Locally owned insurance and risk advisory firm Donaldson Brown has grown “phenomenally” since 2014 and now has a chief executive to help founding partners Dan Donaldson and Alex Brown run the business while they focus on insurance broking. Insurance Business sat down with newly installed CEO Stefan Azzopardi (pictured) to hear what led him to the Kiwi brokerage and where he plans to take the business.
Having spent the past nine years with not-for-profit insurer Southern Cross Health Society, Azzopardi places importance on an organisation’s values.
“Donaldson Brown doesn’t take a commission on the premium,” he said. “It’s entirely transparent in the way that it charges fees, and it bases those fees on the value that it adds to the client. That was actually a very attractive part of the role to me. If you think about my last nine years, I was with a not-for-profit health insurer where the focus is entirely on delivering good customer outcomes.
“It showed me another way of doing business, if you will, relative to my previous experiences with the likes of BNP Paribas and Westpac. My Southern Cross experience was one that I quite appreciated in the sense that you could really focus all of your attention on delivering good outcomes for the customer. And coming to Donaldson Brown, that is very clearly what their focus is – to deliver great outcomes, good risk advice to the customers that they service, and to do so in a very transparent way when it comes to how they themselves are remunerated.”
Working with a values-based business such as Donaldson Brown is what drove Azzopardi to come on board, in what is his first foray into the world of insurance broking.
“I’m not sure I would have gone to a normal broker, honestly,” he told Insurance Business. “Doing the right thing by our customers is super important, so I felt very comfortable coming into the role, from a values perspective.
“For me, what the last nine years at Southern Cross has cemented is how important it is in your career to work for organisations that are a good values fit with you. Because I have worked with others where the values fit wasn’t quite right. It never felt the same – you don’t feel the same kind of engagement if the values fit isn’t there.”
According to Azzopardi, it’s now his job to help build on the good values set and culture set at Donaldson Brown.
Aside from the values fit, Azzopardi will also leverage his corporate world experience, to help Donaldson Brown as it continues to scale.
“What I think I do bring with my years of expertise in a larger corporate is an understanding of what a good corporate function looks like,” the new CEO told Insurance Business.
“All of the support and back-office type of functions that a business needs as it grows that you maybe don’t have the ability to fund when you’re a startup and you do everything yourself – I have really good experience and a good understanding of what good looks like and can help move the organisation to the next phase of its evolution.”
The founding partners of Donaldson Brown, meanwhile, aren’t going anywhere.
“Dan and Alex are still in the business, so I haven’t lost their knowledge,” Azzopardi said. “I haven’t lost their technical expertise. What’s happened over the course of the eight or nine years since they have started the business is it has grown phenomenally. They’ve done a fantastic job in going from a startup to an organisation that now has slightly more than 60 people.
“The business has grown to a point where they need somebody to run the business for them and allow them to focus on what their passion is, which is insurance broking. So, am I nervous? Yes, of course, you’re always a little bit nervous coming into a new job, but not really, because I’ve still got the two founding partners, with all their wealth of knowledge and connections, in the business working with me.”
For Azzopardi, it’s about helping the co-founders make their already successful business even bigger and more successful by having someone take charge of running the brokerage.
“They’ve gone from having a great idea about how a disruptive insurance broking business could run and having the courage to get out there and actually start it and then growing the business, but that naturally takes you outside of your comfort zone if you’re a good broker,” he said. “It takes you into, ‘How do I run the business? What’s the strategy? Now I need all of these corporate functions in finance and HR and IT, and so on and so forth’.
“It takes them away from their sweet spot, and they’ve been self-aware enough to recognise that, and all credit to them for doing so. To me, it was just a fantastic opportunity – a really fast-growing, innovative, disruptive broker that needed somebody to come in and help the founding partners go to the next phase of their journey.
“Building the business to be more successful and bigger in the right way that maintains the culture, that maintains the transparency, that maintains keeping the customer at the heart of everything that we do – that’s really what excites me… Once you get to a certain scale, you need to have a much more targeted approach to what you’re going to chase in terms of business growth opportunities. That’s something that I’m looking forward to doing with this business.”
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