Franchise Informs Consumers, Raises Payouts and Primes Public Adjusters for Success
Property owners pay insurance premiums year after year as faithfully as the sun rises and sets. Yet when they file claims, insurance companies frequently offer lousy compensation. Tiger Adjusters wants consumers to know these aren’t take-it-or-leave-it deals. Its public adjusters, or PAs, prepare compelling damage reports and negotiate higher settlements from insurers. “We’re out to disrupt the insurance claims industry, and statistics prove it is absolutely doable,” says Ted Patestos, founder and CEO of Tiger Adjusters.
“Insurance carrier tactics have significantly driven demand for our service. Delays, underpayments and erroneous denials have made it to the mainstream. Dr. Phil and 60 Minutes have exposed the abuses. Part of our mission is to scale the public adjuster industry and increase consumer awareness and compensation.”
By the Numbers: PAs and Claims
The deck is stacked against residential and commercial policyholders unless they know their rights and resources, Patestos says. “There are roughly 8,000 public adjusters nationwide, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are approximately 350,000 claims adjusters overall. That means less than 2.3% of all U.S. adjusters represent policyholders.”
Extrapolating from Insurance Information Institute and Sunrise Capital Group data, he estimates that more than 14 million residential and commercial property owners filed claims in 2022 (the last year for which institute data is available). “Public adjusters helped policyholders with only about 1% of those claims,” Patestos says, which would be about 140,000 claims. “Given the usual low settlement offers by insurers, the remaining 99% represent a huge market for disruption and scaling. And that was 2022, which was an average or slightly-below-average year for homeowner claims. I think claims for 2024 will be much higher because of the severe hurricanes and floods we had last year.”
Building Awareness
But first things first. “Most people don’t even know what a public adjuster is,” Patestos concedes. “The Tiger Adjusters franchise is building a national footprint with a proactive focus on consumer education and brand identity. The role of a Tiger PA is not to play nice with your insurance carrier; it’s to make a multibillion-dollar organization pay you what you’re owed under your policy.”
To that end, Tiger Adjusters vets personnel and acts with integrity. “When clients sign a contract with us, we have a fiduciary responsibility to put their interests first. We earn our stripes fighting for customers. We didn’t name our company Lamb Adjusters,” he quips. Tiger is an acronym for its core values:
- T – trustworthy; emphasizing honesty and reliability in all dealings.
- I – innovative; encouraging creative thinking and adopting new technology.
- G – guidance; offering expert advice and direction to clients and franchisees.
- E – empathetic; treating clients with compassion.
- R – resilient; adapting and thriving amid changing market and environmental conditions.
Disrupting the ‘Old Guard’
“Our values clash with what I call the ‘old guard,’ which traditionally licenses PAs after apprenticeships. Then they’re left flailing on their own. They might be promised a fee or maybe given a draw but would often be bamboozled out of their commissions when their employer played fast and loose with numbers. Those circumstances deterred people from entering what is essentially a trade.” It also created another opportunity for disruption by the Tiger Adjusters franchise, which teaches the trade and gives PAs a clear, recession-resistant path to financial success.
“The old guard also has failed to improve claims efficiency by adopting improved technologies,” Patestos adds. Tiger Adjusters’ PAs collect evidence using old-school (cameras, moisture meters) and high-tech (aerial drones, 3D MatterPort scanners, laser measures) tools. “It’s not easy to pivot an entire model or the foundation of your systems if you were an already active firm. We built ours with intentionality and didn’t use tools readily available on the market, at least not in their current form.”
How Tiger Adjusters Is Scaling
So who are Tiger’s competitors? “Private equity has funded the four national-level PA companies, and they seldom touch claims under $500,000. Those that do take on smaller claims generally farm them out. Everyone else is regional or a one-person or small-partnership shop. Tiger aims to change all of that” with a national network of PAs handling claims of various sizes.
“We’re here to scale this business and hopefully contribute to a national conversation about what consumers should expect when they pay a company $500 per month or more for insurance premiums only to get ripped off. There’s a false narrative that insurance carriers are going bankrupt. To the contrary, they’re seeing record profits,” says Patestos, citing reports from The Wall Street Journal, Carrier Management, the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association and Consumer Watchdog.
“The way Tiger Adjusters built the business and scaled systems allows us to disrupt the insurance claims industry. Copycat companies don’t worry us. With our strategic foresight, we developed highly efficient, accurate tools and gobbled up industry-specific domain names. We’ll make it extremely expensive to compete. “We’re innovating every day and night, seven days a week, 365 days a year. My wife and I don’t have children so there are no Little League games, no soccer tournaments. There is only scaling, iterating, building strategic relationships and serving franchisees. The Tiger Adjusters franchise takes a macro view, working to build a coherent response to the injustices the insurance carriers have exerted on consumers and empowering consumers at scale.”
For more information about the Tiger Adjusters franchise, click here.
