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Matt Hazelton Tells His Story
Hi Everyone! After completing a talk for Training First Safety Ltd they have asked me to get involved in their TREND community and share my story….
For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Matt Hazelton. I was the Director of a small groundworks company that had a fatal incident resulting in the death of 4 of our workforce. This included both of my brothers and 2 of my very good friends.
I think it goes without saying the incident caused a massive amount of heartache, sadness and was an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. The experience, however, is something I now try to share to help people, hopefully supporting them to avoid going through the same thing. From a personal perspective, it is impossible to get everything down in one article. It would be really difficult to give even a small insight into the pain that you need to live through following a fatal incident. Having said that, from a business perspective it was ridiculously steep learning curve from start to finish.
With my brother – Dan – and good friend – Goody – we started our business from scratch. We were just 3 lads trying to make our young families lives better and give them the things we didn’t have growing up. The time following the incident saw me dealing, not only, with being told the insurance company won’t cover me but also being arrested as both Hazegood Construction and Matthew Hazelton – thankfully by this point I had great legal representation. This is something I feel is missed by a lot of Directors – they don’t realise that even though you are a Limited Company they are still 2 legal entities: you and the business. There are so many young people out there, trying to start a business like I did and having the fancy title of “Director” does not always mean they are aware of the intricacies of insurance companies, and lawyers – I wasn’t!
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