Imagine leaving your insurance job today, not just for a few weeks, but for more than four years. Then you return. What industry changes would you notice?
In 2018, CEO John Elliott (pictured above) downed tools at his brokerage in Perth. Not unlike Lawrence of Arabia a century before him, he set off into the desert on a camel. He spent three and a half years trekking solo around Australia with a team of six camels and his dog for company.
The adventure would include encounters with bushfires, floods, snowstorms and attacks from feral bull camels and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the journey, he raised tens of thousands of dollars to fight skin cancer. However, the camel trek (pictured immediately below), that ended after 12,000 kms in the West Australian town of Geraldton, was more of a personal odyssey.
IB Talk will be publishing a podcast interview with Elliott in the coming days.
IB asked Elliott to describe what it was like walking into his first corporate meeting for his insurance brokerage after more than four years on sabbatical including three years in the wilderness on camels?
“You get this really clear before and after picture,” he said.
Elliott suggested this clarity was a result of really stepping away from the operation of his business.
“There’d be periods of months on end where I wasn’t involved, or even getting a phone call,” he said. “I’d really stepped out.”
The “before and after picture” applied not just to his own firm – that he’d founded in 2008 – but also when he attended industry meetings and events.
“For example, I’d go into an underwriter convention and only recognise a few of the names,” Elliott said. “Everyone had shifted and the market’s very different to what it was five years ago.”
When he came back to work at the end of last year, he said, there was quite a lot of catching up to do.
“For the first few months after coming back there wasn’t really much I could do other than re-educate myself, learn and catch up on what had happened,” said Elliott.
IB asked Elliott what changes in the insurance industry had stood out? One thing he noticed, he said, was a drop in the number of business development managers (BDMs) since 2018.
“When I came back there was one specific little issue that we had with a particular insurer,” said Elliott. “I said to the team, ‘Get me the number for the BDM and I’ll give them a call. Who’s the BDM there these days?’ And they said, ‘What? There isn’t one!’”
He said during his four-year absence the “dynamics” of the insurer-underwriter relationship had “definitely changed.”
“From that point of view there seems to be a little less support, not at all insurers, but at some of them these relationships are not as clear,” said Elliott.
He said despite technology’s “hot topic” status and the rise of insurtechs, industry progress wasn’t as advanced as he expected.
“I thought that technology would have moved along a bit quicker but that still seems to be getting a fair bit of resistance,” said Elliott. “A lot of brokers have figured out how to play but it’s a very chaotic and messy landscape where everyone’s just running their own race and doing their own thing and it’s very hard for a lot of systems to talk to each other.”
However, one stand-out positive change, he said, is the industry’s increasing professionalism and upskilling. Elliott said wages have taken a big jump northwards too but he said that’s in keeping with improved skills across the industry.
“People are out there really trying to hone their craft and their skills,” he said. “Some people that I knew have made some massive leaps and bounds, personally and professionally.”
Elliott said this is particularly evident in Western Australia.
“It was really impressive to see a lot of young West Australian brokers progress so much in such a short period of time,” he said.
The insurance market, he said, also changed noticeably.
“Yes, that was definitely an adjustment as well,” said Elliott. “The market was very different five years ago.”
The harder market, he suggested, is more evident when relationships with insurers are also under strain due to a lower number of BDMs.
“In some ways, it’s become like getting thrown down the chute and the shoot is very much a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer on a lot of things,” said Elliott. “The broker seems to have lost a little bit of agency within that setup and in some of the relationship-based deals that you used to be able to get across the line, it’s definitely a much harder play.”
The four-year sabbatical and camel trek odyssey also inspired Elliott to change the way he does business. Last month he announced a rebranding, including a renaming of the brokerage to The Green Broker. A focus, he said, will be sustainability and the carbon offsetting space.
The change has included the acquisition of Green Insurance Brokers, said a media release, run by industry veteran and “sustainability stalwart” Peter Blackmore.
“We were on the same page about what we wanted to achieve and about mobilising the insurance industry to make a genuine impact in this area,” said Elliott. “We thought, why do this separately? It just makes so much sense to join forces and come at this problem together.”
If you took a four-year career break, what would you do? Please tell us below
