Jensten Group is celebrating springtime in style, avowing its support of independent brokers with a £1 million investment fund and announcing its third acquisition of 2024.
Earlier this week, the group continued its good news spree, announcing a £170 million funding boost. To receive such a positive reaction from investors in the middle of a relatively uncertain debt market was a real affirmation of the strength of the group’s model, said CEO Alistair Hardie (pictured) who shared that the firm is now comfortable naming a target of £1 billion in premium.
Reflecting on the “remarkable” progress made towards Jensten’s strategic growth ambitions in recent years, he highlighted how this financial injection paves the way for the next stage of this strategy. From an internal perspective, he said, having so many investors line up to provide funding facilities serves as a real “feather in the cap” of the Jensten team and the team effort which has been so instrumental in its ongoing success.
“When I took over in August 2020, we were a team of 180 people and we’re at about 850,” he said. “This is to the credit of the whole team and a recognition of the quality of the business we’ve built and our shared belief in the continued growth and success of the business.”
As to what the deal means for the group’s partners and clients, Hardie noted that it’s easy to fall into thinking of funding as being earmarked for inorganic growth alone. However, he said, Jensten, is targeting growth in three key areas; through acquisition, organic means and by blending the resulting of both its organic and inorganic growth to create great talent development and retention initiatives.
“We want to grow our business in all senses of the word,” he said. “We will continue to make acquisitions. We announced 12 acquisitions last year, and we’ve announced three this year already. We’ve got a really strong pipeline and of course, this funding is here to support that but, we’re also looking to grow our business organically. We want to provide better and more solutions for our clients.
“We’re focused on providing specialist solutions. A lot of the businesses we've bought have been specialists and if we've got the financial robustness to grow and develop those areas, that means the clients do end up with a better solution at the end of the day. So, this news is good news all around for our partners, clients, insurers and for those in the market considering selling their businesses.”
Digging deeper into Jensten’s agenda for the year ahead, Hardie highlighted that talent remains a key area of focus for the group. It’s interesting to see how discussions about the “war” for insurance talent have eased, he said, particularly as the industry has worked its way through some of the challenges presented by Brexit and COVID which put huge strain on the talent market for employers.
However, that’s not to say the war has been won, he said, and the pressure needs to be kept up on conversations about the future of talent in insurance. With that in mind, Jensten is looking to continue to innovate in order to create exciting talent programmes aimed at attracting and supporting people in their early careers, whether that’s school leavers, apprentices or graduates. Many of the programmes the group is looking to roll out simply weren’t possible when Jensten was smaller, but now it’s well-placed to make the right investments required to protect its talent pipeline.
“On the growth side, it’s all about striking the right balance between organic and inorganic growth,” he said. “Inorganic growth is great because you just step in terms of your size each time. Whichever numbers you’re looking at, you just jump forward. But organic is much more valuable because it reflects the fact that you're doing a really good job for your clients.
“There is a direct line between doing a great job for your clients and growing organically. So, I was asked whether I’d prefer to get the same amount of growth from organic or inorganic, it would be organic every single time.”
Touching on Jensten’s acquisition pipeline, he noted that the last two years of its growth strategy have been focused on building out its regional and specialist centres of excellence. Now the group has proven the strength of this model, he said, and is looking to equip and empower those centres with the funding and other support required to help them build out their own businesses through acquisition as well as organic growth.
After a strong start to the year, Hardie’s vision for a great 2024 reflects the broader strategic agenda of the business.
“At the end of the year I’d look to see as many of our staff as possible still enjoying working at Jensten,” he said. “A great 2024 looks like having delivered on our plans and our strategy – and that includes growing it organically as well as having done quite a number of acquisitions. We’re already off to a really good start and I’m confident that we’ll end up at the end of the year looking back very pleased with 2024.”
