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Last year, as other insurance companies fled from California, one startup launched with the goal to help homeowners in the highest-risk areas get coverage. The startup, called Stand, believes that by making targeted design changes, homes can become resilient enough that theyre feasible to insure. While the company focuses on retrofits for existing homes, the same strategies apply to houses built from scratch. We talked to Stands CEO about what homeowners should consider as they begin to rebuild in L.A.and how the right decisions could not just protect residents but begin to deal with the state’s insurance crisis. Protect yourself from the house next door In Pacific Palisades, part of the fire danger came from the fact that homes were densely packed together. If the home next door is burning, thats a problem for your own house not just because the flames may spread, but because the blast of heat can cause damage. One small step that can help: using tempered glass in windows. In any window thats facing anything burning, one of the biggest risk points is that the glass will break from the heat, and then embers will fall inside, says Stand CEO Dan Preston. Its a way a lot of these homes ultimately burn down. So you want to have tempered glass, which dramatically improves the odds that it wont break. Other materials on the house should also be fire-resistant, from the siding to the roof, to protect them from embers blowing through the air. A tall stucco wall between yards can also help stop the spread of fire. In the L.A. fires, some of the homes that survived had this feature. Built-in sprinkler systems, which spray exterior walls with water and flame retardant, are another solution. (One example is from a company called Frontline, which makes a system that attaches to a house with reserves of water and foam, and which automatically turns on when a fire is within range of a house.) Preston says his team had previously been cautious about how well sprinkler systems work. But the recent fires proved their effectiveness. Weve found a couple of examples where they basically saved the home, he says. When rebuilding from scratch, homeowners should also consider a new layout. If a house has a smaller footprint, for example, that means there can be more space between it and the neighbors. If theres at least 15 feet between your home and the next one, as long as your house is built with the right materials, your chances of surviving are much higher, says Preston. [Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images] Keep embers out Terrifying videos from the L.A. fires show embers flying through the air, propelled by hurricane-force winds. Most houses in wildfires ignite because embers make their way through gaps at the bottom or top of the building. Once an ember gets inside, its hard to avoid the house burning down. Making sure that theres flashing (thin strips of metal) around the edges of your house, and that vents are covered with an ember-proof mesh, can keep embers out. These are not huge changeshundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars of changes, says Preston. They can be pretty minor things. And that can be the difference between losing your multi-million-dollar home or not. Jim and Nancy Evans’ Malibu home survived the Palisades fire even though many of his neighbors’ homes didn’t. After the Evans’ previous house on the same lot burned down in a wildfire in 1993, he rebuilt a fire-resilient structure with a metal roof, steel-reinforced walls with cinderblock at the bottom, double-paned windows and 6 feet of stone encircling the house, clear of vegetation. The rest of his yard is landscaped with fire-resilient succulents and oak trees. Evans believes his home survived due to its hardened design and defensible space. Photographed on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 in Malibu, CA. [Photo: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images] Maintain defensible space The first five feet around a housewhat fire agencies call “Zone 0″is the most critical place to avoid having flammable objects, whether that’s wooden deck chairs, trash cans, or a pile of dead leaves. If embers fly into your yard and ignite something close to your home, it’s almost inevitable that the fire will spread to the house itself. Inside that five-foot buffer zone, the ideal landscaping might be stones and small, high-moisture plants like cactus. A little farther away from the house, it’s fine to have trees, though the type of tree matters. (One of the lessons of the L.A. fires was that palm trees are especially flammable, since they tend to have dead branches near the top; native oak trees are safer.) Trees also need to be trimmed correctly. Stand uses models to advise homeowners about where limbs should be cut to make it less likely that the crown can catch on fire. If a house is built with the safest materials, there’s more flexibility with landscaping. “If you have tempered glass and you have fire-resistant siding, you can actually have more vegetation near the home because it’s less likely that the home will be lost in those cases,” Preston says. The more that houses are built and retrofitted with these strategies in mind, he says, the more that insurance rates can go down. That’s true not just for the individual homeowners making changes, but for the market as a whole. “The thing that really drives insurance costs is not just the likelihood that your home will burn down in a year, it’s the likelihood that your whole neighborhood gets lost,” he says. “If you could demonstrate that these fires no longer burn down 10,000 homes, but burn down 10, it’s not going to just reduce your insurance costs by 10% or 20%. It could cut it in half.”
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E-Commerce
Its 6:14 a.m. and you, the middle manager, wake up to the rumbling of your phone on your nightstand. You know you should have notifications silenced but your VPs time zone is three hours ahead and when they want an update, everyone is expected to drop everything. Seven unread Slack messages. Your stomach drops. The Q1 goals check-in was this morning and your direct report didnt update the slides with the latest metrics. You throw off the sheets, hit brew on the coffee maker, and open your laptop. Im on it! you respond and jump into the deck to make the changes. Your day was already slammed with meetings, but now you have to come up with time to give your team member feedback on missing those updates. Getting your 5-year-old out the door with matching shoes on is a piece of cake compared to the day you have ahead of you: 9:30 a.m.: Smooth things over with your VP after they got to the meeting with an incomplete deck. 10 a.m.: Team meeting to relay the plan ratified in the Q1 goals meeting, discussing each team members priorities and load balancing where necessary. 11 a.m.: Interview a new project coordinator candidate. 11:30 a.m.: Lead a cross-functional project kickoff meeting. 12:30 p.m.: Squeeze in the feedback meeting with your team who put the wrong updates in the deck. Listen to their counter feedback that its actually your fault because you didnt remind them the day before. 12:55 p.m.: Scarf down a sandwich at your desk. 1 p.m.: Talent review meeting with HR. 2 p.m.: 1:1 with a direct report to brainstorm the next steps on a project. 2:30 p.m.: Work on the project strategy deck for tomorrows review. 3 p.m.: Attend a meeting that four of your team members are also in 3:30 p.m.: Quick chat with a team member giving their two-week notice. 3:45 p.m.: Silently scream in a bathroom stall while rocking yourself, thinking about the mountain of work that the team member is leaving behind. 4 p.m.: The manager stops by to brief you on a new project to take on. 4:30 p.m.: Jump back onto the deck for tomorrows meeting. 5 p.m.: Race to the car to get to school in time for 5:30 p.m. daycare pickup. . . . and youll do it all again tomorrow. This is just a peek into the day in the life of a middle manager. Sounds like a little much? Research on context switching says it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus once weve stopped doing something, making the rapid-fire 30-minute back-to-back-to-backs a problem in and of itself. But these wouldnt be such an issue if the nature of the meetings were the same. Its not the volume of things thats the kicker, its the continual “altitude shifting” from strategic partner leading kickoff meetings with senior leaders to presentation designer building slides that someone else will present that makes the job of a manager so exhausting. As a former corporate middle manager myself, now a consultant and trainer of managers across companies big and small, the shift from big picture to granular over and over throughout the day prevents you from really feeling like you can contribute in a meaningful way. We might be sick of hearing about burnout, but people are still feeling it, big time. As recently as recently as 2023, according to Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index Report, 53% of managers reported feeling burned out, 5% more than their non-manager counterparts. No wonder some have resorted to ghosting their teams. So what do we do about it? Here are three simple ways to reduce the pain caused by altitude shifting. Group similar meetings Group together similar kinds of meetings on the same days, for example having all of your 1:1 meetings on Mondays to kick off the week or project meetings on Tuesdays when folks are in othe ffice together. When our calendar looks like Swiss cheese, we can get in the habit of slotting in meetings whenever we have a free moment, but this reinforces the overwhelm of having to operate at so many different levels in one day. You might not be able to make this change today, or even this week, but make it a goal to look two to three weeks ahead and start grouping similar meetings on the same days. Plan and schedule heads down time One of the biggest challenges created by meetings overload, something that pretty much every manager Ive ever worked with experiences, is that theres virtually no time for project work. This often means project work is left to the hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. before you finally pass out from exhaustion (and we wonder why were burning out). Instead of fitting work in where you can, plan for it. Find and schedule one to two hours every week for project time, during working hours, that you dont schedule over. This will allow you to get stuff done without incurring the cost of the 23 minutes lost from context switching. Delegate the small stuff Managers hate when I talk about delegating in the context of time management, but Im sorry, my friend, because it is your secret weapon for getting more time back. More than that, its going to get you to the right level of altitude you should be focused at, instead of dropping into the details all of the time. Look across all of the meetings you have each week and tasks on your plate, and identify what meaningful things you could hand off to a team member that will help you scale better. For example, invite a team member to do a first-round interview with a potential candidate, skip the meeting your team members are also in, and ask them to email you a recap, give that team member another chance on the slide updates, and let them own the deck. Handing these off (while setting clear expectations and defining what success looks like) allows you to spend more of your limited time actually leading your team. Ultimately, the middle manager’s role is to empower their teams to grow. Its impossible to do this when were too stuck in all the details and barely able to come up for air. Get ahead of this by actively managing your calendar, planning your work, and delegating effectively; you will not only have a team that rises to the challenge of taking more on, but your job will get a lot easier as a middle manager.
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E-Commerce
As you establish your career, you want to find a way to be seen as reliable. That means developing habits that enable you to be a consistent performer so that you are recognized as someone who will complete what you are asked to do, on time and with high quality. I used the word “habits” here on purpose. Being consistent is not something that is easy to do if you have to think about what to do in every situation. Instead, you need to have behaviors that you engage automatically each day that enable you to perform day in and day out. Here are a few ways to develop the critical habits that support your consistency: Have a solid routine One of the most significant factors that can hold you back from being consistent is the way you live your life overall. Being consistent at work means showing up on time and being able to concentrate effectively throughout the day. If you are consistently running late on the way to work, you will feel like youre playing catch-up all day. If your energy levels get low at key parts of the day, you are not going to be as productive. Perhaps the most important thing you can do to develop more consistency is to get regular sleep. There are individual differences in how much sleep people need, but most people need about eight hours of good sleep a night. As boring as it may seem, getting to bed at a consistent time each night is important. Avoid substances like caffeine or alcohol that can disrupt your sleep patterns. Regular exercise helps as well. The state of your body also influences the state of your mind. When your body is functioning well, your concentration is also improved. Good sleep has lots of benefits. It helps to create more even energy levels throughout the day. Sleep also helps to remove toxins from the brain that promotes long-term health. In addition, sleep allows you to maintain your emotional resilience. Sleep lessens the persistent impact of events that lead to negative emotions. A regular routine also helps you to arrive at work on time. When you wake up at the same time each day, you can plan to be ready to work on time. This is particularly important if you have to commute to an office. Slow and steady wins the race Consistency is about ensuring that you get high-quality work done every day. Bringing your best self to work requires you to understand your own work style. Everyone has an optimal amount of effort they can put in daily and still be ready to come back to work the next day. When you put in a lot more effort than that on a given day, you are likely to come back the following day with a decreased ability to concentrate, which can lead to a lot of wasted time. Structure your workday to find that optimal marathon pace that will allow you to be ready to work effectively each day. Avoid prolonged sprints. Work with your supervisor to prioritize tasks so that you are not putting in long hours that make you less effective as time goes on. Start working on long-term projects in advance so that you are not pressed against deadlines in ways that lead you to late nights. Pay attention to negative feedback Often, when something at work goes badly, you want to avoid thinking about it. After all, rehashing a mistake or failure is painful to do. It brings back feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy that are physically uncomfortable to experience. Yet, there is a lot of important information in the errors and failures you experience at work. You may not be able to delve into those details on the day you experience a failure, but after a few days (and nights of sleep), you will be better able to think about those bad outcomes. Use those experiences to identify places where things went wrong. If you have a hard time figuring that out for yourself, talk to your supervisor or a trusted mentor to get feedback. Consistency requires learning from mistakesyou dont want to be consistent in the errors you make. The more that you practice doing your own postmortem analyses of errors, the easier it becomes to do them in the future. When you recognize the benefits of changing your behavior as a result of mistakes, you will start to see the opportunities in errors rather than just the consequences of tasks that went wrong. That can lessen the impact of negative feelings that come along with failures.
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E-Commerce
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