With a career spanning almost four decades, Roz Shaw had been at the helm of Hawkins Road Transport since 1981. In 2018, Shaw stepped away from the $150m business, which her family founded in 1921, to take up the role of Gallagher’s national head of transport last July.
Shortly after starting in her new role, Shaw told Insurance Business what inspired her to specialise in transport. “I saw an opportunity … to work on a two-part strategy – empowering the team by sharing insights into the transport industry and also engaging the client to ensure they understand the role of the broker and how the right one can be the difference between growing and being unprepared to face the challenges ahead. At the end of the day, when relationships become partnerships, both parties win.”
The transport sector is entering a period of significant change as telematics and automation promise to revolutionise transport businesses, and Shaw will likely be looked to as a leader in the field. An active voice for the industry and a former vice president of the Queensland Transport Association, she is no stranger to lobbying for critical change to ensure the transport industry moves with the times.
“The transport sector is a high-risk business,” Shaw said. “It is capitalintensive, and the risk of incident is always high and often costly. Major transport contracts come with high stakes for the operators, and the trade-off between running a quality operation and providing a service to a price is like walking a tightrope. The evolution of these risks might be in the form of new types of policies and further changes in legislation, but I don’t see the risks going away any time soon.”
