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Law and Insurance
7 min

The Entrepreneur’s Safety Net: Navigating Law and Insurance

Discover how Mark and Christian Frederiksen protect businesses through proactive law and insurance in this episode of From Boots to Boardroom.
Guest
Mark and Christian Frederiksen
Published on
April 21, 2026

Have you ever considered that your business is essentially a Viking ship navigating unpredictable seas, where a single unvetted contract or an overlooked policy could be the leak that sinks you? In this episode of From Boots to Boardroom, host Hari Vasudevan sits down with cousins Mark and Christian Frederiksen to pull back the curtain on the "unsexy" but vital industries of insurance and business law. This isn't just a talk about premiums and litigation; it's a deep dive into how proactive risk management creates the freedom for entrepreneurs to scale without fear.

Protecting the Legacy: Meet Mark and Christian Frederiksen

Mark Frederiksen is the President of Frederiksen & Frederiksen, a fourth-generation independent insurance agency in Dallas that has been a cornerstone of Texas business protection since 1949. Carrying forward a 75-year family legacy, Mark specializes in commercial coverage, helping business owners understand that insurance isn't just an expense—it’s a strategic asset.

Christian Frederiksen brings over 30 years of legal expertise to the table, focusing specifically on construction and business litigation. While Mark works to prevent the fire, Christian is the one who steps in when the smoke starts to rise. Both are proud Texas Longhorns who share a unique perspective on how the worlds of "navigating" risk and "advocating" for rights intersect to protect the American entrepreneur.

The "Navigate and Advocate" Framework

Mark Frederiksen breaks down the complex world of insurance into two essential roles: being a navigator and an advocate. For most business owners, insurance feels like a "black box" of technical jargon and fluctuating rates. Mark’s approach simplifies this by focusing on the client’s long-term journey.

  • Navigating the Market: As an independent agent, Mark isn't beholden to a single carrier. If a specific provider pulls out of a market (as many have recently done in Texas due to hail and weather risks), he navigates his clients toward more stable options.
  • Advocating for the Client: Mark describes himself as a "salesperson" for his clients. He takes their story, their safety records, and their business practices to underwriters to "sell" them on why that specific business deserves better rates and broader coverage.

Why Legal Counsel is a "Pre-Loss" Necessity

Christian Frederiksen highlights a critical flaw in many business strategies: the tendency to call a lawyer only when a "knock at the door" signifies a lawsuit. He argues that the most successful companies integrate legal review into their daily operations.

  • The Contract Phase: Most disputes are born in the fine print of a contract. Christian emphasizes that having a lawyer review "redlines" before a deal is signed can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future litigation.
  • The Collaboration Loop: A unique insight from the episode is the need for a "three-way conversation" between the entrepreneur, the lawyer, and the insurance agent. When a contract includes indemnity clauses or specific insurance requirements, the lawyer ensures the language is fair, while the agent ensures the existing policy actually covers those specific risks.

The Human Element in an AI World

While the world moves toward automation, both Mark and Christian argue that the "boring" industries of law and insurance still rely heavily on human relationships and intuition.

  • Trust Over Algorithms: Mark points out that while AI can provide a quote, it can’t advocate for a business owner when a claim gets complicated or when a market shift requires a creative solution.
  • The Power of Experience: With 30 years in the courtroom and 75 years of family history in insurance, the Frederiksens showcase that there is no substitute for "having seen it all." They discuss how understanding the "DNA" of a client's business allows them to spot risks that a standard software scan would miss.

Key Takeaways / Lessons

  • Audit Your "Safety Net" Early: Don't wait for a claim to find out what your insurance covers. Have your agent explain your exclusions before you sign a major contract.
  • Redlines Save Bottom Lines: Treat legal fees during contract negotiation as an investment, not a cost. Christian notes that preventative law is always cheaper than reactive litigation.
  • The "Independent" Advantage: Using an independent agent provides a layer of protection against market volatility, allowing you to switch carriers without switching your trusted advisor.
  • Build Your "Viking Ship" Crew: Your lawyer and insurance agent should be part of your inner circle. If they aren't talking to each other, you likely have gaps in your protection.

Conclusion: Safeguarding Your Success

From the nuances of Dallas property insurance to the high-stakes world of construction litigation, Mark and Christian Frederiksen offer a masterclass in business resilience. They remind us that while entrepreneurship is about taking risks, those risks should be calculated and covered. By aligning your legal strategy with your insurance coverage, you ensure that the legacy you are building is protected for the next generation.

Don’t miss the full story of how these two cousins are carrying forward a Texas legacy—be sure to catch the full episode for more practical advice on securing your business's future and subscribe to stay updated on the journeys of those who power America.

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Transcript
Hari Vasudevan (00:00.776) Welcome to a new episode of From Boots to Boardroom. I'm your host, Hari Vasudevan, founder and CEO of KYRO AI. Previously, I was the founder and CEO of ThinkPower Solutions. The show shares entrepreneurial journeys of those who power America. Presenting sponsor of the show is KYRO AI, digitize work and maximize profits. For more information, visit KYRO.ai. Today I'm joined by two super special guests who I've known for a very long time, Mark Fredrickson and Christian Fredrickson. Christian Fredrickson has been an attorney for over 30 years. His practice focuses on construction and business litigation. Christian spends his free time enjoying his kids' sports and other activities, including watching the Texas Longhorns. Mark Fredrickson is the president of Fredrickson and Fredrickson, a fourth generation independent insurance agency based in Dallas, Texas. Mark is married with two awesome kids. He says he's way cooler than his younger cousin Christian. He's also a Texas Longhorn. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Mark Frederiksen (01:28.27) Hey there. Hari Vasudevan (01:29.834) And just as we welcomed you guys, Christine's not down. Mark Frederiksen (01:33.24) Christian dropped off. Yes, there you go. Well, you know, was the whole cooler that I was cooler than him and he must have gotten upset already. So we'll have to smooth that out a little bit. You know, we'll fix it in post, Tori. Let's just do that. Fix it in post. That's how life works. Hari Vasudevan (01:37.144) Anyway, what's going on otherwise? Mark Frederiksen (01:53.882) it's all good. I said, it's funny, every start of the new year, some people are like, I'm still recovering from the old year. And then some people are like, I'm ready to go for the new year. And it's weird that dichotomy of how you want to view the new year. it opportunity or are you just trying to catch your breath? Hari Vasudevan (02:13.648) Yeah, now has it started hitting full swing for you guys yet? Mark Frederiksen (02:18.714) pretty much because it's like our industry will shut down not completely, but the last couple of weeks of the year, people are trying to squeeze in that vacation and then they don't want to visit agents or talk to it. But then comes January where you got sales goals, you know, we got things we've got to do. We've got to, you know, start pre-planning our 2026. It's like, okay, I'm just, I'm just trying to catch my breath. Like I said, I just got done with these things and now you want to do this? Like. Hari Vasudevan (02:28.25) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (02:48.13) But it's just the way it is. It's the same thing every year. It's just funny that, like I said, some people are like, you've been gone for like two weeks, and now you're itching to get going. And I've been working while you've been doing nothing. pardon me if I don't respond just yet. Hari Vasudevan (03:04.442) Interesting. Yeah, no what happened to him man, he's not in that Mark Frederiksen (03:12.418) I don't know. He's not texting me anything. I can text him and say, hey, where'd you go if you want. So that was clearly, I could tell by the look on his face. Here, let me text him just to say, sorry about the whole cooler than you talk. Actually, I can't apologize for that, Harry. Truth is just my final defense, right? Hari Vasudevan (03:19.024) I think he's really mad at you for saying. Mark Frederiksen (03:36.93) Let's see, where is Christian? Mark Frederiksen (03:44.718) Yeah. Okay. Mark Frederiksen (03:54.102) Maybe because he could hear me too clear with the headphone or something. All right, let me see what he says. Did y'all travel? What did you do over your holidays? Like you went somewhere, right? Yeah, Okay. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Okay. Okay. Can you? Okay. I've got to figure out like... Hari Vasudevan (04:05.038) Yeah, mean, you went to Thailand and Cambodia. Hari Vasudevan (04:11.93) Good, you should go. I can set it up for you. Mark Frederiksen (04:21.358) I've got to figure out like where my family will let me take them. You know, is there a mall in Thailand? Is there a water park in Thailand? You know, don't need, don't need, totally. I mean, it's like, guys, like there's more than just, my family's big on water parks. That's why Atlantis is always a big destination. Cause it's like, okay. But at some point as the old man, you're like, I'm not looking as good in my swimsuit as I used to. Plus we've, Hari Vasudevan (04:26.374) Two Americans. Mark Frederiksen (04:50.264) Been there, done that, let's go somewhere. So Christian, I see dots. Hold on a second, let me see what he says. He says, lost internet, hold please. So, all right. Hari Vasudevan (05:04.718) Yeah, tell me you can actually join using. It just won't actually. It's actually really clear crystal clear actually so. Mark Frederiksen (05:09.416) Using a phone app, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Mark Frederiksen (05:17.687) Okay. Mark Frederiksen (05:23.234) But would you go to Thailand again? Hari Vasudevan (05:25.68) Thailand, yeah, I would, different places. Mark Frederiksen (05:27.758) Okay, okay. I think that's always the key. It's like the thing like, would you go again? It that's that's your sign of approval is like, yes, I might do some things differently. But regardless, I would still take my family or I would go just myself and do something. It's like, our last can cruise thing we did that was our trip before kids, which you always seem to remember, right? The trip before the kids arrived. So Hari Vasudevan (05:34.468) Yes. Hari Vasudevan (05:43.471) I'm saying. Hari Vasudevan (05:50.885) Yes. Mark Frederiksen (05:55.694) But it's also funny where you're like, okay, but I could go with kids now and we could do these things. Or you're like, I know, I can still go without kids. I'm okay. Hari Vasudevan (06:03.66) I think our last trip with our teachers is actually to Alaska too, actually. Mark Frederiksen (06:09.678) Was it okay, yeah, which is great, I mean I said I would do it again honestly And I would there's a lot of the same things I would do and then like I may not buy all the Russian jewels I didn't buy last time right. I'm sure they've come down in price, right Hari Vasudevan (06:27.664) Anyway... Mark Frederiksen (06:32.014) All right, well, there's always something, whether it's illness or internet or something. I think this is the universe trying to tell us, we not need to do a podcast? Is that what's happening here? Hari Vasudevan (06:42.992) Well, sorry, just testing our resilience. Mark Frederiksen (06:48.878) That's exactly yes, we're resilience testing. Yeah, it's funny. It's like always joke. I'm trying to create a term that it tech check is probably still the leader in the clubhouse. But like, you're going to get on a zoom call for a meeting like this. And you think I'm at 930. I'm just going to pop on but you're like, No, no, no, like my headsets not working or the camera is not right. Or you got to have a couple minutes to, you know, to do but Hari Vasudevan (07:13.296) Yeah, I knew actually. I was actually thinking the same. was kind of, you know, I was actually ready to pop in around 9 15. I was like, maybe I felt like that is too late just to make sure everything is for a ride in. Mark Frederiksen (07:23.896) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (07:28.674) Well, think for me invariably it's always like you do zoom and then it wants you to there's a software update like okay Well, is it gonna work for the next hour at least I'll do it when I'm done But if I got to update it before I should have started early, know, it's like that kind of stuff. It drives you nuts. So well, all right Well, I'm still here in my 720p glory right there so my harsh lighting is not quite Hari Vasudevan (07:44.708) Yeah, I agree. Mark Frederiksen (07:58.414) Flattering, know, like you got a more of a soft glow and I've got these hard fluorescents just on me You know, everything's white Hari Vasudevan (08:07.235) So you're in your office, right? You can see the back. Mark Frederiksen (08:09.602) Yeah, yeah, that's why I had to remember to like, okay, I need to get things off my desk or from here. Like, I don't want people saying like how the sausage is made, right? But not that there's any sausage, right? There's no sausage. That's that. That's about it. There's no sausage. We can't even have sausage out of this. It's like now it's Hari Vasudevan (08:19.344) You Hari Vasudevan (08:25.935) Yeah. 100%. 100%. Your business is doing all right? Mark Frederiksen (08:31.062) Yeah, I've got like Hayden, who you've talked to, right? And Lars, my younger brother who started April 1. They are like, we've never really had producers, which we call them in our industry, which is like, look, all you do is sell. Don't account manage. Try not to talk to current customers. Just go out and find new customers. I never had that model because to me, training Hari Vasudevan (08:36.293) Yes. Mark Frederiksen (08:56.482) producers is like some work out and some don't and the failure rates high enough you're like I don't want to mess with it it's fine just slow steady growth off me but now it's like look Hayden and Lars both have good personalities for sales Hayden especially will go call on anybody like he spent a couple weeks during the summer selling longer than that actually selling DIY home security to people in Montana Hari Vasudevan (09:21.808) Hmm. Mark Frederiksen (09:21.996) Who when they answer the door, they got a shotgun at you. You're like, okay, well that's their DIY security is the shotgun, right? Hari Vasudevan (09:26.85) man seriously that's i always there you go Mark Frederiksen (09:34.858) Yep, almost here. Hari Vasudevan (09:38.032) Christian, actually, you know, when people knock on the door and I see people doing that, I mean, always like, man, it's it's actually a dangerous job. Mark Frederiksen (09:45.91) It seems like it is now, it's so infrequent. And how often is someone knocking on the door like a good thing? Like, wow, I actually needed that. Thank you for dropping this off, right? Now it doesn't work like that. It's like now it's serial killers always the board knocking at the door, you know? Hari Vasudevan (09:53.904) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (10:02.192) Christine in the back. Christian Frederiksen (10:05.586) I'm trying. Hari Vasudevan (10:07.472) It says that you're you know because I have the admin dashboard it says that you have the reverse side open in two browsers you got to close one of them. Yes, you know honestly if you have an issue I was just telling Mark I've had I've had many Christian Frederiksen (10:16.16) Let me close that one here. Mark Frederiksen (10:30.35) There he goes. He left again. Hari Vasudevan (10:33.008) He's proven to be a true attorney, tech savvy. Still writing in paper, pencil, tracking time so that nobody can see what the hell they're my God. Mark Frederiksen (10:36.398) Yes, tech savvy is all attorneys are, right? Mark Frederiksen (10:46.999) Yep. Mark Frederiksen (10:54.562) Well, I'll say this our our laundry list on our I thank you. Appreciate you sending the list of potential questions here. It's like it's long I'm going are we gonna get through half of this like because you know what we're gonna talk We yeah, so if you want to make sure we hit high points like if your favorite questions You let me know because I you know me I'll talk about whatever so Hari Vasudevan (11:05.274) Yeah, maybe half. Yeah, maybe half. Hari Vasudevan (11:11.79) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So Christian, can you say a few words just to make sure you're coming along? Christian Frederiksen (11:20.586) Okay, I'm back and I'm not going to touch anything on my computer. Hari Vasudevan (11:24.208) Perfect. That was great. All right. So, you know, 1130. So I'll just jot it down. All right. All right, guys. So, you know, I know welcome to the show seems like Mark, the glowing introduction I gave you really upset your younger cousin, Christian. And he proved that he's not as cool as you, right? Just by Mark Frederiksen (11:24.59) No promises, right? Christian Frederiksen (11:26.229) Okay. Mark Frederiksen (11:45.793) Yes. Mark Frederiksen (11:51.566) Yeah, lack of IT knowledge clearly has proven that coolness didn't flow that far down the symmetry. Okay, good, sure. Hari Vasudevan (11:52.016) You're dropping off! Christian Frederiksen (11:58.786) I have regained my composure, I'm back. Hari Vasudevan (12:02.064) He actually proved that he's an attorney. He's very tech savvy. Alright, let's get rolling here guys. So, you know, there's so many different places where we can start, right? But let's start with the burning question here, right? Texas Longhorns, right? You guys are both Texas Longhorns. What's your... Christian Frederiksen (12:07.562) Hahaha Hari Vasudevan (12:30.5) Prediction for the next season. I know unfortunately you guys didn't make it to the CFP playoffs this season next season prediction Arch manning what's your take on that? Let's go with Mark first Mark Frederiksen (12:42.754) Well, I was going to say I was going to defer my time to the honorable gentleman on this side of my podcast here because he's I am I am admittedly a fair weather long-horn fan because I feel like we have enough money money to buy a championship and why we don't win every year. It's where's our what our funds going to I think Christian's opinion is probably more knowledgeable about mine this year or and next and the year after so Christian you have my time. Christian Frederiksen (13:07.298) I appreciate it. Now we spent a lot of that money this past weekend getting commitments from the top run back and top receiver, which we really needed receivers and put us at the number one transfer portal class, I believe. And I think I heard we spent $40 million on it. So the money came out. So Arch has people to throw to now. So if anybody can block for them, we should be in good shape. Mark Frederiksen (13:26.766) bargain. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (13:34.232) Well, you know, honestly, in the new NIL era, Texas should be in contention every single season just because, you know, rich alumni, right? So good stuff, good stuff, guys. Let's get rolling to the meat of the show here. So Mark and Christian, obviously, I've known you guys for a long time. Mark, I still vividly remember the first conversation I had and just started Think Our Solutions. and I wanted commercial insurance, guys were getting me on the personal insurance side, right? And I called you and said, hey, can I cancel this in a month if this company doesn't work out? And then the rest is history. The company grew obviously beyond my wildest imagination. And here we are in round two, right? With KYRO. So for listeners who may just think of lawyers and Mark Frederiksen (14:13.518) Yeah, all your confidence. Yes Hari Vasudevan (14:31.424) insurance agents or risk management advisors is just boxes check, right? How would you describe your role, ideal role, the relationship with an entrepreneur who's trying to get things off the ground, right? Because you know, honestly, I've been in so many birthday parties where somebody comes and says, hey, I'm an insurance agent, right? But you know, there's more to it. This is such an important piece of the puzzle and you don't realize it until bad things happen. right, which obviously has happened in the course of running my companies, right? So can you get started on that note, Mark? Mark Frederiksen (15:08.59) Sure, no, absolutely. It's weird because it was our grandfather and grandmother who started Fredrickson and Fredrickson back in 1949 out of their living room, basically here in Dallas. And so we're 75 plus years old as an agency. But it's kind of weird, like, what's the continual thread through that? And a lot of it's, like, relationships, like, just being there to help. You know, we've got our Our logo was like, you know, the Danish Viking ship. And so because of that, the verbs I use, what we do for our customers is we navigate and we advocate. So for the insurance world, it's like, there's a lot of questions and AI is smart, but there's a reason like insurance agents exist. And part of it's to help them navigate through like, okay, I know I think I need this, but how do I find it? And what does this do and evaluate those options? But then advocate as well for us, like we're trying to put our best foot forward for all of our insurance company underwriters to give us the best rate and terms they can. And so therefore, like there's a sales aspect of that. But at the same time, you're trying to sell ourselves, our clients to our underwriters. those terms is what we use the most, advocate and advocate. seems to encapsulate, I think, best what we do for our best clients that we're using. Hari Vasudevan (16:39.504) Yeah, navigate and advocate. And honestly, you know, I've had many, many, many, many conversations with you where you've advised me on things to do. And one of the key aspects of, you know, what you do is also an independent agent. Right. You know, honestly, I have some good friends who own all state agencies and things like that. Right. Can you explain to the listeners what is the difference and why an independent agency is better? Mark Frederiksen (16:57.346) Yes, yeah. Hari Vasudevan (17:09.462) for an entrepreneur for the customer at the end of the day. Mark Frederiksen (17:11.714) Well, mean, better is relative. An independent agency, what it allows us to do instead of being tied to one insurance company, the luxury that we have is that we've got multiple insurance companies to shop on our customers' behalf. So it makes it easy for us if one of our insurance companies decides that Texas is just another pen on the map and we don't like Dallas because it hails there and so we're going to shut down here. Well, I have another company to go to if we need it and that's on the personal side, commercial side. You never know who's competitive on what industry and things like that. So it's a great luxury to have when it's like we can keep the customer and they can know that they don't have to share their information with five or six different agents just to get a lay of the land and what the market's doing. so, yeah. Hari Vasudevan (17:57.008) That's a beautiful way to put it and a great example as well because you I don't know the exact insurance agent insurance companies but you know some of them are both in California because of the wildfires and it could happen to any region by any provider at the end of the day so that's great explanation there. Let's go on to Christian here. So Christian one of the things I've done almost always, let me take a take out the word almost always, is a contract comes in, kick it out to you, also kick it out to Mark, we get his inputs from the insurance side, your inputs obviously from the legal side, we try to keep the red lines to the minimum, but at the same time we try to get the most important terms that are critical for us, right? So having said that baseline, What is an ideal relationship between a business counsel like yourself, a risk management advisor like Mark, and an entrepreneur like myself, right? So what is an ideal and what does collaboration mean to you as a legal counsel? Christian Frederiksen (19:12.672) I don't really use the word navigate and advocate like Mark does, but it seems to apply. I wish more clients would come and get lawyers involved early. in the process. Oftentimes they come to me when all I can do is advocate for them because they're already in some kind of dispute or trouble that could likely have been prevented had we been brought in early in, you know, as you say, the review contracts and earlier on in the process to so that we can limit any damage that we could foresee in the future. It's helpful to have the good, you know, line of communication with the insurance agent as well. So you can, you know, that's not my expertise. when you're reviewing a contract, I can do the legal. But as long as I'm comfortable with that you're covered insurance wise, you know, it allows us to properly understand the risks we're taking in the contract too. But I think that it's all about communication. And there's, you know, I have open communication, obviously, with Mark, in you. And that's not just because he's my cousin, but there's other clients, I don't have that, you know, ability to reach out to their insurance agent or to consult with them. And I think the relationship hurts as a result. Hari Vasudevan (20:26.594) Yeah, yeah, no, you, you, you hit the nail on that. So essentially the key piece is be proactive. Be engaged with your legal counsel early at the time of writing a contract. You know, don't, don't, don't hope for the best that, everything will be all right. But then it doesn't always turn out to be that way. Right. Even with the best planning, it doesn't always work out that way. Christian Frederiksen (20:52.858) You know, the first contract that they're going to hand you is not going to be favorable to you. As a company, may not know, looking at it, what's the red flags initially until you've negotiated some of these contracts and you've been advised. And so you can sign something that could really harm you on down the road. However, if you consult with the lawyer up front, you may have to pay a little money, but it's still investment, I think, is well worth it to protect yourself on the back end. Hari Vasudevan (21:19.248) 100%. The way I always say it is you either pay for the risk down the road or you buy down risk on the front end, right? What you're doing here with collaborating with a legal counsel, of course, you got to pay the legal fees and with an insurance agent and getting the right mix of, you know, insurance for your company, you're actually buying down the risk for yourself as an entrepreneur and you as your company. So that helps you in the long run. Right. Is that is that a good way to characterize that Christian? Christian Frederiksen (21:52.482) Exactly, you're minimizing the risk going forward to the best you can. You can't anticipate every scenario, but you just want to be as protected as you can be up front. Hari Vasudevan (22:01.892) Got it. All right, let's move to Mark here. So real world situation without naming customers, What are some of the situations where you felt like the customers didn't have the right coverage or did have the right coverage, right? There are so many different coverages out there. You got business interruption, professional liability, ENO. which is the same, right? Cyber, all these kind of things, right? Where did it come into play? Where did it protect the customer? mean, I'm case example number one, right? There was that big issue that happened, but can you explain a little bit to our customers here? Mark Frederiksen (22:28.682) Yep. Mark Frederiksen (22:41.944) Yeah, no, I think the easy initial gotcha to identify for us is always like a lease. Like everyone who is like to Christian's point, you get a landlord handing you a lease. Well, guess who's in favor of it's in favor of the landlord, not the tenant. And we get in these situations very frequently where like there's an insurance paragraph, like what you're talking about. You give the contract to Christian and I, and I look at the insurance section and Christian looks at the rest. But What we end up finding is that from a landlord tenant standpoint as an example, there's things to ensure that fall outside the insurance paragraph. There's a tenant responsibilities section of every lease where it's like, well, and Kershaw and I have picked up a mutual customer by someone who was a warehouse in the Dallas area. Windstorm blew off the AC units off the roof. so therefore, the landlord said to the tenant, like, well, you're going to replace those, right? The tent thought, well, I thought that was yours to cover. It's like, no, no, no, look at your lease. And it wasn't in the insurance section. It was in the tenant's responsibility section, which is a complete different part of the lease. And I guess their agent had not looked at that, which a lot of agents, I've only learned to look at that by, you know, experience, right? I wasn't a genius knowing, oh, of course, let's look at this part first. But like, You you start to identify those risks like yeah What are you gonna do if those units are on you know catch on fire blowing off the roof? Well, we want to ensure those right? So it's not just looking at that, know the insurance paragraph Which is the easy part to do and a lot of times easy to fulfill But it's it's just trying to find all the little gotchas There's always a gotcha somewhere and like I said to me I'm like look I don't do my own taxes like I want to hire CPA tell me what the gotchas like Why wouldn't you bring an attorney into the mix? Hari Vasudevan (24:20.912) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (24:31.842) to look at that for you, that's their job. Isn't that worth the investment? Why would you not do that? It doesn't make any sense. Hari Vasudevan (24:39.331) Yeah, 100 % especially when you're dealing with sophisticated customers who, you know, it could be large customers like the ones that KYRO has or it could be sophisticated landlords, right, who have multiple properties. Clearly, they have a legal counsel, if not an army of lawyers with them, right. So might as well have the right advice on your side. So, know, Christian, anything to add to that? Mark Frederiksen (24:43.758) Yum. Mark Frederiksen (24:57.73) Yeah, true. Christian Frederiksen (25:07.266) No, mean, Mark's, you know, just to do it upfront, the best, I mean, as you said, Mark, you learn from experience. And that's just the way it is true in the legal field. It's true just as a business owner. You're going to make mistakes at the beginning. And it's Mark and I's job to try to just to minimize those, you know, and to get you off and running. We can't prevent everything, but it's going to get you off to a better start and investment well worth it. Hari Vasudevan (25:36.24) it. Okay, let's stick with Christian here. So you know every company has an operating agreement, right? You know many people don't really pay much attention to it on the front end because they're excited about getting started on a new venture and things like that, hoping everything will be all right, right? That seems to be the theme of the discussion so far here. But you know there comes a time when partners disagree and one wants to go one way, the other wants to go a different way, right? A long-winded way to ask is operating agreements for business owners, entrepreneurs. What's your take on that Christian and where have you seen that become very useful, right? When there are oftentimes disagreements between partners. Christian Frederiksen (26:23.202) You know, unfortunately, Hari, I've seen it worse, the worst case scenario more than the best case scenario in terms of people don't have that built into their operating agreement about how am I going to separate from the partnership or, you know, they go into this business with a friend or with... relatives and we're never going to need this withdrawal procedure. I'm not really concerned about tiebreaker situations and everybody comes back to bite them. That's one of the worst ones I ever saw was involving three brothers. You all got crossways with each other and they ended up in court for three years. Hari Vasudevan (26:57.594) Cheese. Christian Frederiksen (26:57.622) trying to fight over ownership of the company. And so it's important to establish those withdrawal procedures. You may not need them. You just don't want to have 50-50 deadlocks. Who's making the decisions? and it'd be sure it's well documented. can, you know, even talking to a friend or relative, you can have a handshake deal, but that's not enforceable. And people forget those when it comes to, you know, when you get cross-weds with each other. just to document and pay attention to the operating agreement upfront, because that's going to be controlling. And for example, if a member dies and you've got now a wife who's, you know, trying to become involved in the business, you need to have mechanisms in place that either allow or disallow that and to buy out the wife husband or whatever. So that's all important stuff at the very, very beginning. Hari Vasudevan (27:46.256) Setting up a business. You're right. You're right about that. So so mark From insurance standpoint, right? You know setting up a business just like Christian is saying you said they were operating agreement now you're setting up a you know the Different types of insurance that is needed What is not negotiable right? What is absolutely needed for somebody to get started like I did back in 2013? and how would you scale it as let's say the business progresses from zero to 10, 10 to 25 employees and then, know, to 50 employees and so on and so forth. Or maybe in today's day and age of AI, to be honest, right? Maybe it doesn't scale employee wise, but it can scale exponentially revenue wise. Just the nature of these businesses have changed and evolved over a period of time. because some of these businesses are what they call as magic businesses. They can scale exponentially, software businesses. So what's your take on that? What's your experience and what's your advice? Mark Frederiksen (28:51.758) I think we have to, we usually keep in mind on the risk management side, which includes insurance is that our risk management program needs to grow with the company and adapt with the company. Because when you start off, like a lot of times like, okay, know, like we get to these situations where why are we buying insurance? And are we buying it to make a landlord happy? Are we buying it to make a client happy and check those boxes so we can get to work so we can get the revenue and then grow from there? Hari Vasudevan (29:06.137) Did it. Mark Frederiksen (29:22.209) But we don't, I try not to start from there. Like those are obvious reasons like why we have to have insurance. But I... Hari Vasudevan (29:27.792) Yeah, yeah. honestly, just to jump in without breaking a chain, oftentimes when entrepreneur starts, really that does, that is the primary reason, right? It's like, hey, I want to, I don't know anything about it. I mean, honestly, I started out that way, right? It's like, hey, I want to get this contract, make money, right? So you're right. Mark Frederiksen (29:39.627) It is, yeah. Mark Frederiksen (29:48.417) Yep, that's exactly it. Yeah. And so we start with that. so, but where we try to avoid that is like, look, like that's definitely a factor because we got to make the client happy. Otherwise we can't get to work, but I always talk to my customers, not always, but like the typical advice I give them is like, look, when we start this process, let's risk manage this because we get that you're going have a client or a landlord that says you must have these policies, but everything else that's your discretion, like let's talk through this. Let's. The risk management process will basically identify the risks and then decide what you want to do about it. Do you want to mitigate it? Do you want to transfer it? Do you want to avoid it? Do I want to duplicate it? Let's do all these other things that are in our control. Whatever's left, then we can decide, do we want to insure it or not? But I will advise my four nonprofit customers all the time. The advice when we look at this holistically from a risk management standpoint is to say, what if we just act as if insurance didn't exist? Let's, we have an alternate universe where insurance wasn't a thing. Like it doesn't even, no one knew what it was. And so what would you do if you still had your mission, whether it's a for nonprofit business or even a personalized customer? Like it's a little bit different, but the business side of it is, okay, would you have that charity golf tournament? Would you bring the bounce house here? Would you hire the person with the questionable driving record? Well, and to me, all this circles back to policies and procedures that you established upfront. And frankly, don't, you don't, will you mute Christian's thing real quick? I don't want him to hear this, but like sometimes the attorney is the most important part of that aspect of like, you got to help identify the risks and contractually get your way out of them or set up a handbook or the rules or whatever you want to call it to say, look, this is our operating procedures for how we're going to run the company. Then we have that established. Then let's look at insurance and figure out where do we need to sprinkle the insurance? to take care of the things that the clients or the landlords are not requiring us to carry. Because that's where the strategy part comes in, because then we say, what deductibles do we need? How much coverage? How much coverage do you think you need? Just because your client says this amount doesn't mean we think that's appropriate, but we should talk that through. But that whole conversation should exist before we get to the part where we say, let's buy insurance, because if we don't set that part up, we're going to get bad quotes, because we're going to have poor procedures or no procedures. Christian Frederiksen (32:01.643) it. Christian Frederiksen (32:10.944) procedures. There are no procedures. Hari Vasudevan (32:12.88) so eloquently put, I really want to sprinkle in my own personal experience that I actually developed the two of you all here. Fleet insurance, super expensive and it became exponentially expensive over a period of time until it stabilized. So the way we navigated that was exactly how you put it, which is to put in a policy that is enforceable. Christian Frederiksen (32:28.802) Thank Hari Vasudevan (32:42.564) We worked with Christian, we worked with our labor council and you to come up with a very tight fleet policy where, hey, if you had this driving record, you cannot drive a company vehicle. Or if this happens, you cannot drive a company vehicle. Right. What that did was it gave the underwriters confidence that we are running a tight ship. Right. And, you know, didn't magically, you know, bring the cost down by 50 % but it clearly gave us some you know pricing edge because of the confidence we gave in underwriters right so you know a real world example at the end of the day the second piece of what you said I just want to kind of put it in an entrepreneur's perspective it's like what is the risk that you can live with right if you're a company that is 50 million dollars in revenue super highly profitable Do you really need a $50,000 deductible? Can you live with a $500,000 deductible? Right? That is, you will get a much better quote. But then you gotta have the confidence that you can actually manage that risk effectively. You need to have good health and safety programs. You need to have good cyber programs and things like that. So I know it's a long-winded way to explain it, but I really wanted to kind of address that as well. Would you agree with me on what I just? Mark Frederiksen (34:10.397) yeah, I do agree. We're all long winded. wait, that's not what you want to be agree with? Okay, yeah, but yes, the short answer is 100%. If you don't identify the risks, whether it's Christian identifying the risks in a contract or you deciding like, look, these are the risks that we can live with when we toss the keys to someone driving one of our vehicles on our behalf. You got to get that comfort level. We call it risk tolerance. What do you want to live with? And again, from our standpoint, Christian Frederiksen (34:13.462) sure. Hari Vasudevan (34:14.622) Hahaha! Mark Frederiksen (34:40.053) We don't want our clients to have the claims because we know what our industry is going to do is that we're going to pay the claim hopefully, but then we're going to charge you for three to five years to for that claim. like, does that math make sense? It's not profitable. It's it's diverting you from your mission, which is, you know, whatever that is for that company. And it's just but it's a process and it's not fun per se. It's not sexy. And if you just want to focus on premium. Like you can and most of the time that works because the odds are most people won't have a claim, but the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that I do feel like they will dedicate the appropriate time to the risk management process, which includes reviewing contracts and employee handbooks and the policies and procedures that you need in place and get the experts when you need them to help guide you through it and share best practices. Hari Vasudevan (35:33.134) Yeah, no, 100%. By the way, brother who listens to the show, he just said, you know, you need to talk less and let your guests talk more. you just... Okay, so Christian, Mark, do want to say something? Okay, all right, Christian, let's go down to, you know, I know in our contracts, we always try to get Texas law, right? Christian Frederiksen (35:43.586) Hahaha Mark Frederiksen (35:50.614) Why would I say anything? No, of course not. I'm here to listen. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (36:03.22) over the last 12, 13 years, we've always tried to do that, right? Any disputes, let's address in the state of Texas, right? Let's kind of go into incorporation. All my companies incorporate in the state of Texas, but you know, many people do incorporate in Delaware. In light of this Elon Musk compensation, which has since been revoked, I believe he's getting his compensation, right? Christian Frederiksen (36:27.319) Right. Hari Vasudevan (36:30.849) How would you address that? Where is a good state to incorporate in? Texas, Delaware, Nevada, although we're all biased to Texas, what's your advice to entrepreneurs here? Christian Frederiksen (36:42.24) You know, people prefer Delaware and they always have. Delaware has established business courts that they've seen in every scenario. And so it's a predictability that if you're going to apply Delaware law and something happens, you know what's likely to happen if a lawsuit gets filed or you have to go to court. And people prefer that, some people. Delaware's got strong limited liability protection. So it's important to members of LLCs. That's why you're setting up the entity, is you want to be sure that you're not exposed individually. Delaware is very very strong in that and that probably goes back to the predictability and the history there. They do reward companies that form in Delaware even though they're not located in Delaware. You get some tax benefits here in Delaware for that. But Texas is becoming more attractive to form a company in as well. Of course, you know, no state income tax and there's, offer a lot of franchise tax exemptions for smaller entities, you under 2.5 million revenue, kind you know, which are, you know, it is kind of important. And it's really good, Texas is good for the regional, more regional, based businesses. I prefer Texas, you know, obviously more familiar with Texas law and if you go to Delaware you're going to have to probably hire a Delaware attorney to help you out there which is hoping to bring more expense and bringing him or her up to speed. But, and I think, you know, there has been recently, I say in the past two or three years, people wanting to do Delaware law. Christian Frederiksen (38:26.402) Even though I recommend Texas, said I just prefer Delaware. And I don't know if that's a comfort level or what, but you're not gonna get in trouble either way, but I think Texas is becoming a lot more attractive. Hari Vasudevan (38:37.988) Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you on that. I mean, we've incorporated in Texas, but know, honestly, KYRO is a Delaware registered company. we spun out, Delaware, mean, when you spun out KYRO from ThinkPower, we actually incorporated in Delaware. So, all right, let's. Christian Frederiksen (38:46.678) Right. Christian Frederiksen (38:56.29) You know, can always convert, start as a Texas company and convert to a Delaware entity on down the road if your company is growing and you're bringing in a lot more venture capital. Whatever is happening with the company, you can convert to Delaware law and that probably would be in your best interest to be the subject of Delaware law as you grow and you expand beyond the initial stages, formation stages. Hari Vasudevan (39:13.273) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (39:22.192) To get started, hey, if you're a Texas-based entrepreneur, registered in Texas, I mean, Texas is becoming very business friendly. I believe that Texas is incorporating business courts and things like that, Christian Frederiksen (39:34.39) Well, Texas is trying to. They don't do as good a job as Delaware. They do now have a business court, but the jurisdiction level, the amount of revenue and damages and dispute that it takes to get into that court is pretty significant. It's not something you can take your or million dollar dispute to. You've got to be up significantly higher. So they're limited in the resources, I think, right now. And I think you're going to see that expand. Because I think people like the idea of having the business court, who would be like Delaware's already long done, establish this is the predictability of disputes and what's going to happen if we go forward. Hari Vasudevan (40:17.326) Yeah, I mean, it's good to have competition, right? Good to have competition in business jurisdiction as well. So, all right. So, Mark, you know, I have my list of lines of insurance, right? Commercial package, business interruption, general liability, commercial automobile, workers comp, umbrella, professional liability, cyber liability, employment practices liability and fiduciary. DNO and then you got the health insurance right dental vision you know accident insurance all hospital indemnity all kinds of stuff right when you advise an entrepreneur where would we get started what is constantly underbought in people who regretted later on down the road Mark Frederiksen (41:11.085) Probably underbought these days is probably the employment practices liability coverage. Hari Vasudevan (41:17.969) And before we go any further, explain to audience what is employment practices. Mark Frederiksen (41:20.813) Sure. Yeah, it's basically your hiring and firing coverage, your workplace torts, when an employee feels they were discriminated, harassed, wrongful termination. It's the internal claims that arises from just the joy of having employees. And it goes hand in hand with the D &O coverage, but you get a lot of basically privately held companies who think, I don't need D &O because they don't have a big board, it's tightly held. They don't see the need for it. And for the most part, they're right, even though there are situations that it's like, no, you totally could use this. But from that standpoint, it's the joys of growing a staff, basically. And sometimes you make a mistake and hire the wrong person. And then a lot of times you haven't followed procedures or didn't have it in place, but you say, look, I need to move on from this person to do it right. Well, and then depending on the jurisdiction, how much protection is that state gonna give that employee? versus the employer and every employment practice liability claim is kind of a guilty before presumed innocent from the employer standpoint because the employee's alleging a tort, you did something wrong and now we have to go and defend and say, no, no, no, we didn't do it wrong. We did it right. And here's how we did it right. And in every, you know, insurance scenario, all of our underwriters think like, well, of course we have a checklist and we've done all these things. We've got our employment handbooks that have been reviewed by a labor attorney that have all the right things in there as well. like, And those are questions on the application. And a lot of times the customer is like, yeah, I have it. But like, I haven't really looked at it in a while. But again, it circles back to the idea like you can always buy the insurance for these things. But when you see the questions on the applications, whether it's employment practices or cyber liability, or like crime coverage is one we didn't mention of like employee dishonesty, like sometimes just having the procedures in place, you don't need the insurance. You know, whether the claim is likely to happen or not, but then you have the headache. Well, If we have a claim, an employment practices claim, because someone says that the employer discriminated against them, well, the insurance company is going to hire an attorney and the attorney is going to say, hey, hurry, what tools do you have for me to defend this claim with? What have you got? And so that's why I go back to the, if insurance didn't exist? Would you be hiring attorney off your own dime? And you still need to give them the tools. So we need to develop the tools first. Mark Frederiksen (43:43.149) I think employment practice liability is definitely a policy where like you get a critical mass, like, you get 10 or more employees, like, and then the math starts making sense. But regardless of the number of employees in the math, it's like, you want to start with the procedures at employee number one, and then we can grow from there. You can always buy any insurance policy, any coverage at any time. You know, the fastest growing is cyber because people are realizing that, okay, more stuff is in the cloud. Hari Vasudevan (43:59.823) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (44:11.565) have a greater exposure, whether it's an internal exposure or third party data exposure. But if you look at a cyber application, I'll say, look at that first, just do what the application says, even if we don't get quotes. If you're not doing what the application's asking you to do, review it with your expert, IT person, attorney, labor attorney, whoever, and go through that, and then maybe you don't need the insurance. Because you can always worry about like, I don't have that, I don't have that, I don't have that. Hari Vasudevan (44:33.87) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (44:38.433) but you don't have an unlimited budget to buy insurance. We wish you did. And for lot of companies that make sense, that's a risk management plan. But like when you're starting off with this entrepreneurs, like you're going to get the clients throwing all that stuff at you. Got to have these things to get this work. Okay, I get it. But after that, there's no money left. I'd like to be able to eat, you know, and pay my rent, right? And then give it to the insurance company. So you get those scenarios. We talk a lot about that on the for nonprofit side about just Hari Vasudevan (44:58.16) Bye. Mark Frederiksen (45:07.317) what's appropriate at this stage of your company's growth basically. Hari Vasudevan (45:11.504) Yeah, as well as the for-profit side, right? Yeah. So, know, honestly, the cyber is a big piece of it because, you know, I remember as the company was growing, was like one of our customers came and said, we need a $10 million coverage, right? On cyber. Oh, my God, that cost us an arm and a leg, right? I don't know, 50, 60 thousand bucks, right? For something that Mark Frederiksen (45:15.317) Yes, exactly. Both sides. works both ways. Yes, absolutely. Mark Frederiksen (45:28.577) Yeah, Y10, they just needed it, right? yeah. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (45:39.908) we knew we never going to use because we had good, hopefully, hopefully never going to use, right? I mean, never used it. But you know, it's serious stuff. I mean, it's not cheap and you got to make sure you have the right process and procedures in place. Mark Frederiksen (45:45.471) Yeah, right. Mark Frederiksen (45:53.773) Yeah, and we want you, we want to just like Christian is used to negotiate contracts. We want to help negotiate those limits like because why was it 10 million? Like why do they feel they needed 10 based on what services we were providing them? Maybe they were justified in asking for it. Maybe that's just a template agreement that every vendor they have. They just ask for 10 like, but why don't ask for the exception? Why not? Because it's just. Additional money like a landlord saying you got to have these policies and limits in place was just additional rent Well, then let's ask for less But we also understand that our part of this may not be the preeminent or the primary need like the insurance part may not Trump Something else in the contract that you is more valuable to you, but we at least want to give you the options and let you decide What's important? Do I want to argue the insurance point here in the limits or don't want a horse trade for something else? And that's why I think a good agent Hari Vasudevan (46:46.597) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (46:49.229) can help provide on the insurance side where Christian can do the same for like a contract. It's like, look, I can redline this. These are your options. How hard do we want to fight for these things? Hari Vasudevan (46:58.736) Well, honestly, at end of the day, when you you when you when your customer says, hey, no, I'm not going to reduce my requirement. You can always say this is going to cost me serious money. Would you be willing to, you know, pay more for these? Right. Because ultimately it comes from the bottom line. And, you know, lot of people don't realize insurance doesn't you know, prices don't go down. In fact, it goes up. I mean, you you kind of help me Mark Frederiksen (47:12.289) Yeah. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (47:28.824) understand that it's like because as you as your company grows you kind of leave the potential for more lawsuits from the last several years. So the risk management from that time from the insurance agencies goes up and same for cyber and all these kind of things right. So you got to plan for it. Many contracts require you to have an insurance three four years after you've completed the last project. So you have to really bake it in in your pricing. these things really need to be well thought out. Mark Frederiksen (47:57.976) Yes. No, that's 100 % one of the gotchas we help identify to say, look, once the project's done, you're still paying for it per se because they want you to carry those limits past that project expiration. But it's 100 % correct. When you're focusing on, just got to have the work, it's one thing. But you need to be able to walk away from the work if it doesn't benefit you for the future. We just want the, like from your your risk management budget to be appropriate for the size of the company and your revenue. We don't want it to be inappropriate because it's been affected by a claim, which is, you know, I renewed it this year. The next renewal I get, the premiums increased 200%. Well, I can't pass that along to my client. That was something I could control, though. And so you just want to focus on what you can control from the get go and then make sure that if we need our insurance, it's there when we need it from a catastrophic standpoint. But if I can void the small claims, the frequency part of it, just focus on the, eliminate the frequency, focus on the severity. Those are another couple of terms we use a lot, frequency versus severity. Is it better to have one big claim or small claims? And depending what day you find an underwriter, they'll give you a different answer, but we don't want either. It's like, the short answer is we don't want neither one of those, so let's figure out how to avoid that as much as we can. Hari Vasudevan (49:16.814) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (49:22.448) You love working with underwriters don't you? love underwriters. You're literally married to one. Mark Frederiksen (49:27.085) Well, I I have married a one so be careful how you say I'm sure she's monitoring this call right now I know what I'm allowed to say but but underwriters frankly are our partners and our good underwriters make things easy for us which therefore translates to the entrepreneur That's why you want to find a good agent that you know a lot of us on agents are using the same insurance companies But is the relationship we have with our underwriters as well. You have a good underwriter Christian Frederiksen (49:27.126) Okay. Mark Frederiksen (49:54.349) They will help us help the client grow the same way, hopefully my advice is or Christian's advice does too. So they're definitely a key part of this conversation that the client never talks to, but they're a partner for us. They're almost like angel investors in a way, because they're helping us get coverage that we need for the best terms possible. And best terms possible doesn't mean premium. It means coverage first, then the best premium for what that coverage is being provided. Hari Vasudevan (50:22.658) you know honestly I've never heard anyone say that underwriters are angel investors. That's a first. Mark Frederiksen (50:28.781) Yeah, I'm yes, I'm being paid to say that where's all my insurance company logos to say right? Yeah But I think the analogy is appropriate. It doesn't seem like they're angels most of the time I get it but like but the good ones are you know, I promise Christian Frederiksen (50:35.009) you Christian Frederiksen (50:44.418) Thank Hari Vasudevan (50:46.352) Yeah, I understand that. So, all right. So, Christian, know, contracts, right? You know, we've negotiated multiple contracts where you advised us, right? What are two or three clauses that routinely cause most hard money? Any business construction, obviously, you focus on that. I mean, you've advised me on software contracts. What is something that entrepreneurs need to focus on? What do you help them focus on? Christian Frederiksen (51:23.074) You know, I don't think I have to tell them, but number one, the payment terms. You need to be clear as to when you're going to get paid and, you know, understand that you can negotiate that back to a more reasonable period. I also don't like the cross offset provisions. those are provisions that if you have multiple contracts with the group and one of the contracts goes bad, then they can withhold paying you on all your other contracts. And that I try to cross those out and negotiate those out as often as possible because I've seen people really pay the price for that. You know, if you can, You're going to limit the indemnity, the indemnification provisions. Texas does a good job. They passed a statute that helps you. So you don't have to necessarily negotiate it all out that, like you're not responsible for somebody else if they're the sole negligent party. but I still, those are the ones that you want to limit as much as possible. And those are oftentimes, especially in the construction context, those are the ones that are, you know, those are two pages of indemnity provisions. those are the kind of the main ones you can, you you can, Hari Vasudevan (52:28.432) Thank you. Christian Frederiksen (52:31.972) really focus on dispute resolution too. I like to have that pretty concrete in terms of preference to maybe go to a mediation. If a dispute arises before you get into arbitration or a lawsuit, it could save the party's money. It could get the thing in dispute handled a lot quicker. And so to be sure that those mechanisms are in there and that it's not just the mechanism requiring mediation is how are you going to pick the mediator or how do you ultimately select arbitrator on down the road? What construction or alternative dispute resolution rules apply? Those are kind of the main ones that I focus on. you know, at least going forward. Again, as you say, you can't change the entire agreement. You you try to mentalize the red lines because, you know, a lot of times you're not negotiating from a position of power. But, you know, you can't just come back and you don't have the ability to say, I want to change this entire contract. Hari Vasudevan (53:15.833) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (53:23.045) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (53:28.944) 100 % Payment terms super important and if you are negotiating with a vendor you can also negotiate payment terms right you can pay a little slower that also helps with your cash flow. Offset terms I know we've had that in our contract and you've helped us at least ask the customer hey can you take it out dispute resolution indemnification and another aspect of it is intellectual property protection. You help us protect it quite often. It's like, hey, intellectual property is ours because a lot of contracts say, if you work on our project and if you use this software, the software is ours. Code is ours. So all those things also come into play. Christian Frederiksen (53:59.008) Right. Christian Frederiksen (54:15.04) Right. One other factor would be a non-solicitation provision. Depending on the nature of your business, you want to protect your personnel and your people from getting just hired away from you and going to work for the people that you are providing services to. Hari Vasudevan (54:31.044) Yes, yes that happens quite frankly that happens all the time and you know despite having the non-solicitation but at the very least you can tell your customer listen I'm being nice to you I'll let you guys have this person at least bills up from brownie points and things like that right so you know I agree with you we've had it on almost all our contracts there so that's fantastic so you know Mark let's kind of get into health insurance a little bit. right? You helped me get started on health insurance at ThinkPower. And it is a big piece of how I attracted a lot of good employees early on, right? And then we scaled it over a period of time, different types of health insurance aspects, right? Meant dental collision, all these kind of things, right? Explain to an entrepreneur all those different things, right? I've got a list of things here. HSA versus non-HSA. Then you have all these ancillary plans, dental, vision, life, AD and D, voluntary life, STD, LDD, LTD, accident insurance, hospital indemnity, EAP, all these kind of different things. I know, I know. Mark Frederiksen (55:41.749) Yep. Mark Frederiksen (55:46.911) Yeah, we love our acronyms, don't we? then you got to go, Siri, what does this mean? And it's like, and now my Siri is lighting up right over here. right. Yeah. Christian Frederiksen (55:48.886) and Christian Frederiksen (55:52.93) you Hari Vasudevan (55:53.425) I'm gonna ask you about AI anyway, but go for it. How would you get started? I know you're a big preference of HSA and we got started on HSA way back in the day. It's super helpful. So why don't you get started? Mark Frederiksen (56:09.707) Yeah, I think the benefits conversation overall is definitely one of those growth conversations where once you cross that line to say, look, we are crossing the Rubicon, we are going to be a shop that provides benefits because no one wants to roll it back once you provide it because your employees have that expectation like, well, you were providing it before. Why are we rolling it back? And to your point, Harit, like you've got to attract the best. employees we can for a lot of employees that's a critical part of their compensation package yet we forget it's a compensation package part where it's like look if I didn't have to buy you health insurance I could just give you that money and it's a lot regardless of the size of the company like health insurance is expensive it's been expensive forever like my dad second generation Fredrickson here Christian's uncle wrote an op-ed piece to a Dallas newspaper back in 1993 about the cost of health insurance, for example. And Washington, to my knowledge, is not coming to save the day on that. So it's one of those things where we decide, we are going to earmark that X percent of our budget that we're going to provide this benefit. And then we get into the mechanics of, well, what do you want to provide? Because you start with health insurance coverage. But then you have people like, what about dental? And what about vision? And then, what about, well, we want to be a good employee or employer. I want to give people some life coverage as well, and maybe some disability coverage, whether it's short or long term. But all of a sudden, you start building an entire package, including EAP, the employee assistance stuff. You're like, whoa, OK, again, I don't have a limited budget for this still. again, it's definitely. discretionary, we're custom making a benefits plan for you. when you when a client asks me from a health insurance standpoint, I have my traditional PPO and I have my health savings account options, which one should I pick? I can spend hours talking about why I think a health savings account or a high deductible health plan which lets you have a health savings account. Why that's the best bet for most employees from a never use it catastrophic use it in between use it. But when I go do a Mark Frederiksen (58:27.477) open enrollment and talk to people about the plan, there's definitely an educational standpoint where people have that comfort level of a PPO, but it's inherently more expensive and maybe not what's best for that employee. But it takes time and education to talk through it. Now, again, the partners on that end of it, like I love the resources that the HSA banks provide to help employers explain to their employees how to maximize the benefit out of I think people think they got to be a CPA to maximize an HSA plan and the account. mean, accountants certainly know that and every accountant knows like, I get the math on that. I'm going to do that immediately. But the HSA banks is your bank in that regard and you got to get educated. It's all education on that because Hari Vasudevan (59:14.192) I mean, HSA, ultimately, the money is yours. Absolutely, it's not like the FSA where you got to use it or lose it. number one, number two is it stays with you when you change employers. Mark Frederiksen (59:17.899) Yes, it's not user to lose it. Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (59:27.359) It stays with you. You can use it on things that are not just health insurance. Like any small business, I'll say, look, maybe you don't need dental and vision. If you have a high deductible plan and then offer the HSA account to the employees, they can use that money to pay for dental and vision. With the idea still being like, we're still trying to help the employees be good consumers. That's the other thing we got to remember. We're picking an exactly right. Hari Vasudevan (59:53.026) educated consumers of healthcare because we don't know what the hell we're paying for. Mark Frederiksen (59:56.991) Yeah, right. We don't want them out of the office because like, I'm having to wait to go see a doctor 50 miles away because you gave me a crappy health plan that didn't have any local doctors in my network. It's like, but that costs money. And so it's still a conscious decision by the employer to say, is that benefits important that I've reached that point? I have a critical mass of employees that I can't grow and scale until I provide a benefit. But then what does that benefit look like? Christian Frederiksen (01:00:03.362) you Hari Vasudevan (01:00:23.524) Yeah, honestly, you know, from an insurance standpoint, one of the key, I mean, you're hitting a very important point, you know, going 50 miles away to see a doctor. Right. And we can't really happen more often than we we appreciate on this discussion. Right. But, you know, one of the things that I've always tried to do is, hey, if my employees are focused on health care or lack thereof, they're not focused on serving the customer. Right. which invariably affects your business, right? It becomes your business at the end of the day. So how can you provide, how can you actually really dive into this complex topic, understand it, and honestly help your employees understand it, make the right decisions, and give them something that is important to the business, right? You really does affect the business if you don't have good benefits. Keep going. Mark Frederiksen (01:01:22.125) No, and 100 % agree. we understand our role. There's bad agents always, bad insurances. But most of us are good, here for good at least. But that's the kind of advice. Look, in a way, we look at this, you're a free agent every year because you renew every year most of these policies. So we're not locking into something forever per se. You may be locked in like, look, I know I'm going to provide a benefit, but what does that benefit package look like? That can adapt year to year. You want to have You don't have to look forward to this conversation every year with your agent, but you want to have the conversation every year with your agent to say, look, we've grown. Our expectations from our employees are now this. But I realize I've got a limited budget and I can't just spend all of our revenue on benefits. And so you got to find those balances, the risk tolerance levels of the employer. Like, look, I will do this. And some obviously have to be super generous based on the competitive industry that they're in. and we want to help them still tailor that plan to what best meets their needs. And some you get like these small nonprofits, for example, like, look, I'm not as confident about my revenue sources since they are foundations and the government and individual donors that kind of see this as a year to year proposition as well. So you basically just want to guide them through it. Like I said, we want to navigate for them and say, here are your options. Let's figure out what best. Hari Vasudevan (01:02:38.693) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (01:02:47.413) meets your needs right now and it may be different next year. And then if that is, we'll talk next year. Hari Vasudevan (01:02:53.006) Yeah, I mean, honestly, some of the things is right. The educating the employees piece becomes very critical because when I look at my own scenario, I kind of do the math. It's like, OK, four thousand dollar deductible is thousand bucks. Twelve thousand dollar deductible is, I don't know, five hundred bucks a month. Right. If I did the math many times, the the extra deductible kind of washes. with the lower premium that I'm paying or something like that, vice versa. So it doesn't make really any sense. So you can actually put that money in your HSA account, it for a rainy day as opposed to, if you don't really need a health insurance, why would you buy something that you don't need? And we ended up contributing 300 bucks a month or 400 bucks a month, something like that, to our employees HSA account, which essentially is their money. We're not paying it for premiums. Mark Frederiksen (01:03:23.585) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:03:48.804) But hey, they can use it even after they leave the company if ever there was a need for health insurance, right? Mark Frederiksen (01:03:52.855) Yeah. It's effectively was a bonus because to your point, it's their money. can can investment that their HSA bank will help them figure out how to maximize that that tax free dollar for them. But again, it's it's it's it's you know, that can change for each company doing that math. Like, why am I paying for such a low deductible applies to almost every insurance? Like, I'm not turning into claim that low. Why am I paying for a deductible that low? My strategy, my my my policy term should match the strategy that I'm going to have. If someone's going to call me and I'm going to talk them out of turning in a small auto claim, well then why am I going to let them have a $500 deductible? You can't get out of a body shop between the parts of labor for under X amount anyway. And I know the insurance underwriter will take that claim and use it against us, so to speak, for three to five years. It'll stay in our record. And over that time, we might pay more in premium than what the claim check we got. Hari Vasudevan (01:04:49.071) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (01:04:49.589) And we can't know everything going forward, but we can take some of those simple strategies. I've used the term strategy more often from the risk management standpoint in the past few years than ever, because you have to. basically, because the premiums are going up, you're like, OK, well, I can't just afford just to pay for a low deductible. And it's not even appropriate for how my people are using the plan anyway. We want to have those conversations, basically. Hari Vasudevan (01:05:12.409) Yeah. 100%. So, know, Christian, let me bring you into this super sexy conversation about health insurance, right? So have you ever had a super high-end healthcare at a low premium with zero deductible? What's your experience been on that? Christian Frederiksen (01:05:22.048) Ha ha ha. Christian Frederiksen (01:05:33.122) No, no, I'm not. Yeah, and I don't deal much with the health insurance plans, those type things. I kind of defer that to the marks of the world. Hari Vasudevan (01:05:45.774) Yeah, but you know, as a consumer, let me ask this to you from a not as a legal counsel in this case, right, but as a consumer, right. And obviously as an employee as well. Right. What's your take? What would what's your take on health insurance in terms of how you make selections as an employee for your family and things like as a consumer, essentially? Christian Frederiksen (01:06:08.992) Yeah, no, to be honest with you, I let my wife do it. Mark Frederiksen (01:06:15.777) But that's a common, but honestly, you joke, that's what you hear, my spouse does it because there's always a lead spouse, right, that says, okay, I care more about this than you do. And then you're like, what are we paying? I don't know, what's our deductible? That happens all the time. Hari Vasudevan (01:06:30.746) Yeah. Christian Frederiksen (01:06:30.838) Why happens this happened for 25 years here, but she knows better what the kids need, what kind of coverages, you know, and what's going on. So she, you know, she's the one that kind of runs that show for me. So I know. Hari Vasudevan (01:06:44.058) Yeah, no, that's... Mark Frederiksen (01:06:45.079) Well, and at that point I was going to say, so when we have an open enrollment, like a lot of times it's like you have the employees there, but sometimes it's the spouse that you want to participate because they're the, to Christian's point, they're the ones with the questions. They're the ones seeing the doctor and arranging that, or not that they don't care more than the other spouse, you know, the parent does, but like we, we know who's more invested in the decision. And so, you know, we have to keep that in mind too, that whatever we tell the employees, they may not be the decision maker on their own plan. They may be taking that information home and saying, these are the options. So you gotta make sure that you kind of keep it on a layman's term enough, but then open enough, like if they have a question, be available to answer questions. Hari Vasudevan (01:07:28.4) No, honestly, mean, know, Christian, what you said is actually 100 % spot on because all these different things that I mentioned here, STD, LTD, all these kind of things, hospital indemnity, they all came through recommendations from somebody's spouse. It never came from an employee, right? Somebody said, hey, why don't you add STD? Why don't you add LTD? I believe somebody's wife is pregnant and they were like, hey, can we have Christian Frederiksen (01:07:47.927) Mm. Mark Frederiksen (01:07:49.965) you Hari Vasudevan (01:07:58.096) indemnity here and I looked into it we added that right so I think these are all things that you know we joke but it's actually super super important so that's good stuff there so you know gentlemen is there anything that we missed I know it's super high-level discussion here that we've had but we still went in depth we can always go deeper into insurance is there anything that we missed so far in the key aspect of insurance but I was gonna go into AI next anything else we need to talk about Christian Frederiksen (01:08:28.706) I think we're good. Mark Frederiksen (01:08:29.847) think we've used all of our words already on the insurance. Isn't there a word count limit here? Did you pay for the extra plan? You need to pay for the extra plan when you put a couple of Fredrickson's in the room. You know, we're going to use all the words, Hari Vasudevan (01:08:33.456) Thank Christian Frederiksen (01:08:34.464) Hehehehe Hari Vasudevan (01:08:40.784) You know, I actually, you know, I want to ask about multi-plan, right? And plan administrators, Mark, you know, there's this big New York Times investigation about multi-plan and how they get paid, how, you know, doctors don't get paid, you know, the patients get screwed literally, but the multi-plan guys, they make a lot of money by giving supposedly discounts and things like that. Right, as a risk advisor, right, how can you help companies navigate those hidden industry issues out there. Mark Frederiksen (01:09:16.397) Yeah, to me that's always an example of there's always going to be these investigations that there's always some bad actors not doing the right thing and what's best for the customer. And I get from an insurance standpoint, holistically, all parts of insurance when the premiums are where they are and how high they are, people are looking for alternatives. And And sometimes you're like, look, from my standpoint, you're like, there's no way someone can price that like that. They can't make money. It's too good to be true, but it's hard to talk your client out of it sometimes without basically digging into it to figure out like, look, is that what's best for me? Like they're not all Ponzi schemes, but there's definitely scenarios where there's like, now some people are going to call every insurance company a bad actor, right? I get it. Haha. like, which and we've earned the reputation, don't get me wrong, like there's a reason I will always have a job. Yes, there is. Yep. And they are right. That's the part of the problem. Like there's always opportunities. Well, there's insurance companies going wrong here, going wrong here. But that's where like everything that you point, what you mentioned earlier, the education part of it, we at least want to steer people like, look, let's Hari Vasudevan (01:10:11.856) There's a weekly Wall Street Journal article seems like they have a paid reporter on. Mark Frederiksen (01:10:34.273) Let's get the information on it. Let's look at it. It may work for you, but here's the questions that the clients don't know to ask. that AI these days, as we get to that, might be able to tell you, but may not. And that's where the value of having a consultant like me or Christian or whatever, or like what you have done for your clients. It's like, you don't know what questions to ask. What's important. Like I can see AI is telling me this, but like, I don't know how to evaluate it for what my company needs and if and and we certainly want to help them avoid the pitfalls and that like man it sounded too good to be true but I had to investigate it and I did it and a couple years later they realized that was a catastrophe. Mark why didn't you talk me out of it? Like well I mean sometimes we can't predict the future you know so it's like that's definitely a scenario what you're talking about is one where it's like look there's resources out there and there are agents with big companies and small companies, we're all agents. you know, find an agent that you trust, that you have relationship with, that can help you navigate and find out these options and then go from there. Because you're always going to find a problem with an insurance company. Always, always. And so that's always going to be there. Hari Vasudevan (01:11:49.996) That's good. So, know, Christian, let's bring you in here, right? So let's bring you into AI. So one year down the road, am I going to talk to Christian Fredrickson or am I going to talk to Chad GPT or Gemini or whatever? XAI? What's your take? How is AI impacting your profession, legal profession? And obviously, Mark, you can go next. Christian Frederiksen (01:12:18.882) You're always going to talk to a person, I think. You're going be talking to me. Now, you may be reading some of my work product that's AI, and this AI-generated, that has really caught fire. In the past year, it was funny because you read it, and it would say exactly what you wanted it to say, and you're ready to file it with the court. But then you actually check the legal authorities that were being cited, and they're all made up. Now it's changed considerably since then. So yeah, can submit this, but this is a case, Your Honor, that didn't exist. mean, it says, it's perfect language. But now it's gotten a lot better and people, you can tell they're using it. mean, people that I've dealt with before never wrote this well. They certainly do now. So all the written filings are gonna be cleaned up. someone's gotta go into that courtroom and argue a case. Or quite frankly, someone needs to build a relationship up front with the you can't do that over the computer. There's got to be a personal touch there, a human factor to it. So I think there's always going to be that. yes, more and more of the work is being generated by these programs. We're all getting trained in it, to be sure we know. I guess, fortunately, it saves us time. It does save us time and it saves the client's money. But it is fortunate that they are becoming more, the programs are becoming more more accurate and you can, you you still got to check everything. You just can't trust it and file it, some people do and they got in trouble for it. You know, but it's like I said, it's getting a lot better and so we are definitely going to be relying on it for the written portions of our practice. Hari Vasudevan (01:13:54.233) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:14:07.568) It's good to be a litigator, I guess. Right. You need to go into the courtroom and litigate at the end of the day. Right. So. But, know, question, you know, I was reading about the impact of AI on different professions and one of the profound impacts is going to be on legal professions for exactly what you just said. And, you know, they were saying how it could actually fundamentally change how the business of law works. Right. Instead of hourly billing, it could be Christian Frederiksen (01:14:13.046) Right. Hari Vasudevan (01:14:37.813) it could go into impact based billing and things like that. What's your take on Christian Frederiksen (01:14:42.754) No, I think it's going to affect even the billing, as you say, it has changed over the past year and a half and it's become a lot more complex. But it's going to be, I think the way we build is going to change. It's not necessarily just going to be by the hour, here's what we charge. And, you know, I worked an hour and a half on this. There's going to be, well, AI has generated this filing for me or whatnot. I didn't spend an hour and half. I didn't have to. I spent, you know, 30 minutes. It's going to save money, but it's also going to affect, as you say, the billing. But there's also a little bit of that. You have to know what to plug into the computer to get it to spit out what you need it to say. But that's going to be an interesting field of what happens on the billing, finance side, administrative side of the law firms. Hari Vasudevan (01:15:23.758) Yes. No. Hari Vasudevan (01:15:33.466) Got it, got it, got it. Mark, over to you. What's your take and how is it going to impact the insurance side of the business? Am I going to talk to you large, Hayden, or is it all going to be chat, GPT or Gemini? Mark Frederiksen (01:15:40.871) Mark Frederiksen (01:15:47.479) think like to Christian's point, it won't all be that. But it's definitely a tool that's being, you can't say slowly embraced. It's in nascent stages still for us. But there's still a lot of repetitive administrative tasks. Like, look, it'd be great to have a tool that we can use that would be more accurate than a human's, some things like that. Just make sure it says and does what we need it to do to get that part right. eliminate mistakes. mean, I don't don't I don't fear AI that's ever going to take my job because like, like who wants my job first off, you know, hey, if you want it, here you go AI come have it right. But but there's always going to be that, to me, like the human touch part of this, but like, but again, it's just another tool that if it helps me do my job better than then we want to embrace it, we want to use it. And so We will see, we're seeing slow adoption, so to speak, kind of waiting for a couple of the tools to arrive, the insurance specific that become the leaders in the clubhouse. we're all kind of confident, yeah, okay, that's been tailor-made to what our agency does because there's thousands of agencies in America, just like the thousands of law firms. So we're all kind of waiting, like, okay, what becomes the standard? But we'll get there and we'll all be using it, just like email and any other tool we have. It's a tool that we can use for good so we can do other things with it. And frankly, for me, it's like, if I can eliminate the repetitive task, free up my time to have like the risk management conversations with people, I'm hoping they're using AI to free up their time so we can talk about things that AI can't answer for us. And even if they can't answer, it can still be a guide, but like it could be a guide for us, okay, what should we talking about? And I get for me, like education again, coming back around to it, Industry is confusing enough. So anything that helps a customer understand their policy or the options like I'm all for it. And so We'll get there like to be point like by this time next year I don't know but this time in five years like who knows the pace the acceleration of technology and It's like we went from stone tablets to paper. my god, we're going away from stone tablets What's gonna happen? Like hey, you know what guys? Hari Vasudevan (01:17:53.519) Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (01:18:13.037) We're going to figure it out. We're going to realize the uses that we're going to use it for. There'll be bad uses for it, and there'll be good, positive improvements that we can all benefit from, 100%. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:18:24.016) 100 percent, 100 percent. Good stuff. Christian Frederiksen (01:18:24.642) I'm on that add one more thing. You know, you could expect that every phone call and every meeting that you're having, especially on the legal side is going to be recorded. Because rather than me sit there and take notes of a phone call or meeting, we record it and it gets a summary gets spit out to us is just spot on. Hari Vasudevan (01:18:36.122) Yeah. Christian Frederiksen (01:18:46.836) It's kind of even better organized than my notes would be. And so, you know, that's just kind of an important thing I would say to the people listening. Hey, expect that if you're dealing with lawyers or, you know, maybe to an insurance agent, you're going to be recorded and all your conversations will be summarized and noted. So we'll know, you ought to be considered doing the same, you know, but it's, it's, it's interesting. It has really been helpful to be honest with you, to be able to record those conversations. Mark Frederiksen (01:19:14.573) Hurry, what's the irony that AI is, Christian, you're gonna have to say all that over again because AI disrupted your. Christian Frederiksen (01:19:23.084) Kind of like Forrest Gump. Mark Frederiksen (01:19:27.117) You broke up right when you were going to say, here's how AI is going to help everything. then the guy with the bad internet connection is bragging about AI. And then AI won't let you say good things about it because you just went all choppy on us. Sorry. Christian Frederiksen (01:19:37.195) Okay. Hari Vasudevan (01:19:41.104) You know, you can go back and talk about how you actually talked about note taking. We'll give you a second shot. AI wouldn't, but Mark and Hari are going to give you a second shot. Christian Frederiksen (01:19:41.664) I feel like I'm being censored here. Mark Frederiksen (01:19:53.439) Yeah, there you go. Christian Frederiksen (01:19:54.274) Fair enough. mean, basically, to keep it shorter this time, am I out or can you hear me? Mark Frederiksen (01:19:56.749) Ah, yeah, there you see, there you go. Christian Frederiksen (01:20:04.194) Can y'all hear me? Okay. No, I mean, yes, it is apparently. Long story short is, look, you can record meetings and phone calls and it's a real helpful tool, but everybody should expect that they're being recorded. Hari Vasudevan (01:20:04.676) Now you can hear you. You're going in and out. I think AI is a good friend of yours. Hari Vasudevan (01:20:21.498) Yeah, I think you know Christian you're freezing up, let me let me summarize what you're saying to our audience here, right? Essentially AI can record meetings you expect. You know your meetings with lawyers to be recorded in the notes and summary that AI spits out is better than what you know better organized than what your own notes even would be. Is that a reasonable way to summarize it? Christian Frederiksen (01:20:49.846) Better organized, better, and more accurate probably. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:20:53.144) Yeah, no harm percent. That's that's that's great stuff there. So so let's kind of wrap this up here, gentlemen, obviously. Right. So it's going to some rapid fire questions. Right. Longhorn fans here. We started it started the show with Longhorns. I'm assuming you guys have attended at least one long on football game here. Both of you. Right. Favorite long on game that you've attended. Why? I'll go with Mark first. Mark Frederiksen (01:21:22.772) Um, God, there was a game when we were in school and Houston was, uh, like an up and coming powerhouse. Is that yours? Okay. Then you know, I'll take the other game. The other game I had was, um, uh, my brother, Christian's cousin worked for city Dallas and, uh, for the city manager's office. City manager couldn't go to Texas. Oh, you game gave my brother his tickets. I said, well, Paul, we got to go. You got to go to a Texas. Oh, you game at the cotton bowl. Cause you got to see. Christian Frederiksen (01:21:27.682) I can't take mine. The exact same one, 1991. Mark Frederiksen (01:21:51.457) this side, burnt orange and this side red or white or whatever, but the color differentiated and how one side of the stadium erupts and the other side is super quiet. And, and they're great seats, right into governor Bush, you know, all the celebrities that are there just part of it. But it was, it was the weirdest thing because it's like in the mid nineties, like the game ended in a tie. Usually when this game is over everyone's streaming out of the cotton ball into the state fair saying I gotta get my corny dog and you sucks right on our side and then they're saying the same for UT and horns down all this stuff someone's trash talking someone else But it was like completely quiet Everyone is coming out of the stadium Like it was just so like it was just kind of funny to see like like no one's happy because it was a tie you'd rather lost or won Hari Vasudevan (01:22:38.224) There's a diet. Hari Vasudevan (01:22:44.346) You just. Mark Frederiksen (01:22:45.838) But tie was the worst possible scenario. And so it was kind of funny to watch that. But it's a great game to go to, just especially because of the rivalry and all that stuff. But it was like, I remember that one up. And it might be, I don't know how many ties there have been, but there won't be another tie ever. That'll be the last tie. So at least trash talking will be able to resume for the rest of our lives, right? Yeah, we gotta have a winner. Hari Vasudevan (01:22:48.024) Interesting, that's a good deal. Hari Vasudevan (01:23:05.134) Yeah, yeah, because rules have changed and you know all these kind of things, right? So yeah, Christian, hopefully your video works and let's go. Christian Frederiksen (01:23:14.402) Well, as Mark was saying, 1991, was a Thursday, I believe it was Thursday night game in Austin where we played Houston and Houston came in shockingly top, you one of the top teams in the nation and we knocked them off. It was the most electric stadium I've ever been in. You know, and they've added thousands of seats since then, but just being there as a junior in college sitting there, you know, I may have been with Mark, but regardless, one of the most electric and it hasn't been replaced. I haven't seen anything since then. I've been to the Sugar Bowl and to obviously the Texas OU every year, gone to other bowl games. I've stopped doing that because we tend to lose when I go. bad luck, I just watched it on TV. that Houston game in college was probably the one that just really hooked me on UT football. Mark Frederiksen (01:23:58.401) He's banned, yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:24:06.542) Yeah, interesting. That's good. Yeah. Okay. All right. Arch Manning. Overhyped or you know, he's got the skills. What's your take? Mark. Mark Frederiksen (01:24:08.279) Pun intended. Yes, Christian got hooked. Yeah Mark Frederiksen (01:24:23.629) I think he'll I think he's got skills like I mean he does he's talented enough, but it's interesting to see that You know if you're a UT person you see you think Vince Young just carried the team all the way to a championship But you forget the job the defense had to do against USC Just to keep us in that game until Vince Young could work his magic So, you know, you still need the team you need good coaching and I'm I'm pro NIL, pro Portal, like these athletes, they're not students, they're athletes. This is basically minor league professional stuff. Let them get paid. yeah, it has, which is great. Yeah, like I said, any team could do anything at any time. And you're only angry because it's not your team doing it. Like how dare Texas Tech spend money and get players and get good, you know, type of thing. It's like, you know what? Hari Vasudevan (01:25:00.772) Yeah. And honestly, it's leveled the playing field, right? You got Miami and India. Christian Frederiksen (01:25:06.715) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:25:12.698) Yeah. Yeah. Mark Frederiksen (01:25:19.605) Everyone else is doing it. Let's just make it above board and just admit what we're doing. And then people enjoy spending their money in that way and have at it. But I think Arch Manning will hopefully to Christian's point, we'll have a better year this year because we'll just have better team around them. Hari Vasudevan (01:25:31.824) Yeah, and he's got one year of, you know, real games. And honestly, you know, talking about NIL, I'm actually pro NIL as well, because, you know, for all the reasons you just stated. Plus, you know, at this time of the year, at some point it got boring, right? Alabama, Alabama, Alabama LSU, right? Georgia. It's like now it's like, honestly, it's, you know, anybody can compete in your right. Texas Tech has a few billionaires who are willing to spend. there you go mark cuban is willing to spend for iu there you go right and ut i mean lots of people are they're willing to buy players which is good good for the market good for players good for the schools and honestly good for the game right so christian Christian Frederiksen (01:26:19.009) To answer your question about Artich I think it's both. think he's overhyped and I think he will eventually live up to his talent. And I think he showed that like the second half of the season really started coming into his own. I think he was a bit overwhelming there at the beginning of the year for him. But I mean, he had very limited experience. So I think he really came along and, you know, again, adding these new players I think will can only help him. Hari Vasudevan (01:26:34.629) Yeah. Christian Frederiksen (01:26:43.682) I'm glad he's not even given any thought to trying to go to NFL or, you know, I think he's good enough to one where your experience I think will really help. So. Hari Vasudevan (01:26:51.256) Yeah, you can at least. And candidly, some of these guys are willing to stay six years in college now because they're already getting paid, right? Christian Frederiksen (01:26:57.536) Yeah. Right, exactly. Mark Frederiksen (01:27:02.059) Yeah, that's where the money is there. mean, again, I appreciate you not talking at all about the Cowboys because I we're talking about legitimate football teams, not that UT plays that way either. You know. Hari Vasudevan (01:27:13.232) Anyway, you know, maybe we should talk about the Mavericks or not, right? Because it's like I'm a huge Mavericks fan or I was, right? Until they traded Luka and Adjit. So, anyway, it's a nuts. Christian Frederiksen (01:27:18.73) Christian Frederiksen (01:27:27.85) I kind of wish they'd stop winning. They won again last night. I wish they'd stop winning so we get a better draft pick, you know. Mark Frederiksen (01:27:28.78) Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:27:33.36) It is the only draft pick that we control through 2031 or something like that, right? So it's crazy. Gentlemen, honestly, it's been an honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on the show and, you know, educating the audience a little bit about insurance and a little bit about business law and how to set up companies. And hopefully we'll do it again sometime in the future. Christian Frederiksen (01:27:35.692) I know. Right, so. Mark Frederiksen (01:28:02.125) Yeah, I was going to say, there a prize if anyone who's listened this far past all the insurance talk and then the UT talk? think if there's any non-insurance Aggies, they didn't make it past five minutes in, right? that I get. But if anyone has made it this far, contact Harry, he'll have a prize for you. Congratulations. Yeah. Hari Vasudevan (01:28:12.88) You're right. Hari Vasudevan (01:28:18.992) All right. Christian Frederiksen (01:28:21.056) Yep, thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. Sorry about the technical glitches at the beginning, I guess in the middle too. Hari Vasudevan (01:28:26.634) Yes, yes, mean, no worries. mean, you just proved that you're a great attorney, so you don't need tech. Take care, guys. Bye-bye. Christian Frederiksen (01:28:32.658) Something like that. Okay, thank you. Bye. Mark Frederiksen (01:28:38.657) Awesome. Thanks guys. Bye.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mark and Christian Frederiksen

Mark Frederiksen is the President of Frederiksen & Frederiksen, a fourth-generation independent insurance agency headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that has been serving clients since 1949. With deep roots in both personal and commercial lines, Mark specializes in helping entrepreneurs and growing businesses build holistic risk management programs — not just buy policies. His approach centers on two core principles: navigating clients through the complex insurance landscape and advocating on their behalf with underwriters to secure the best possible coverage and terms. Christian Frederiksen is a business and construction litigation attorney with over 30 years of practice experience. His work focuses on helping companies navigate complex contracts, manage liability exposure, and resolve disputes — ideally before they escalate into litigation. Christian is a strong advocate for involving legal counsel early in the entrepreneurial journey, particularly at the contract negotiation stage, where strategic guidance on payment terms, indemnification clauses, intellectual property protections, and dispute resolution mechanisms can prevent costly outcomes years down the road.

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