Follow the Advice ep5 - Martin Weaver-Parker

Martin Weaver-Parker is a commercial insurance broker who started the Yorkshire Broker to help business owners and create a community. He believes that building connections and helping businesses grow is important, and it has been well received. The name "Yorkshire Broker" hasn't limited their client base to Yorkshire, and they have clients all over the country. Martin also discusses his charity work and the challenges he has taken part in to raise money. He believes that insurance brokers are often perceived as corporate and impersonal, so he tries to stand out by using cartoon imagery and creating a more personal brand. He aims to educate people about what brokers do and provide a better service for SMEs. Hello and welcome to the Follow the Advice podcast. I am David Brown. In each episode of my podcast, I will be talking to the people who make the wheels of our industry turn—the owners and directors of small and medium-sized advice businesses that make such a massive contribution to sustainability. In this episode, I am delighted to welcome Martin Weaver-Parker. Martin is a commercial insurance broker with 20 years' experience in our industry. Recently, after 18 months of hard work, his vision became a reality, and the Yorkshire Broker celebrated one year of trading in early 2024. He formed the Yorkshire Broker not only to help business and property owners find security and peace of mind, but also to create a community, bringing together like-minded people with different skills—people who can help each other out when needed and give something back. Martin also loves a challenge, and he has raised money for various charities over the past few years, taking part in the Great North Run, running 1,000 miles over eight months, the London to Brighton bike ride, the Yorkshire and National Three Peaks, and—up next for him—the Manchester Marathon. I am delighted to welcome Martin. I hope that you enjoy listening to him. Martin, welcome aboard. It is great to have you here today. I am really looking forward to our chat. You started trading just over a year ago. One of the things that struck me about the business and the brand and what you are trying to do is the identity that you have created. I know that you talk a lot about creating a sense of community for customers and business partners alike. Let us start with that. Tell me a bit more about the inspiration for that idea of community. I will start by explaining this. There are two of us in the business, myself and my business partner, Phil. When we were planning the Yorkshire Broker, one thing that was really important to both of us is community, where we are based in Wakefield. It is a huge place with lots of business, lots of unique businesses. We thought, this is really important. It is a great place. How can we help those businesses? How can we link those businesses? Obviously, we help them from an insurance point of view, but the business community is more than that. What we try to do is link certain clients with other clients. We link businesses together and help the community to grow together. How have people responded to that? It is a bit different, at least in your sector, which is usually all about the numbers and the product and the service. Yes. It has been received really well. We have made some really brilliant connections through various networking groups, via as clients and for as clients. When we first started, I was concerned that we would not have enough clients to be able to pass on to other people and make recommendations. Then it became more clear that it is not just about that. It is about helping businesses that are not necessarily our clients. People and businesses really do appreciate that. It builds that connection more with us as a brand. It has helped our brand develop and grow. I am sure it has. As you know, I have followed a lot of your content on LinkedIn since you started. I love the cartoon imagery and the freshness. Clearly, you are trying to stand out in a quite traditional marketplace, which is great. I am interested in the name of the Yorkshire broker and what that means. Do you find that that limits your clients to Yorkshire, or do you find that people further afield are drawn in by that sense of identity? Yes. I think the Yorkshire broker was a name that I came up with just offhand. We were having a little bit of a brainstorming. We put it to one side for a while. For that reason, we thought it might limit us. Then the more and more I thought about it, Yorkshire is a brand of its own. It has not limited us in the way that we thought it might. We have clients all over the country. Yes, our base is mainly Yorkshire and the local area, Wakefield, because that is where we are more present on a day-to-day basis, but the marketing has a wider reach. We have not found anyone switched off by the word Yorkshire in the title—it is quite the opposite, to be honest. I talk to a lot of owners of small and medium-sized broking and IFA businesses and, to a greater or lesser degree, they all have a geographical customer base. I guess the difference is that you are just labelling yours, whereas others are not, so I do not know if it necessarily— No, we have not found it. It is a strong brand within Yorkshire. Yorkshire people tend to be very proud of being Yorkshire, so it helps us in that respect, to be honest. Yes, and you talked about that inner sense of values and community. Exactly, and that is what Yorkshire says, to be honest. Yes, and it is a big place. Yes, Yorkshire is a big place—a big old county. There is enough business in Yorkshire and stuff. I want to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that you do, Martin. I know that you do a lot for charity, and I think that it would be really interesting to hear about some of your experiences and some of the highlights, or maybe lowlights, of the work. Again, when we set up the business, charity comes back to that community thing. We wanted to be able to use the business as a platform to give back to the community and various charities—some local, some national. We have got more things planned this year. Last year—I always like to set myself a challenge. The last two years, I have done the Yorkshire Three Peaks. A year or two ago, I did the National Three Peaks, Great North Run—all for an Alzheimer's charity, actually. But then we have done some work for the local charity. Based at Wakefield, Pinderfield Hospital, there is a My Hospital charity, and they have an MRI appeal to raise money for an MRI machine, which will help a lot of people. If anyone has ever seen Phil in any of the marketing, he has a large ginger beard—a big beard—and he shaved that off for charity at one of the networking sessions. We have donated selection boxes for children's wards. Again, for the My Hospital charity and a barbell appeal, that was really good, because that brought a lot of people together. I think they were very surprised at how many people were actually involved in that. That was great. It does not have to be a huge thing. We are always looking for little ways we can help. At the end of the day, we are still a small business. We have been trading for a year. We have just celebrated our first birthday, so we do what we can, where we can, as much as we can. My next challenge is in just over 13 weeks, which is the Manchester marathon, which will be for one of the local hospices. We are trading for that at the moment. How is training going? Okay, actually. I have done quite a bit of running in the past. Last year, I joined local running club, which is a massive help in getting the training in. I am enjoying it. Good. Are you a morning runner or an evening runner? Historically, I was always a morning runner. I used to go and run on my own. I was always, get up, get out, get it done. Now, I am more of an evening runner, because that is when the club runs. So, yes, it is different. I have done a little bit of running myself. I have always been an evening runner, but I found it was a great way to download from the working day and just kind of process the stuff that is going on and just mentally get ready for the next week. I absolutely agree. Last week, as a prime example, we were supposed to be going to everything track and doing some interval sessions. I had a bit of a tough day at work. I decided, well, that is enough for one day. I am not going. In the end, I decided, yes, now get up and go. I am so glad I did, because it just, like I say, just de-stresses and lets you offload. So, it was great. Good for the soul. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yes, this is not a podcast about running. No. Frankly, I could talk about that all day, because it is something that I enjoy, but let's not. So, yes, I love that sense of community and that sense of giving back that you have talked about, Martin. What do customers say to you about, or prospective customers say to you about our industry and how we are perceived? So, I think there definitely is a perception that insurance brokers are there to rip you off. Many people have had bad experiences when it comes to claims and things like that. Brokers charging silly fees. You know, actually, a lot of people don't understand now what a broker does, necessarily. I have had that in the last 12 months. I don't really know what you do, what a broker does. Okay, that is interesting. I think there is a perception that brokers are very corporate, stuffy, office people, and maybe not human beings. Yes. So, yes, that tends to be what the perception seems to be out there at the moment, and that is why we want to place ourselves as something a little bit different, hence the cartoon characters. We want to, you know, I do try and do video blogs and do something a little bit different with the marketing side of things and get them as well as get themselves out there and get themselves known within the community. So, people can see that that is not us, and we can educate people as to what a broker does and, you know, what service is available. Because, you know, especially for our target market, so we are really targeted at the SME size market, we, you know, you have some corporate brokers that don't really deal with the SME market because, or if they do, it is very transactional. We get so many, I get so many people saying, you know, I don't know if I am a broker, just send me a letter every year with a renewal invite. Okay, there is a gap there where the service is needed. You have got that end of the scale and there is another end of the scale where people are forced down the online route because they don't think they have got any other choice, really. And online is all well and good, but you are not really getting that advice, but I think people really do need to be advanced. Yeah, I think you are spot on. I think our industry has not done enough over the years to, you know, to create the right reputation and, you know, in our customer base. And I know you talked about bringing back independent broking when you set up the business and I don't want to lead the witness, right, maybe you just touched on a little bit of that, but I am interested in exploring that further. So, what is it that has been missing for you, Martin, that needs brought back? So, I suppose in the last sort of five years or so, there has been a lot of the larger corporate businesses buying small brokers. That happened to me. I came from what was an independent broker. Years ago, we started out with a high street broker doing car and home insurance and things like that. People coming through the door and having face-to-face conversations and we were, you know, an independent broker. We grew into a more of a commercial broker. The business was then bought by a larger corporate business. And actually for the first year or so, everything stayed the same, it was fine. But then more and more things were being brought in, sort of, I suppose, deals done with insurers that sort of, then there was a placement strategy implemented and things like that which meant that we weren't really independent anymore. We weren't necessarily, to a certain extent, doing the right things for the client. I didn't like that, I didn't agree with that. And I think that's happened quite a lot over the last five years especially. So, I just want to come away from that and that was one of the reasons for setting up the Archer broker. I wanted to have that independence, to have that flexibility, to have a panel of insurers and I suppose do the best thing, really, for the client. It's the client that comes first to get about background insurer deals. That's what it's about. It's about the client, not the business and how much money you can make and satisfying shareholders and things like that. Because I think that situation does add to the perception of brokers, really. Yeah, I get that. I've seen that myself in the industry over the years. I don't know if it's enough to be considered a trend but I'm definitely seeing people like you coming out of the corporate broker environment and setting up on your own and having success, I guess, at getting back to basics. Bluntly, that's what this podcast is all about, showcasing people like you who are on that journey. So, like I said, I don't know if it's a trend but I'm definitely seeing more people, maybe, than before doing that kind of thing and I think that's great. I think it's what's needed for a competitive marketplace, as well, if I'm honest. Yeah, I agree. So, tell me what got you into this in the first place because I know that this isn't all you've ever done. No. You've done some stuff with property in the past and I know you've done some bar work and that kind of stuff, as well, in the dim and distant past. But insurance broking is quite different, right, to those things. So, what was it that drew you in, in the first place? Yeah, no one really chooses to be an insurance broker. I've yet to meet someone like that. It was the career of choice. But, I suppose, my journey started. I was working as a manager for a large club chain in my early 20s and I got to a stage where it was, so, okay, right, where's this going to take me? I'm not sure. What can I do next? And, to be fair, I was just searching for a job just to do something a little bit different, try something a bit different and I started working in a call centre in Leeds selling home and travel insurance. If I'm honest, I hated it. But, it gave me enough experience then, a basic experience to then look and that's when I ended up in my previous role as my high street broker, as I previously mentioned, doing home and car insurance and I was at that brokerage for 16 years and it was very much in its early stages. It was only two or three years old when I started there. So, I've grown and developed with that brokerage and it became a commercial broker to the point where it was 6.2 million DWP or something like that. And, when I left, well, I was MD when I left, so I very much went through the stages and thought of somewhere in the middle there, it was one of my goals to have my own brokerage. Never really thought about it too much because I was quite happy where I was. Then, obviously, things changed. I started thinking about, well, what can I do? What can I do now? I'm not sure. What's available? What are my options? I was chatting to a friend of mine and he said, why don't you set up on your own? Well, I thought about it before but not really sure whether it's something that I can do. But then, the more I thought about it, the more the cog started turning and then, yeah, here I am, three years later. It's not been easy by any stretch to get to this point. Just setting up is a difficult, it is a challenge. Being directly authorised, obviously, there are different options if people are looking to go into broking. But I wanted to become directly authorised from day one for that independence. And, yeah, that was difficult. I've been trading a year, not being able to get up and down, but it's really nice to get to this point now where we're doing a renewal book. We're getting regular leads coming in from the work that we've done over the last year, two years. It's nice. Difficult but it's good at the end. Of course. Someone said to me once that you know, if it's easy, it's probably not worth doing, right? Well, yeah, that's true. That's true. I think you used to be congratulated and celebrated for the journey you've gone on and the success you've had so far. So, what's next for you and the Yorkshire Broker, Martin? So, I think, at the moment, more of the same. We've got some plans in regard to fundraising. We've started speaking to other charities in the area to see what we can do this year and work with some of the other people from the network and within the community to see what we can all do together. From the business point of view, we'll be very happy at the end of this year if we can repeat what we did last year and then we'll look into recruitment at that point and grow, push forward and do more and more. Expand the empire? Absolutely. Good. Well, it goes without saying that I wish you luck with that. Oh, thank you very much. And every success. So, before we wrap up, very quickly, if there's someone listening to this who is thinking about following in your footsteps, what nugget of advice would you give to them? Stick with it. Get as much support as you possibly can. For me, the great support was one of the broker networks, Hedron Networks, is the one that I joined. The help that they give is immeasurable, especially from the setup process. But yeah, I think the main thing is stick with it. Don't give up. It's tough, but yeah, you'll get there. Yeah. Believe in yourself. Yeah. Good advice, Martin. Thank you. I think it's great. It's been great chatting to you and it's great talking to people who have entrepreneurial mindsets and want to go on that journey. I love that. Like I said before, I think it's so important for any industry to have that flow of new businesses into the market, but especially in our industry, which has been very traditional for very long. So yeah, it's fantastic to see. And like I said, I wish you every success with it. Perfect. Thank you very much. So thank you for joining, Martin. I've really enjoyed our chat. I could talk all day about some of these things, but it's been great. Absolute pleasure. It's been great exploring some of this stuff with you. Thanks a million. Thank you very much. What a fantastic conversation. I really hope you enjoyed that. You've been listening to Follow the Advice. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you'll find me on LinkedIn. Just search for David Brown Problem Solver. You can listen to other episodes of the podcast on audio.com. And if you'd like to check out my video content, you'll find me on YouTube at Skoosh Consulting. That's S-K-O-O-S-H. If you want to know what that means, visit my website at www.etsyskoosh.com. Thanks again for listening, and I hope to see you all soon.