Risk Assessment: More Than Insurance

Effective risk assessment goes far beyond securing insurance—it’s about understanding and managing the broad spectrum of business risks that impact your cooperative's success. This session, designed for cooperative board members, takes a high-level look at key business risks, including interest rate fluctuations, industry-specific challenges, and regulatory policies.

Explore unique risk factors such as commodity market volatility and policy shifts. Learn strategies for identifying, evaluating, and mitigating these risks while ensuring long-term stability and resilience. This session will empower cooperative leaders to think strategically about risk, equipping them with tools to address uncertainties and guide their organizations toward sustainable growth.

Presenter and Moderator Bios

Presenter: Juanita Schwartzkopf, CPA, CFE, Senior Managing Director, Focus Management Group

Juanita Schwartzkopf, senior managing director at Focus Management Group, has over 35 years of experience in commercial banking, business management, and financial advisory services. She has dealt with asset recovery situations involving the court and out-of-court situations on behalf of borrowers and lenders. Juanita’s extensive background provides her clients with creative methods of solving complex recovery problems. She has worked with nearly all major financial institutions in the evaluation of credit risk of borrowers, including developing strategies ranging from cost reductions to asset sales, to refinancing of existing lenders. Her experience crosses over into a variety of industries, including all aspects of food and agribusiness, healthcare, energy, distribution, transportation, real estate, manufacturing, and distribution. Over the past three years, Juanita has helped many companies navigate the opportunities and difficulties that the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s response to the financial stress have combined to create for businesses. She has been involved in numerous panels addressing supply chain and performance risk issues and has written extensively on dealing with inflation, labor, supply chain, and cyber security problems, combined with the difficulty analyzing year-over-year financial performance as driven by the pandemic impacts.

Moderator: Wayne Sine, CPA, Education Director, National Society of Accountants for Cooperatives

After retiring as Tax Director for Southern States Cooperative, Wayne Sine was asked to serve as Education Director for NSAC. He has been a long-time and active member of NSAC, having served as past President of the Atlantic Chapter and past Chair of the Tax Committee. In addition to his work with NSAC, Wayne has served on the Legal, Tax, and Accounting (LTA) Committee of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, Chaired the Tax Committees for both the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Virginia Manufacturers Association, served on the Tax Policy Committee of the Virginia Society of CPAs, and served as past Region Vice President for the Tax Executives Institute.