When she started Arma Insurance back in 2008, Amanda Morris (pictured) had no experience writing insurance policies and didn’t have a single client on her books.
“It was a naïve choice, looking back on things – I’d never even sat in a brokerage at that point and didn’t even know what liability insurance was,” she told Insurance Business. “From there, I joined networking groups, went knocking door-to-door, and did a lot of other things that amounted to a crash course in insurance.”
Fast forward to 2020 and the Hunter Valley brokerage now has a client base of more than 4,000 serviced by a dedicated nine-person-strong team. Morris’s hard work was recently recognised with an Excellence award in the Broker of the Year – Independent (1-19 Staff) category at this year’s Insurance Business Australia Awards, an accolade she attributes to the client-first approach she has engendered at Arma.
“We’re definitely hands-on and proactive with our clients here,” she said. “We’ve got a number of services in place to automatically communicate with them, but we really appreciate the opportunity to meet with them face-to-face and build those personal relationships and see how their businesses function.”
Morris encourages her staff to bring their own passions and areas of expertise to the workplace. For example: her husband, Steve, works as a rural insurance specialist at Arma, due in no small part to the fact that they live on 100 acres of land and engage in some hobby farming. As a result, Steve looks after the farm-related clients that Arma has on its books, and maintains a keen and personal interest in the sector.
For Morris, her passion lies in business coaching, particularly for those who are newcomers to insurance broking. “Since I was learning on the job in some ways, I tend to do some things quite differently to how the industry generally does them,” she said.
“Through business coaching, I’m able to instruct brokers on best practices and provide them with courses to improve their insurance knowledge. It’s a way of ensuring that they’re set up to succeed, and it’s something that I get great satisfaction from.”
Looking ahead, Morris sees a hardening market, combined with an increasingly regulated insurance environment, as some of the key challenges facing Australia insurance brokers in the future.
“I think we might see a lot of brokers, who aren’t willing to put in the hard work necessary in such a market, potentially close up shop,” she said. “Brokers are going to have to work harder and be more professional, and they might have to have some hard conversations at times with both underwriters and clients.”
