The Chairman's Corner

By Thomas McCarthy

September 2019

As I am drinking my coffee this morning, I look at the mug and it has words of inspiration. Be Present - To be focused on the moment at hand.

With the craziness of summer, it’s easy to get pulled in 100 different directions, but sometimes you just have to stop for a moment and focus on exactly what you are doing. I think before next summer I am going to print this out and put it up on my wall to remind myself every day to be present in what I do.

My next thought is how is it already the end of summer? Seriously, August came and went in a flash. But before it ended, the CMSA Executive Committee got together in San Diego to discuss the year ahead and the current issues our association is facing. We talked about Assembly Bill 5, which continues to evolve almost daily. Interestingly, we were up in Sacramento last month talking to staffers; and on the news, you see the different groups at the capital lobbying this specific bill. It’s going to be watched very closely.

Once finished with all our meetings, we were fortunate to spend some time enjoying some of the things that make San Diego special. I would like to thank our event partners: Paul Hanson Partners Specialty Insurance, Victory Packaging, Dewitt Move Worldwide, Champion Risk & Insurance Services and Vanliner Insurance Company. I would also like to thank the Board Members and Partners who made the trip to San Diego for this meeting.

Looking ahead to our immediate future, September promises to be just as tumultuous as August was for me. I get to start with my chapter visits seeing Twin Counties, San Diego and Orange County to start. I look forward to coming out to all your chapters. Lucky for me though, when I go to my chapter in San Diego, Tim McCarthy will be out of town so he won’t be able to interrupt my presentation to ask me if I want pepper on my salad like he did to past Chairman Pat Longo.

That reminds me, I need to get started on my presentation. After that, it’s off to Scott Air Force Base for the Personal Property Forum or PPF. We will get to discuss the past peak season and hopefully get a chance to discuss outsourcing. At our last meeting, the military was almost flippant when we tried asking questions about this topic that has all of us wondering what our future holds. If you do military, this will change how you get awarded work and how you get paid. Since this will be effectively a monopoly now, who knows if it will even be cost effective to handle military business.

I foresee a model similar to the ”rate reasonableness” environment we are in now. If you are okay with the rates, you participate; if you don’t, well then you don’t.

To bring us home, I hope you had a great summer and are doing well getting the kiddos ready and off to school, so you finally have some time to yourself and time to plan how to finish the year out strong. A wise man once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could just miss it.”–Ferris Bueller.

September 2019 - CMSA Communicator