Toolbox June 2020

TOOLBOX

THE #1 COMMUNITY OF SUCCESSFUL CONTRACTORS

CCN

JUNE 2020 FROM THE PRESIDENT

IN THE TOOLBOX

4 Selling in the New Reality – an Interview with David McLean, Brothers Services

6 How to

Sell Virtually

How CCN is Helping During This Time SCOTT SIEGAL

Scott Siegal, President CCN

A

s the Coronavirus stretches from an acute crisis to our long-term reality, CCN is here to set you up for success. This is why we have a call every Tuesday addressing the most pressing topics of the week. Week after week, we’ve covered everything from the getting a paycheck protection loan, to meeting the terms for loan forgiveness, leadership to sales. Adapting to this virus means grappling with disruptions to our industry that are probably here to stay.

Tuesday Webinars

8 Increase Your Sales with

Same as Cash Financing.

9 Tour the Virtual Training Center

10 COVID-19

Is Your Company Ready to Return to Work?

Government policies, safer-at-home instructions, essential worker classification, and more continue to change week to week and unfortunately will continue to change as we confront the virus and the economic fallout from it. CCN is doing the legwork for you and pushing out the most current information every Tuesday.

We’re not the only ones, of course, but what makes this network is so valuable and why we seem to be ahead of the curve, is that we own contracting businesses ourselves. We’re not at a think tank speculating about what might work.

John and I are with you in the trenches, figuring out solutions, and pushing them out to you in real-time.

We’re fighting the fight with you every day.

Managing the crisis Even as we look to the future and how to adapt our businesses, the initial crisis is not over. I did a poll of CCN members after the first round of grants and am proud to say that 75% of our members got their loans. That is a stark difference from the horror stories you hear in the media about small businesses not getting funded. And that’s because we are all on it – about what to do, who to contact, and how to do it.

But the challenge now is that there is different guidance coming out every other day for fulfilling the terms of the loan. I’ve heard from contractors that they’re thinking of

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CO N T R AC T O R S . N E T

FROM THE PRESIDENT

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TOOLBOX THE #1 COMMUNIT Y OF SUCCESSFUL CONTRACTORS

MISSION STATEMENT To enhance the professionalism, performance and perception of the construction industry.

We promote ethics, education, leadership and innovation, so that the construction industry and the community achieve mutual benefit.

Corporate Headquarters 6476 Sligo Mill Road Takoma Park, MD 20912 301.891.0999 800.396.1510 866.250.3270 fax www.contractors.net STAFF Scott Siegal, President scott@contractors.net John Martindale, Principal johnm@contractors.net Catherine Honigsberg, GM catherine@contractors.net Sindy Wohl, Director of VIP sindy@contractors.net Denise Metheny, Accounting denise@contractors.net Troy Timmer, CCN Business Consultant troy@contractors.net Dave Harrison, CCN Business Consultant dharrison@contractors.net Daniel Murgo, Events Manager danny@contractors.net Brian Wohl, Membership Consultant brian@contractors.net Carla Sarabia, Help Desk Administrator carla@contractors.net Toolbox is a publication of the Certified Contractors Network.

Toolbox is a member benefit.

Non-members may subscribe for $75 annually. design: Stacy Claywell thatdesigngirl@icloud.com editor: Jessica Vaughan jessica@contractors.net

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lowering their pricing because they feel if they have a loan and it will be forgiven, it’s free money. Now the government is saying that if you didn’t really need this money and you can’t prove that you needed this money, you may have to pay it back, even if you spent it on payroll and rent. On top of that, you could face criminal liability. There are a lot of pitfalls that people have to watch out for. We have guidance for you about what you need to do to stay protected.

Richard Kaller founded CCN 40 years ago, not as a consulting company for him to talk about his hard-won success, but as a network of contractors.

The Network Richard Kaller founded CCN 40 years ago, not as a consulting company for him to talk about his hard-won success, but as a network of contractors. There are two ways to improve – guess which path forward to take, make a ton of mistakes, guess the next step, and repeat a lot. Or you can jumpstart your journey by years by learning from other people’s mistakes and successes so you can stop guessing about what to do next but going straight to what works now. The Masterminds have always been a key part of CCN conferences where we sit down by industry and by job and put problems and questions to the wisdom of the group.

Now in this time where innovation is so important to respond to rapidly changing conditions, the network is more important than ever.

How Sales has changed Will people purchase home services online? Before this year, the common feeling in this business, and I certainly shared it, is that they may buy smaller jobs maybe, but definitely not the big projects. If someone is going to drop $20,000 or $40,000 on a remodel, you need to go out and look them in the eye. That connection is crucial. But like with so many other online trends, we’ve blown past the tipping point that might have taken another decade to reach without this black swan event. This has changed the game forever.

When none of us can go out and do an in-person sales call and homeowners don’t want us to come out either, suddenly buying a huge remodel over the internet becomes conceivable and even necessary. Many people are easily buying things online that they never purchased before. Even when this crisis ends and a vaccine is found and social

member news When none of us can go out and do an in-person sales call and homeowners don’t want us to come out either, suddenly buying a huge remodel over the internet becomes conceivable and even necessary.

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distancing is over, I don’t think there is any going back. What is the new normal going to look like? The in-home sales presentation may be history.

Between Brothers Services and Maggio Roofing, in a month and a half, we’ve done over $5 million in sales virtually. We know it works even in this economy.

We haven’t seen a real business slowdown. Of course, there are soft markets, especially with financing getting harder to obtain, but for the most part contracting is considered essential for a reason – if you know how to sell online.

We’re pushing that information out on the Tuesday calls as well as this issue, but we’re also turning this into a model and over the next couple of months, we will perfect it and push formal training out.

How Admin has changed It’s not just sales that are affected. Will we ever go back to working in an office? Maybe, but maybe we won’t have to. Huge companies have already called it–Twitter recently announced that all employees can work from home forever. Several New York skyscrapers will sit empty next year as major investment banks shrink their footprint and stay online. The same is true for many small businesses. Maybe you don’t need that overhead anymore. Instead of a big office, maybe you rent a warehouse for your crews further out of town where only essential personnel work.

How will this work? Where will you interview new hires? What must you provide your people to work at home and what do they need to work effectively?

What internet bandwidth will be required? What conferencing software do you use, and how do you keep your business secure? Making the transition from a more traditional in-person business to a thriving modern internet business is essential.

RGS Exteriors finished their biggest month in company history in sales in April, closing almost $600,000.00, including $360,000 in new construction sales. Owner Tim Brown attributes this to what they have learned in CCN. They were able to adapt quickly and adjust – in particular, the sales process was key.

It allowed our sales people to sell even when even in less than ideal circumstances.

How Production has changed.

One part of your business will never be able to work from home, or at least, from their own homes. Production crews will always need to deploy. If you’re in windows or remodeling, you have to be inside other people’s homes. The new required supplies and equipment will add some cost and potentially time to the jobs. Even for exterior crews, thinking about social distancing and interacting with the customer changes the game.

How do you source those supplies? Maybe going forward, you need stockpiles of them to avoid paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep people protected.

What expectations do you set with your crews for the new PPE? Are they required to wear a mask? What kind of mask? Is a bandana okay? Can it have a logo on it?

Even since the printing of this issue, things have changed. There are a lot of unknowns out there, and we’re going to be tackling them every week.

So, make sure to be on the call every Tuesday.

Thanks, Scott

Toolbox Wants To Hear From You Have something different, unique or particularly successful that you’re doing with your marketing? Is there a method or process that you or your staff has developed that solved a problem? Is there a sales or production superstar on your staff? Toolbox aims to bring news, views and above all the best practices of CCN members and member companies to the attention of the overall membership of CCN. If you have a story to tell, we are eager to convey that news to all CCN members!

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FEATURE

Selling in the New Reality

an Interview with David McLean, Executive Vice President, Brothers Service Company Part 1 Tell me a little bit about you and your company?

WE STARTED 38 YEARS AGO AS A NEW CONSTRUCTION ROOFER – INSTALLING ROOFS ON NEW HOMES. NOW 38 YEARS LATER, WE HAVE OVER 150 EMPLOYEES DESPITE THE CORONAVIRUS.

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I’ve been with Brothers Services for almost fourteen years now. I spent the first ten years of my professional life in the Air Force, and the last five years as a recruiter.

Recruiting is a fancy word for sales. I really enjoyed recruiting, but when I decided to get out of the Air Force, I needed a job and started at Brothers as a roofing repair technician. I had no idea that you could get into sales; I had no idea what large scale home improvement contractors did.

I’m from the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire, where we don’t have specialty contractors. We have the guy down the street who does everything. When I interviewed at Brothers and heard about their sales department, that piqued my interest as soon as I started here. Sales was one of those things that chose me; I didn’t choose it. I sold as a salesperson for a couple years, then ran the service department for a couple of years, then ran our sales team, and now I do whatever it takes. At the end of the day, it worked out really well.

Brothers is a full-service remodeling contractor. We started 38 years ago as a new construction roofer – installing roofs on new homes. Now 38 years later, we have over 150 employees despite the Coronavirus. Roofing is still our mainstay; about 30% of our total volume is still roofing. But the rest of it is made up of siding, doors, windows, gutters, insulation, repair work, and we made a headfirst move into the interior remodeling world in 2011. Nearly half of our overall business is kitchen and bath remodeling.

How has this crisis been for you and your team?

It sucks, and you can quote me! It’s just presented yet another challenge. Nothing that we do is easy even in the best of times. Trying to convey value to a customer wasn’t the easiest thing to do before a pandemic, and it’s certainly not the easiest thing to do in the middle of a pandemic. The nice thing about being a diversified company is that the majority of our business is still things people can’t do without. You can’t do without a roof over your head and windows and doors that work. We’re still very fortunate in that regard.

There’s a lot of uncertainty out there. We’ve had to adapt our payment offerings to overcome that at least some of that uncertainty. We’ve used the CCN VIP financing programs for years, but we’ve jumped into more of those plans. We’ve always done 12 months Same as Cash or a reduced interest rate loan. Now we offer a 24 month Same as Cash plan to customers need that and make them more comfortable with making a decision now. If cash is king, Same as Cash is queen.

One of the things we’ve focused on for years and really doubled down on over the last couple months is a quote from Jeff Bezos about Amazon – that his number one goal is to make it easy to do business with him. Our challenge always, but even more so in a contactless or virtual world, is to continue to make it easy to do business with us.

When did you realize you needed to transition to virtual selling?

In that first week of March we were looking at ourselves saying – this is getting weird.

On the morning of March 9th, I got on a plane to fly to Florida, and I was watching people with disinfectants wiping down their seats. I’d never been on a plane that clean!

The plane was at 70% capacity. I’ve flown that route dozens of times, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been on a non-fully booked flight since 9/11. Coming home three days later, the plane was 50% full, and my airport was a ghost town. I realized this is changing everything really quickly.

In that second week in March, we immediately recognized that we needed to react to it quickly. We knew coming out of the Great Recession in 2008, that the reason we were able to come out of that was that we acknowledged it as soon as it happened and reacted quickly. Those who didn’t react quickly or acknowledge it quickly didn’t survive.

You can’t bury your head in the sand when things like this happen.

How did you react so quickly?

What we started doing early on, right around March 11, our executive team started a daily Zoom call, and we are still having them every day, where we address any legislation changes that have happened since the last time we talked since those change daily, any sales issues that we need to think about as a group, and any other communication that might need to happen in the company. It was during those meetings that the team would talk through our sales process and to get it online and execute it every day.

To set up calls, we have a call center and adjusted the scripts our call center says that gives prospects the option for a virtual or contactless appointment. Fortunately, with the weather nicer, not everything has to be virtual, but it does have to be contactless.

To make it easy to do business with us, we’re letting customers choose what avenue they want to take. We have the option for virtual or contactless, whichever their most comfortable with. And then we had to set up the technology, and train for both of those, and provide assets for both of those, plus the proper PPE for our team.

We had to do the same on our production side. What jobs can we do? What jobs can’t we do safely? What jobs do we need enhanced PPE for? And this changes every day, especially as the pandemic continues to evolve. The guidance changes and at least weekly, we are adjusting something.

TRYING TO CONVEY VALUE TO A CUSTOMER WASN’T THE EASIEST THING TO DO BEFORE A PANDEMIC, AND IT’S CERTAINLY NOT THE EASIEST THING TO DO IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC.

What were those virtual sessions like?

They were not great. There’s a novelty to seeing yourself on a screen. Remember the first time you Facetimed somebody – you giggle the whole time. It’s the same as when you jump on Zoom. It’s different, so there is a break-in period. I tried to have a Zoom sales meeting for a half-hour every day for two weeks, just to get the team used to the platform and used to the medium. The more you do something, the more normal it becomes. You’ve got to give your people the tools and show them how to use them,

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How to Sell Virtually SCOTT SIEGAL

S

elling home improvement projects over the web went from a fringe pipe-dream to mainstream overnight and now there is no going back. We will be releasing training in the coming months on virtual selling best practices, but we simply can’t wait until it’s perfect to get these tools into your hands. Here is how to successfully start selling virtually today.

Choose a technology platform and get trained on it

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SALES HAVE NOT CHANGED: FIND A PERSON’S PAIN AND CONVINCE THEM YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIX IT, DO WHAT YOU PROMISED, AND GET PAID. 6

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A salesperson fumbling with technology can botch the sale when a customer concludes that your incompetence at technology means you may also be incompetent at contracting.

There are a number of conferencing apps on the market but the most versatile one we’ve found is Zoom Video Conferencing. You’ll need to set up a free account and then get your whole team trained on how to navigate it. Have salespeople run a few practice sales calls with one another. Another great tool is OneClick Contractor which puts all of your proposals and estimates online. We are currently working on enterprise pricing for OneClick Contractor for all of CCN.

Signal Competence and Professionalism Signal your competence by being a few minutes early to the Zoom call, dressing professionally, and being mindful of the wall behind you. Just as a clean truck signals a professional operation, a clean wall in the background signals the same. If you use Zoom backgrounds, be sure to choose a professional setting as well.

We’ve all seen the viral Zoom moments where the dog or baby wanders into the pictures or heard a toilet flushing offscreen. Though sometimes it’s impossible to avoid, do try to prevent these moments.

When salespeople share their proposal or the Toolbox brochure, they will be sharing their screen. Remind them that whatever is open in the browser will also be visible.

Having everything loaded and ready to click onscreen can help make this process go smoothly.

DURING THE ZOOM CALL, SET UP A TIME TO INSPECT THE EXTERIOR OF THE HOME AND LET THE CUSTOMER KNOW YOU’LL BE GETTING UP ON THE ROOF

To prevent lag, use the conferencing software only to when sharing the documents and video. Then, call the customer directly which frees up a lot of bandwidth.

Set up a Virtual Appointment from the Start Have the admin team request the customer’s email address and explain that due to social distancing and for their safety, they have the option of a virtual meeting or a socially-distanced meeting. If they prefer a virtual meeting, have the team set up an appointment and send the Zoom link right away.

Measure the Job The CCN Measure Call does not require you to be onsite. As always, you should go through all questions and walk away with your prospects’ pain, sense of urgency, purchasing ability, likely objectives, and a Follow-up Appointment booked with the complete buying party. We have virtual copies of Toolbox and the How to Make a Successful Construction Investment brochure on the Knowledge Center that you can share in Zoom as well.

Inspect the Exterior of the Home During the Zoom call, set up a time to inspect the exterior of the home and let the customer know you’ll be getting up on the roof (or on a ladder to look at windows and/or anything else you must do). Even though you’re not meeting with them, you still need to show up when you say you will. Ask them to stay inside because of social distancing. Coming with shoe covers, masks, and gloves not only protects your people, but is another signal of competence.

Send an Email to the Customer.

Instead of just leaving the brochures behind, email the customer links to them. Also confirm the date and time of the Follow-up Appointment with the Zoom link to that call.

Create an Effective Sales Proposal Your proposal may be more important now than ever because, while we’ve seen this process work again and again, it relies more on systems and other signals of competence than a salesperson’s charisma and ability to ad lib in the moment. The proposal must accurately describe the problem, identify the people who can solve the problem, and the price.

You can add a section about Covid-19 to your proposal detailing how you plan to keep the homeowners and your crews safe and socially distanced during the job.

Close the Job One challenge to this is getting people to turn on their video camera so you can see their faces. If they refuse to appear on camera, there’s not a lot you can do, but do try to encourage them since it can give you so much more information than hearing their voices. Keep them engaged by stopping your presentation much more frequently – every minute or two – to ask questions or ask for their thoughts so you can be sure they’re still listening and haven’t walked away from the computer.

A virtual presentation will be shorter as a two-hour Zoom call is likely to exhaust both the salesperson and the prospect.

Shortening the pitch and stopping frequently for questions will keep it to under an hour. Aim for forty to fifty minutes.

The fundamentals of sales have not changed: find a person’s pain and convince them you’re the only one who can fix it, do what you promised, and get paid. On the other hand, sales is constantly changing. And because this pandemic is a bigger, faster change than usual, we are adapting and changing along with it.

Please get in touch with any questions you have.

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Increase Your Sales with Same as Cash Financing.

JESSICA VAUGHAN

S

ame as Cash financing is more popular than ever, even for people who could pay cash today. With all of the economic uncertainty, the ability to defer payments or spread out payments without going through their bank, dipping into their equity, putting money down, paying credit card interest, or filling out any paperwork becomes very attractive. CCN offers financing with the CCN VIP program with EnerBankUSA. Here are some tips we’ve found to make Same as Cash a success:

Who would be interested?

Most people who take a Same as Cash loan have access to cash and credit. The ideal Same as Cash customer is one who would have put this purchase on a credit card because the main problem is their cash on hand. They can use this as a bridge loan like a card without the interest.

And if they are sounding hesitant about doing the project, this way they can have their cake and eat it too. They can do the job today and put off paying for it until next year. It’s a way to take advantage of today’s pricing for materials and labor. Plus fixing the damage now minimizes the risk of further damage and a potentially more expensive job. If they wait another six months, whatever problem they called you about will only get worse.

Market with Same as Cash This shouldn’t just be something you bring up at the end of a call when they say they aren’t buying because they can’t come up with the cash. This could be one of the reasons they call you in the first place! Include it on your website, direct mailers, and emails as another way to differentiate from your competition.

Especially right now, going with the contractor who can offer no-interest financing instead of the contractor who doesn’t mention payment options of any kind is an easy decision.

Add it to your proposal This should be a standard part of any proposal. Right after standard industry terms of 33% at acceptance, 33% at half completion, etc, you should put “VIP Same as Cash Balance Due in 3, 6, 9, or 18 months, subject to approval,” so you don’t even have to spend time talking about it, but people can just check a box.

Offer it to every customer The key is to offer it to every customer just like you would tell them you take credit cards. Do not try to qualify them or guess 8

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if they’d be interested. It’s one of several payment options they have. Have salespeople ask them at the end of the presentation, “Which way would you like to handle this?”

Prospects will probably hesitate here and offer an objection, which is what the question is designed to unearth. But because asking them how they want to handle the purchase isn’t a yes or no question, their brain is thinking about the ways they can make this happen, not whether they want it to happen at all.

Use it to overcome objections It makes it easier to buy at the Follow-up Appointment because it fixes the cash flow question. A prospect buys when their pain and urgency are high enough and their confidence in the solution and who’s delivering it matches that. And they believe the price and terms are fair. A discussion about pulling $30,000 out of their savings or sticking it on a card with 20% interest is very different than a discussion about paying $30,000 over the next year and a half without any interest.

Upsell Speaking of that $30,000 job, every proposal should have good, better, and best options based on what the salesperson uncovered in the Measure Call about their pain, needs, and wants. You can tell pretty easily in a Follow-up Appointment which option they want to choose. Sometimes that is the good option where you fix their problem and they’re happy, but more often than not, you’ll see them eyeing the better and best options. They can’t quite afford it today, but if they had a year to pay without worrying about interest, they may jump at the chance.

You can weave Same as Cash into every step of your sales funnel and presentation as a way to decrease objections and increase leads, sales, and the average size of your jobs. Especially in this volatile time, having access to financing can be a home-saving service for your customers.

Tour the Virtual Training Center Have you visited the Training Center?

CCN has partnered with Lightspeed, the number one training platform in the world, to bring you all of our classic training, webinars, and presentations. Reach the training center for the member’s section of www.contractors.net. Reach out if you need help connecting.

Here are some of the features you can use:

Pick up where you left off because every training tracks your progress and lets you know.

From the home page, you can access all training, go to the report card to continue anything in progress, see and print how much you’ve done on the usage report or certifications, or return to your notes.

Favorite any training so you can find it from the main page at any time.

The training center is organized by topic. Front and center are the CCN Coronavirus Webinar Series where you can find a recording of the Tuesday calls the same day we record them.

The Notes option is available in every training and is saved privately

Watch in Full Screen, In-Browser or Picture-in-Picture which will float a small screen in front of anything else going on your screen.

Customize your profile, assign training, and connect.

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ON HR

COVID-19 Is Your Company Ready to Return to Work?

BY ANITA DOMBROWSKI, MBA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, PRESIDENT & SR. HR CONSULTANT, FOURTH DIMENSION ENTERPRISES LLC.

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ur lives have certainly changed! We have moved from going to the gym, then the office, out to dinner and retail shopping to being at home, exercising with a mobile app, telecommuting, cooking at home, and online shopping with pick up at the store. It’s only been about sixty days and working in a brick and mortar office is a fading memory. Unfortunately, many employees no longer have jobs due to company closures. Some employees are fortunate to be working remotely from home.

IT Departments were called into action to provide remote access to company files and phone resources so we can keep essential or life-sustaining businesses running while so many other businesses closed their doors. But there is hope!

The daily newsfeeds tell us that we are going to be opening our economy and re-opening the doors to those brick and mortar offices just as we were getting comfortable working in our jammies and slippers! While I hear that telecommuting will be the new normal, I feel many smaller companies don’t feel ready just yet to commit to the concept.

However, if you are thinking about it, here are some things to consider as you develop your plan: What are you going to do to make sure employees are healthy when they are working in your workplace? n If you are thinking about taking temperatures, do you have a procedure? n Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? nM asks – Most state guidelines are going to tell you if you need to wear them but as the employer, are you going to provide them or ask employees to provide their own? nD o you have enough hand sanitizer or bleach wipes to disinfect counters? nW hat other PPE does your particular organization need? Do you have enough resources? nS anitizing and disinfecting – do you have a janitorial service that you can have come in more than your regularly scheduled once per week? What about a daily cleaning schedule of workspace cleaning? nS ocial distancing – what does that look like in your company? How will you keep employees 6 feet apart at the time clock? In the lunch room? On scaffolding or in small rooms if you are in construction? nO pening the door to employees – will you bring in everyone all on the same day or stagger opening days for partial workforce entry? Perhaps Monday, Wednesday, Friday for half of the staff and Tuesday and Thursdays for the other half?

Human Resources will be calling back employees, but what if they don’t want to come back? Can you force employees to return to work?

The fear of catching the coronavirus isn’t enough reason to refuse to work. If a furloughed or laid off employee receiving unemployment benefits refuses to return to work, they are resigning their position. Employees who resign are not eligible for unemployment benefits and they may also be required to repay benefits paid in excess of eligibility.

For essential workers like pharmacists, healthcare workers, etc., refusal to come to work means termination.

If an employee feels the workplace presents a dangerous situation, they could contact the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA rules permit employees to refuse to work in a situation of immediate and imminent danger. While contacting OSHA is an option, it is not very practical to wait weeks for an inspector to visit the workplace to determine if the workplace is unsafe especially if the employer has made efforts to protect employees by disinfecting their facilities, providing masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE) necessary for their workplace.

While employers do have the upper hand in this situation, termination is not conducive to a productive and engaged workforce. The better scenario would be for the employer to listen to individual employee concerns. See what alternate work arrangements might be possible.

It is important to remember that once you make an accommodation of some sort, you set a precedent for other

employees in similar situations so be mindful about how generous your accommodation arrangements should be and if you would be able to sustain them long term or for multiple employees. Employers should listen to employee concerns and explore alternative working arrangements with them.

Employers could encourage or continue flexible or remote work options, particularly for exempt employees. Perhaps a schedule of alternate days rather than five days per week schedule.

Where remote work is not an option, employees may be given the option to use their PTO or take an unpaid non-medical leave from the workplace.

If employees refuse to come to work as a group be especially careful if a representative is designated to speak with Human Resources on their behalf. Discuss the situation immediately with legal counsel. These concerted efforts could be protected under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

NEW COBRA GUIDELINES As I write this article, the Departments of Labor and Treasury and the IRS just introduced new guidelines for COBRA special enrollments and timeframes related to COVID-19 situations. In a nutshell, it allows for a longer enrollment period for COBRA that goes until 60 days after the announced end of the national COVID-19 emergency outbreak and, for the first time, retroactive enrollments. Also included in this legislation are special enrollment periods under HIPAA and impacts to FSA carryover timelines. Please be aware of these new regs as you administer COBRA for your company. Don’t hesitate to contact me for more information.

Please stay safe – wash hands, wear your mask, self-distance, and stay optimistic. Together we will get through this!

This article should not be considered legal advice. Should you have any questions about this article or any of the HR articles presented in this newsletter, please do not hesitate to contact me at AnitadombrowskiHR@gmail.com.

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