Exploring Life & Business with Ryan James of Liberty Adjusters

Key Highlights:

  • Former 20 years in financial planning and wealth management

  • When you are presented with challenges where success is the only way to survive, you have to become resourceful and creative in finding solutions to problems.

  • Most people will only file one property damage claim in their lifetime

  • Contact our team, led by Ryan James, for quality insurance adjusting. 

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan James.

Hi Ryan, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?


After a 20-year career working primarily in wealth management and financial planning in the financial industry, I decided I had had enough of corporate America. In 2015, I decided it was time for a career change and I spent a number of months reviewing my options. During that time I came across a Public Adjuster who explained to me what he did. Since I previously suffered through the yearlong insurance nightmare that I experienced after having ridden through the eye of Hurricane Charlie, I really saw value in what he did. I felt this is a service that can really make a difference in people’s lives who are going through tough hardships. Long story short, that conversation is what eventually led to my starting a Public Adjusting office in Tampa.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?


With any business, you don’t know what you don’t know. I think my struggles have been similar to most entrepreneurs. Figuring out how to find clients on a limited budget while creating a company from scratch takes creativity. In the beginning, I spent a lot of hours face-to-face networking, trying to find business. As time went on and I got busier, I had less time to network but because I wasn’t networking as much business would decline. Then I’d go back out and network. It was this vicious up and down back and forth of finding business then being too busy to look for more. I eventually started investing money into marketing which did lead to more business. So much business that I couldn’t keep up and was regularly working 15 plus hours a day. This was not where I wanted to be so I hired other public adjusters to come work for me. The problem was they all had their own way of doing things. This made it hard to keep up with them and maintain my brand and quality of service. So I changed the way I was doing business. I hired people to support me. I broke down all of the functions I did as a public adjuster and wrote down processes for each one. Then I started hiring people to assist me in the areas that did not require a license. In areas that do require a license, I hire licensed people to help me with those tasks. But I no longer use individual public adjusters to work the entire claim from start to finish. I oversee every claim myself from start to finish but with a lot of help from my team.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Liberty Adjusters?


I really enjoy helping people and this job is very rewarding. Insurance companies don’t make money by paying insurance claims, they make money by collecting premiums. The insurance claims process is designed to be difficult to navigate. What’s more, is most people will only file one property insurance claim in their lifetime. This puts consumers at a major disadvantage when filing a property insurance claim. These companies have invested greatly to keep the amount they pay to a minimum and the laws tend to lean in their favor. My job is to be an advocate for the property owners who are trying to collect the money they are entitled to. I understand policy language and how things like building codes and Florida laws apply to the claim. The insurance companies rely on consumers’ lack of knowledge to take advantage of them. In short, we take the burden of the claims process off of the shoulders of property owners while collecting a great deal more money than they can on their own. We manage the entire claims process from start to finish so they never have to talk to the insurance company. We also have been successful in reopening closed denied and underpaid claims to get the settlement people are entitled to. The best part is there is no out-of-pocket cost to using our service. We are paid on a contingency which means we only get paid if and after our clients get paid.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?


I became a full-time single father at 19 and I don’t have a college degree. I feel when you are presented with challenges where success is the only way to survive, you have to become resourceful and creative in finding solutions to problems. I also know what it’s like to have nothing, work hard for years on end to build something great only to lose it all, and have to start over. There’s no such thing as luck. You just have to always be looking for or trying to create opportunities for yourself and when they come, be prepared to act………. and take risks.

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This article was originally published in Voyage Tampa on August 17, 2021.

 
 

If you’d like to get the fairest settlement you can to repair your home or business, lean on Liberty Adjusters.