Summary:
Following on from our official launch of our video campaign last month, we are delighted to share our next video in this series with you.
Video 2 focusses on the claim experience of our esteemed client, Elams Plastics Pty Ltd, who tragically suffered a major loss at the hands of a large factory fire. The story is told by the Managing Director and Owner of Elams Plastics, Allan Smale, as he recounts the events of the day and his experience post-loss.
We would like to give a huge shout out to Allan and the team at Elams Plastics for allowing us to share their story. Ironically, the day of shooting this video was the 5th anniversary of the fire so no doubt was a very emotional experience. Thank you immensely for taking the time to share this with us. We are so proud of your resilience and tenacity to get your business back up and running!
Transcription:
I was absolutely devastated.
Once you’ve lost your whole future and everything you’ve worked for over your life, it’s very hard to rebuild again.
So we’ve been runnIing for more than 35 years. Once you start with the raw material, you put it through a machine and you make your bottles, you’re very proud of what you do. Business has been pretty good until I got a phone call at 7:30 in the morning, as soon as I left home you could see the smoke, and the whole street was cut off. Then when I got here I could see our factory just burning to the ground. 620 square metres. Once it started that was the end of it. So everything in the factory was just destroyed.
I knew we were insured, but what happened in the next step I really didn’t know because you never thought your factory would burn to the ground. I looked at the phone I said, “I should ring Mike from Stellar, “he’ll tell us what’s happening with our insurance.” and within an hour he was here with all our policies. He gave me a big hard cuddle knowing it was very upsetting for us, and while we were there watching the fire he was just going through it with me saying, “you got this covered, this is covered, this is covered.” but it gave me a little peace of mind knowing that we will be alright and it’s going to be up to us to work out do we rebuild again.
Was an easy call for me, and it’s taking time but we’re getting there slowly. We would have probably had 30 meetings with insurance companies, and Mike came with us everyday. First off they wanted to hit us with under-insurance. But then Mike stood up, “we’re out of here” They turned around and begged us to sit back down and negotiate again, so we did. He was fair dinkum and he wanted to get the best deal for me. So I was very proud of Mike when he did that, I didn’t know what to do. He did an absolutely excellent job.
You have enough on your mind, just to run a business, so every year, Mike comes in, and we have a meeting, and we go over the figures for the year so we know what the business interruption should be covered for. As soon as we buy anything, more moulds that we make as well, we ring Mike and make sure he puts it on our insurance policy. Without Mike ticking all of the extra boxes and making us see that we should do these things, we wouldn’t of got anywhere near what we did get back from insurance companies. Probably wouldn’t be here today ’cause you couldn’t afford to start the business back up.
Stellar has always been there for us, and they will still be there for us.
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