“Refreshingly traditional”. That was the strapline that first pulled together the co-founders of Yutree when they decided to create the independent broker and underwriting agency. Now it’s 10 years later and in addition to celebrating a decade of trading, the firm recently announced it hit the significant milestone of £10 million in GWP.
It has been an incredible journey for the business, which co-founder and MD Kevin Hancock (pictured) noted started with just blank sheets of paper and the ambition of treating clients as more than a commodity. While he wouldn’t deny that it had been a tough journey, he said, every step along the way had been made easier by Yutree’s team of dedicated insurance professionals across both its broking and underwriting businesses who had helped the firm ride the peaks and troughs of the market.
“That strapline still works today because while we do embrace tech and embrace new and innovative ways of doing things, actually it’s still about getting the basics right,” he said. “It’s still about doing the best job that you can for your clients and your brokers. And I’m fortunate enough to believe that it has worked for us and got us to where we are now.”
Yutree has seen consistently solid performance during the past decade, regularly and significantly outperforming its targets in a competitive marketplace, largely through organic growth, and wholly without private equity involvement. Hancock believes this is integrally linked to the values at the heart of the business – transparency, integrity and honesty.
“The whole culture of the business was originally and continues to be built on transparency,” he said. “We deliberately set out to be transparent with our clients in terms of earnings, that was the most obvious place to start but 10 years ago that was still relatively unusual. That’s not to say we don’t earn commissions, we certainly do, but when we earn commissions we tell the client up front what we’re earning. We’ve always done that, and we continue to do that.”
What this transparency does is make conversations about the role of Yutree and the role of the insurer very straightforward, he said. However, that transparency goes beyond the firm’s interactions with clients and includes how they engage with staff, with suppliers, and with insurers. The firm is open and clear about its plans and ambitions so that all relevant stakeholders can be actively engaged in its strategic roadmap.
Having those “old-fashioned” values in place has been key to Yutree’s impressive organic growth as the predominant growth stream for its retail business is recommendations and referrals. The team’s focus is on building strong, long-lasting and consultative industry relationships, which is paying off very well as it means the business doesn’t have to look to the telemarketing or cold calling techniques that work for other insurance businesses.
Having the right ethos is essential to keeping the health of the industry strong, and Yutree’s team is dedicated to promoting the role of professionalism in insurance – through its own Chartered status and the role multiple members of its team play across industry associations, including the CII and BIBA. This time spent volunteering effectively is deliberate, Hancock said, as the business is passionate about giving back to the profession.
“I think you just find the time to do the things that are important to you,” he said. “And insurance has been really kind to me and my family, and to [Yutree] as a business. I think we have to be able to put work back in, that just goes with the territory. And everybody has to make their own choices about what they want to focus on and how to get their work-life balance right, but I see this as just part of my responsibility.”
Maintaining and evolving the health of the industry is also critical to creating momentum for a business, he said. The Yutree board has considered, and continues to consider with great care and consideration, what kind of activities it is looking to undertake, how it wants to carry on its growth journey and whether acquisitions are key to that.
“And while I won’t say we’ve got ‘everything’ in place, we’re certainly very comfortable that our growth ambitions are very achievable with what we do now and how we continue to evolve,” he said. “We don’t have any particular ambition to acquire other businesses at the moment, because we are really focused on the organic growth of our business. We don’t want to upset the culture that exists within our business by trying to integrate something else that might not quite fit.”
For now, the wider Yutree team is delighted to celebrate its success to date, and Hancock noted how proud the whole business is of how far it has come. The brokerage and MGA is happy to share its plans with its stakeholders, as it shared its ambition to hit £10 million GWP by December (a goal it has smashed), and continues to share its targets on an almost daily basis with its staff. That allows its people and partners alike to become truly engaged with what the business is trying to achieve and why it’s trying to achieve it.
“Equally, over the next five years or more, we’re trying to continue to grow the business,” he said. “And the £10 million GWP is just a milestone that we’re delighted to achieve. But it’s just another part of our story, it’s not the end of it.”
