Brianna Maury just found out she’s been selected for grand jury duty, which will eat up every afternoon for the next month. But Maury isn’t stressed one bit about how this will affect her business. In fact, the glass-half-full insurance broker says she feels “amazing.”
“Those are my least productive hours of the day anyway,” she laughs. “And I’m thinking about it as my legal internship for the summer.”
Known as one-half of the creative force behind Brooklyn-based startup LoftOpera, the 26-year-old entrepreneur is also the co-founder of Royce, a company that helps small businesses navigate their insurance options.
“One of my passions is making insurance really accessible to both women and millennials,” says the WeWork Dumbo Heights member. “I feel like people my age, or even a little bit younger, see insurance as a field for soulless financiers, which it is not. One of my huge goals for this company is to change the way people think about insurance. It’s actually a really beautiful, fascinating, and human-centric field.”
As for the company’s name, it refers to Maury’s 93-year-old friend Royce.
“She is the toughest and most brilliant person I know,” says Maury. “She moved to the city in the ’40s as a fashion designer. She is one of those epic New York women who only wears black. She sends emojis now too.”
Below, Maury shares her best advice for small business owners shopping for insurance.
1. Think ahead. “The truth is that everyone who runs their own business thinks that nothing bad will ever happen to them, but that is very not true,” says Maury. “It doesn’t even need to be a high limit, but everyone needs general liability because even as an Etsy store owner, for example, if you sell a faulty product and it ends up hurting someone, Etsy will not be held liable. You will.”
2. Consider your employees. “You really do need some sort of corporate governance structure, even when you only have five to 10 employees,” says Maury. “A lot of small companies I’m seeing are making huge mistakes that are opening them up to employment practice liability problems. If you fire someone without putting them on a plan before you fire them, or you fire someone that was pregnant and you didn’t know they were pregnant, you can be really open to a lawsuit and get in big trouble.”
3. Talk to a broker. “For venture-backed companies—I know I meet a lot of them in WeWork—every time you go to raise a round, your venture capitalist is going to ask you to get directors and officers insurance,” says Maury. “General liability pretty much works across the board because it’s a very standard policy type. But for directors and officers, you need to actually talk to a broker, sit down with them, talk about your needs. Because depending on what kind of business you run, a policy could just not even react at all if something goes wrong with your company.”