd be trees in a forest. Stupid things like that. Okay. You know, not all racers are bright. Right?
But it's a protection nonetheless. Not all waivers are created equal, and you need to be sure what your state laws protects you by ensuring the proper statements are presented in your waiver because some states require you to have certain words in your waiver in order to be considered illegal. Now this goes back to the research again. Go and research.
Waver liability and waivers were not they cover raises or not. That law is all over the Internet. And sometimes you're in a state where they've made a judgment on that stuff. And you need to understand what that judgment was to protect yourself and protect your company. And protect your races. So what are you gonna ask yourself this? Well, let's go down the list of things we need to understand.
Or talking about how to mitigate our risk when it comes to waivers. So what are the state laws regarding liability waivers? How have there been any landmark legal cases involving liability waivers in your state? Here's a really simple 1. Do you even have a waiver form? Please say yes. If you say no, stop this podcast right now and go create 1. Go get a lawyer and form 1 up because
you should not be racing at all if you do not at least have a liability waiver form as part of your registration. Okay? The rest of us, is the waiver form specific to your company, or is it generic? Did you cut and paste it off the Internet? Or did you actually craft it? Did you actually use a lawyer to help craft it? Do you require racers to sign it as a condition of registration?
Answer better be yes. Here's another 1. Can you read the signature and the information on the waiver before you accept it? Wow. This is a toughie. Registration gets packed, waiver gets signed, racers have horrible handwriting. So you need to make sure that you can read that stuff. Because it's important to understand who signed what because you can't find the waiver they signed. Guess what? They didn't sign it. That's how the law looks at this. Did you retain
the waivers that you have had in past races for at least 2 years? Because suddenly, someone came out of nowhere and said, oh, yeah. Remember that race where I fell down. I got hurt. Yeah, I'm suing you. You're like, what are you talking about? That never happened. You need to have that stuff prepared. Do you use your waivers to populate your registration in your email databases? If so,
then that needs to be good data. Right? You need to know whether or not this person's race before. You need to have this kind of connection. Wafers can be that conduit to other things within your race, like your contact list, like your preregistration. Hey, we're having a race list. So it's important to get the information correct. And the the end result of step 5 should be the creation
or an update to your customized liability form. And it should also become part of your registration process and be treated with as a serious document. This means poor penmanship should be rejected or maybe you should create an application, a tablet, maybe, a computer based process where people go and actually give your information verbally, show IDs, I know at the inclategic events, you have to show your your USA cycling license in order to race.
Is that being shown? What's the number? Do you have the number? Did you write it down? So you should be able to collect all these all these information and be readable. Your waivers should always be legally reviewed by a real lawyer and not something that you pulled off the Internet. I'm not a lawyer. So this is no no ways represent legal advice. Always have a lawyer look this stuff over. But do not, please.
Do not. Cut and paste off the Internet and call that your waiver because that will not work. And finally, last but not least, the 6th step of our contingency planning process in our risk communication strategy is customer behavior.
And customer behavior of mitigation thinking. You might be thinking, customer behavior, what what does that have to do with risk management? Well, this is everything to do with dealing with does gruntled or disappointed customers. These are the customers that are not happy no matter what you do. No 1 like a customer who is not happy. But even if you were like a customer that is never happy, and you know who I'm talking about, everyone's had these people at their races.
These are the customers that need to walk up on the wrong side of the bed or just complain about everything from the food they're served to the speed of traffic. There is no pleasing these customers. And as a race promoter, you need to prepare be prepared to refund the money that these people paid and send them on their way.
You know, review review the treat people like, you know, pretty people like Disney. Dude, the Disney. Like, they're a guest. Right? But at some point, they're not a guest anymore. And I know there's the Disney process, but some customers are just there's just no pleasing them. Right? You need to send them on their way because they're gonna create a bad experience for other people. However, there's a difference between a customer that's behaving badly and a bad customer.
This is the customer who's either doing something that is annoying other customers or doing something that could potentially get others hurt. This customer needs to leave sooner rather than later, and your staff needs to know how and when to bounce a badly behaving customer or even a spectator Drugs and alcohol are guaranteed consuming factors in most of these incidents. I mean, go back and listen to our part about venue security.
And the mitigation strategies for that. Because you should be prepared for customers that are practicing bad judgment. And what are those? What kind of questions do you ask yourself during this kind of this kind of strategy thinking is, do you have a refund policy in place for unhappy customers? When and how will you escalate this problem? I mean, when do you call park officials? And when do you call the police? At what point is this guy's bad behavior or gal's bad behavior?
Really cross the line. The end result of step 6 should be a policy and a process for how you deal with bad customers. This is an important process. Because the way you classify and deal with quote bad customers will say a lot about you and your business. Unfortunately, most cases, bad customers equal bad experiences. And in a business, it's all about creating good experiences, How you handle and get rid of these problems means to be included in your planning and communicated to all involved.
Often, It's just better to do whatever you can for that 1 customer up to including a full refund, then stand your you know, better than stand your ground, and try to debate them because you won't win. If push comes to shove, you need to have a policy and a process in place To inform you, your staff, and your volunteers on what to do when a bad customer becomes a problem. Don't wait until it happens. Remember, these are all about when they happen,
because they're gonna happen, not if they're gonna happen. These are a lot of win. Remember, we're trying to mitigation. To go back to the earlier part, this episode, we talked about avoidance. Mitigation and acceptance. All this is mitigation strategies. Some of these are acceptance. Very few of these are of waitants. So take that into consideration. And never something completely different.
The golden race promotion is to deliver races. So why is it so hard to set the price that actually creates preregistration money. Setting your preregistration price is supposed to be easy. Right? But even if you've been to other races, you don't know how they're making any money. And for your look, another race promoter is going out of business. So when you decide to set your own prices, you're constantly reminded
that you need to have a certain number registrations just to breakeven or you're gonna be 1 of those race promoters that goes out of business. I mean, breakeven is not running a business. That's a hobby. You won't run a business. That means you need to have the right price to get the right number of people in your race, so you can actually make a profit and grow your business. Only what happens is you set your price, and then no 1 registers,
and then you hesitate to increase the price because no one's registered. Then you offer discount, no one's registering, then you begin to panic. I mean, how are you supposed to make any money? If you're constantly chasing customers away with your high price, low price, how do you know? I mean, you've seen other people make a living in the business? So why does it feel like you should be coaching football instead? I've been there too.
I had a hard time setting prices and races. I still have a hard time. Why? Well, because setting a price isn't just a number. There's actually research analysis. There's some math. There's a lot of different parts that go into setting a price. And you'd be surprised It has little to do with what your competitors are charging. It has a lot to do with what you were delivering, and you need to understand what that what you were delivering. And how your price will also keep your business open.
Because if you say your price too low, you're gonna run out of money, and that's not a business. If you set your true price too high, no one's gonna show up and that's not a business either. So how do you solve this? How do you get past this conundrum of setting a price something that sounds so simple, but seems to be very complex. Well, I wrote a email course. And it's called the 7 part guide to setting the right registration price. And it's simple.
It's 7 parts of a lesson that teaches you the things you need to go through to set your registration price, and there is some complexity to it. But if you work through this course, give about 2 courses, 2 lessons a week for about 4 weeks. You will start to understand what goes into actually setting a price, and here's the best part about it. Absolutely free. I'm just looking to make you a better race promoter.
And by signing up for this course, I send you all 7 parts over about a 4 week period and you learn how to tackle this problem and how do you want to do this. Well, you're gonna go to wreckingear.com/pricing.
Nice easy link. It's gonna take you over to the registration page, put your email in, And within about a, you know, just a couple days, maybe even today, if you're registered today, depends on depends on when I receive your email. And I'll send you lesson number 1. That's simple. In fact, I have lesson number 1 on record not a comma right now. So if you wanna go over there, just read it, discover what it is, and see what it's like.
You can go over there right now and find out. But if you go to wreckingear.com/pricing, I'll send you this course, a 7 week 7 week course, 7 part course, 4 weeks. Right? And you're gonna learn some things about pricing. Maybe you didn't understand, but we didn't know. And the best part about an email course and the best part about it being free is if you don't like it, unsubscribe. That's simple. There's a link right at the bottom. If you don't like it, boom, you're out. Piece of cake. Right?
But if you do like it, this course will definitely provide you a little bit of education that you didn't know you needed. And it will help you be confident in setting pricing. From now into the future, you can go back to this and read it over and over and over again, and it will give you the tools the pieces of information you need to collect in order to understand how to set a good price.
So, enroll in my 7 part guide setting the right registration price. Absolutely free. Wreckingear.com/pricing, and learn how to price your races confidently. You're free for just being a listener to the Merchant Center podcast. And now for some final thoughts. Putting your risk mitigation strategies together take some time. You have to go through all the contingency steps and make sure you answer all the questions to your satisfaction.
And make sure that you actually have processes in place and policies in place that answer those questions and deal with those contingencies. And those those 6 may not be all of them. You may have more. Some of them maybe you don't have, you know, security. Maybe you don't have some of the other issues, bad customers, things like that. I think those 6 definitely a good place to start. So this critical step that you at least do at least a minimum
those 6 things those 6 things were planning. And this only the only thing that's really left for you to do is write it all down and put those the results. You collect it from sex steps 1 through 6 into some sort of coherent document that you can share with your, you know, review yourself, share with your staff, teach others. No matter how you format it, what what you put it in, it could be a website, it could be a paper document. It should be short, direct and include only the information
that will be easy to find in a crisis because you need it in a crisis. That's the whole point. If you don't use it for the crisis, it defeats the whole point, unless you memorized it. Chances are plenty of other things to be worried about the time. So use it. Use it as a tool. Just like a hammer.
Use it as a tool. Once you have all the real answers for all of your contingency plan, processes, and of the questions, the actual risk control you will have over your race will be easy to communicate to park officials, insurance companies, and your staff and volunteers. That's a huge thing. Which you can walk into insurance company and say, here's all my mitigation strategies. Here's all my avoiding strategies for all the things that could go wrong.
I've already thought them all out. You might get a good deal. They might think that, hey, maybe you're not so risky. Put you in a different bracket. Park may give you a permit when they normally wouldn't give you permit. Because they think that you're well organized and that you have actually thought things through. So these are important things to consider.
A plan that nobody ever reads or implements does you know service, especially when there's a major injured injury or an incident occurs. Because the biggest part of all this is saving a life. Right? Is if you plan for how you will deal with this before these issues transpire, you will be prepared even if you never have to use it. Because the obvious thing is that it's not if it'll happen, it's a win, it will happen. So do your planning before you are in trouble. And now you know.
Alright. You're now a risk management expert. And as a risk management expert, you're going to start seeing a risk everywhere. I'm sorry. This is the way it is when you discover these things suddenly, they pop out of you right in the left and you don't know what's going on. But no worries. The skill is all in the strategy
that you implement and the contingency planning that you do. Only now, you know what all that is. So it's not so scary. But Mister Murphy and his wheel of Woe is not done with you yet. In the last cautionary tale that we're gonna talk about next week, I'll introduce you to some race promotion tricks that you can actually use on your next race and immediately put them into practice. And when you learn what they are, Mister Murphy will have a hard time messing with you on race day.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Merchants Group podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me on Twitter at Merchant of Dirt. If you wanna subscribe and make sure you never miss an episode, merchantsadirt.com
is how you do it. 1 click gets you every episode for free. If you have an Android, iPhone, whoever eats your podcast, 1 click gets it for you. Mean, we're on iTunes, we're on Stitcher, we're on Google Play, and I think if I'm not mistaken, We're soon to be on iHeart radio, which is really cool. So I'll see you in the next episode of the merchandiser podcast. Until then, go take what you've learned today, and build a better race.