David Revagliatte meets James Andlaw, Managing Director of Masbro Insurance. In this candid, open discussion, James shares his experiences working for top insurance firms, his plans for Masbro and talks about the pressures of leadership. James also sheds some light on why so many of the UK's insurance firms choose Gibraltar as their base of operations.
Brenda Cuby pops in to chat with Harriet Seed about some new initiatives at GibSams including their life-saving helpline, chat service, and active listening training that are redefining mental health support.
Thanks for listening to the Gibraltar Business Podcast by the GFSB! Follow us on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook!
David Revagliatte meets James Andlaw, Managing Director of Masbro Insurance. In this candid, open discussion, James shares his experiences working for top insurance firms, his plans for Masbro and talks about the pressures of leadership. James also sheds some light on why so many of the UK's insurance firms choose Gibraltar as their base of operations.
Brenda Cuby pops in to chat with Harriet Seed about some new initiatives at GibSams including their life-saving helpline, chat service, and active listening training that are redefining mental health support.
Thanks for listening to the Gibraltar Business Podcast by the GFSB! Follow us on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook!
Hello and welcome to the Gibraltar Business Podcast, where we meet the local entrepreneurs and experts leading in their fields. I'm your host, david Trevagliade, and whether you've just found us or have been with us since the start, thank you and welcome to the show. The Gibraltar Business Podcast is brought to you by the GFSB and is sponsored by Gibraltar International Bank, which shares our passion for all things business. This week, I am joined by the managing director of Masbro Insurance, james Antlo. Masbro is part of the Peninsula Group and is an established business here on the Rock. James and I talk about the balance of refreshing the business while retaining existing clients. We also talk about balancing life in general, with a busy career, family life and all things related to that, as well as swapping London and a busy city career for life in Gibraltar.
Speaker 3:Later in the episode, my co-host.
Speaker 1:Harriet Seed meets Brenda Kubie from GibSams in our new what's New Gibraltar Future. So, james, welcome to the Gibraltar Business Podcast. Thank you very much for having me as managing director of Masbro Insurance. I'm sure you're really really busy, so I appreciate your time. Again, thank you, not at all. It's great to be here. We've never had a.
Speaker 1:Actually we've never had a guest from insurance, from the insurance sector on the show before. So you're my very first insurance guest, so really excuse the questions, I'll go straight in there. I think when I think insurance I think car and home, but can you tell me a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess there's obviously lots of different insurance products which ultimately do exactly the same as motor and home insurance products. They're there to protect and to cover the eventuality of loss and to provide people with assurances that there's a protection in place ultimately. And that's one way of looking at insurance. But obviously you have products. You also then have the makeup of the businesses themselves and insurance as a business as a whole is very diverse.
Speaker 2:You know, when people do think about insurances, usually people fall asleep. Certainly I did when I was a young kid, and here I am many, many years later and I speak to my kids and they have the same reaction as I did. So not a lot has changed in that regard. But you know, what I would say in terms of insurances in industry is that it's incredibly broad. There's a lot to be done with within the construct of an insurance business. It's not just the underwriting of an insurance product, which is how you assess the risk and defining the terms and conditions and the pricing. There is the construct of what the actual pricing is, which is an actuarial role, and usually they're mathematicians and the brains behind the insurance organizations. But then you've also got sales people on the front of house or on phones. You have marketing people, you have managers, you have associates, and it's just a very broad industry where usually there's a home for everyone.
Speaker 1:I must admit that I have met a few actuaries in this. My God, the brains, they're amazing, amazing, amazing thinkers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they are and they really are and they're the brains behind the organizations, especially, you know, the larger, more sophisticated insurance companies and the level of modeling that they have to do for sure.
Speaker 1:So Gibraltar, gibraltar has, you know, we see there's conferences here, there's a lot of activity within the insurance sector. Why are so many insurance firms based here in Gibraltar?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean there's a lot of international and I can be quite generic, but there's, you know, there are major UK motor insurers Domesold here in Gibraltar. I think it's one in three UK cars are insured from an entity which is Domesold here in Gibraltar and it's, you know, it's directly linked to the fact that the jurisdiction provides a tax efficient jurisdiction. So financially, you know these businesses are in makes it an attractive jurisdiction for them to Domesold.
Speaker 1:See, I think there's a lot of conversation around that. What makes Gibraltar good for business, right when you're looking at an international context? So so, yeah, that makes sense, james, your journey to this role, you know. So now you're a managing director at Mass Bro. How did you get here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean there's there's a long story and a long story, but I'll keep it short. So, as I said, coming back to it, I mean I really did fall into into the insurance industry. I finished my geography degree, did, did a teaching placement in Zimbabwe, came back to London, which is where I was, which is where I was educated and grew up without really knowing what I was going to do. I got a temping role within Zurich, a large multinational insurance company, and then, 20 odd years later, I'm still working in insurance.
Speaker 2:I guess the catalyst or how I've ended up at Masbro really came about by my moving away from the UK. I'd worked for close to 16 years for large multinational insurance businesses globally recognised, the likes of Zurich and QBE, and then my most recent role in the UK was working for a Lloyd's syndicate startup, which is what I thought my dream job was, had equity in the business or, potentially, was going to have equity in the business, and the whole construct of what I was working towards sort of very much came into question because of various challenges and made myself and my wife evaluate the direction that we were heading. Fast forward. That obviously brought things to a bit of a head and we ended up in Gibraltar. I started working for an insurance MGA called Peninsula Underwriting, based here in Gib, which I now lead, and through my work with Peninsula, I was then given the opportunity to also run Masbro.
Speaker 1:Right, okay.
Speaker 2:When did the?
Speaker 1:move happen. When did you leave London and come here?
Speaker 2:Yes, incredible how time flies. So at the end of this year we'd been in Gib for six.
Speaker 1:Time does fly.
Speaker 2:Time really does fly, do you miss?
Speaker 1:London. Do you miss the hustle of London?
Speaker 2:Yeah, interestingly so we actually made, and I guess in life there's always a process and sometimes a meaning behind certain events that occur. We chose to, even though I was born and bred in London. When I married Kirsten my wife being a South Londoner that I still consider myself to be I told her that to try and manage her expectations that I was never going to leave London, although it came again to a head when there were the London riots in 2011,. We had a young family and it was myself that really drove us moving out of London and we moved down to Brighton.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so that move already from London had started to happen. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And we were in Brighton for six years before we then made the move to Gib.
Speaker 1:I was actually living in London during that time of the riots as well. I made a decision to move back from London to Gibraltar a bit later than when the riots would happen, but I remember that was a bit of a turning point of thinking wait, hang on a minute, is it giving me everything I need? So it's nice to hear that someone else had felt that too. And the real London. I like you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I mean the gleam of London. And you say whether I miss London. I mean absolutely. There's aspects that I do miss, but the positive thing is actually you can enjoy a lot of those things much better as a tourist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true, true, true. It's almost like the balance right. And I remember James and we met for a coffee even just to kind of plan this, this kind of this interview, or just kind of try to get you on the show. We did talk about the issue of balance, because I think we did have a shared experience of leaving the Bintz City, coming back or moving somewhere else, and we talked about balance and burnout, right, and, and something you said really stuck on my mind, and that was that balance was transient. It's quite, you know, a big, big kind of philosophical almost way to think about it, but what did you mean?
Speaker 2:That in itself is a big question, but I'll try my best. Yeah, so I mentioned that, you know. You know, the whole reason for moving out to Jib was because, you know, there were things that are suddenly alluded to it. The things weren't quite working and it's very fair to say that, certainly those last final years living in Brighton from a personal perspective and from a family perspective our lives certainly weren't in balance at all. You know, we had, you know I had a very good job working in London. I was commuting on a daily basis, spending, you know, up to four hours on a train every day, had a young family didn't really get to see them until the weekends and, you know, the life was picture perfect in many respects. We had, you know, bought a house, completely redeveloped it and refurbished it, the dream house. My youngest daughter was actually born in in the front room of that house, you know. So, on the face of it, everything. You know, people from the outside in looked in. They were saying, wow, what a fantastic lifestyle that they have and life that they have.
Speaker 2:But the balance just wasn't there.
Speaker 2:I mean, I lost. I lost my father when I was very young and one of the things which was which is really important to me, is actually to be present in my, my children's life, whether they like it or not, whether they wanted or not. Certainly, from my point of view, that was something incredibly important, and I think this whole question of balance really came into play, because my world got quite dark, quite quickly actually, and you know spending so much time on a train every day. You know when you, you know when you're confronted with negative thoughts and you know when you. You know you try your best to stay positive and read books and educate yourself. It's very easy to fall into the trap of well, I'll just check my social media. And what ended up happening is that I found that because of, because of a real imbalance for me in my life and a lack of the positive things which gave me energy, which was time with my family, everything else in my life was thrown into question and everything, as a result, started to crumble very quickly.
Speaker 1:Wow, james. Well, you know. Thanks for sharing that. You know, I think when we're in a lot of our guests we talk about balance. We focus a lot on achievements, jobs, as you say, trying to build, construct that people might see from outside and look in, and it's, it seems like you know that move to here. Has it brought a bit more balance for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, listen, 100%. I think the because everything, because everything was quite negative for a long period of time, it really focused the mind and efforts to try and understand and it sounds a bit cliche, but really understand what it is that we were. And I look, I talk about it collectively with myself and my wife, kirsten. You know, what are we? What we're striving for, we're striving towards, what is it that we were trying to achieve? And Kirsten's been a huge positive influence in my life because of what she does for work and some of the insights that she's very graciously shared with me, perhaps through desperation and Kirsten's a leadership coach, right yeah yeah, and and she really helped me try and focus on what it is that we were working towards and I guess you know we were quite fortunate to achieve quite a lot from quite a young age.
Speaker 2:We had children quite young, which meant that we were sort of ahead of the curve in terms of our friendship group, but yeah, so we really needed to look at that and one of the things that came through very quickly was that I was living a life, or driving a life, which was I'll be happy when sort of mentality. So we had this house, we had a mortgage. You know I was going to be happy when the mortgage was paid off, you know I, you know I'd be happy when I made an enormous sum of money at the end of the sale of this new entity that I was working for. And whether that came about or didn't come about, the construct of and the foundations of how we were driving our life was actually quite flawed.
Speaker 2:So, coming back to your question, apologies, david. Yeah, the whole move to Gibraltar was to completely tear that up and actually drive and try and achieve a less is more approach. So say less without it being obviously being fairly idealistic about it, but actually having less materialistic things and having more time. So, certainly from a time perspective, what I can say is, moving to Gibraltar and just the nature of its jurisdiction, that in itself I have close to four hours more a day, time wise to allocate to myself and allocate to my family. So at the moment we're winning.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, Good to hear that. I think so much of what you said resonates. I think there's a lot of time that we were living in the future. It's like when this happens, when that happens, when I get this job, when I do that, and we have to be living much more in the present and it does sound like you are kind of getting there. And so, yeah, great, On the subject of the present, and sorry to kind of bring you right back down is to kind of looking at your role at Masbro. I'm keen to know a bit more about what's going on with the firm. What are your core areas of business here locally?
Speaker 2:So, coming back to your associations with insurance in terms of motor and household, masbro is very much a personal lines insurance provider here in Gibraltar. You know, I consider Masbro certainly, you know, even before I took on board the opportunity, and one of the reasons I took on board the opportunity is it is very much part of the local fabric, it's part of the community. It's been in existence for close to 35 years and, yeah, we serve the local Gibraltar population with their insurance needs.
Speaker 1:I've been there too. I remember going with my grandad actually to renew his policy at the Masbro offices and I'm sure there's still the people there today that actually served you way back when I bet there are. So Masbro, of course, is like an established business with an established client base, and probably it's retain staff, etc.
Speaker 3:What is it doing?
Speaker 1:What's the business doing to retain existing clients?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think when I was presented with the opportunity a year and a bit ago it was, you know it was taken I took it on the understanding that I was going to be able to make some what I consider to be real needed changes but, more importantly, within those changes, also recognise how and why Masbro has been successful as it has been to date. And I think, coming back to what we said just a moment ago, that you know Masbro is very much you know very much part of the community and the people that work within the business are very much part of that very community. So there's insurance and you know insurance is very much a contract of trust. So what we're really trying to do is, quite frankly, just enhance, modernise what the business has been doing for the last, you know, 30, 35 years, by creating efficiencies internally and the way in which we operate, ultimately to provide more time to our excellent people at Masbro to be able to serve the customers.
Speaker 1:So you touched on it, maybe in terms of some of the much needed changes, but tell me a bit more about them. How are you going to attract new clients and make sure you safeguard the future of the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, absolutely so. You know, having moved to GERB from London six or eight years ago, you know as you would have experienced. You know, from a consumer standpoint pretty much everything's accessible digitally and in Gibraltar we're some way behind that. You know, the personal lines insurance industry in the UK has been selling products more than 20 years digitally and Masbro has an amazing opportunity to transform itself and go through that digital transformation to be able to enhance its service offering.
Speaker 2:I think the key point here and it really is important is that what we're not, what we're certainly not suggesting, is that we're going to become a digital business. What we're doing is enhancing our offering to include a digital offering which people can choose to utilize or indeed they can continue to come in and be served by us. And actually what we have done, and what we are continuing to do and improve upon, is actually enhance that face-to-face offering. A lot of businesses in the UK when they did digitize, they went from zero to hero. They went from a customer-facing business to digital only, and actually now there's a huge trend. I mean, if you look at travel agents as an example, there is now a return back to face-to-face because the amount of information available digitally is just overwhelming.
Speaker 1:It's overwhelming. Actually, you tried to book a weekend away. You just want to ask someone to either AI to do it for you, for you'll get their real expert opinion on what to do. So it's absolutely Well this is it.
Speaker 2:So, again, a lot of what we're doing at Masbro is very much bought in to buy the people there, and actually they are my marker as to whether what we are doing is going to fly or not. We've got some amazing people Clive and Jackie, for just classic examples who have been there for 30 years and if, through the conversations that we're having and some of the changes that we're making internally, they're re-energized, that is my biggest motivation and my biggest marker in the sand as to whether we're headed in the right direction.
Speaker 1:And then, hopefully, their opinions and their feedback will be resonated by the clients as well, by your customers, let's hope so.
Speaker 2:You can never please everyone and the reality is where change is concerned. You mentioned your grandfather, for example. People know their version of Masbro and unfortunately there is aspects which are changing. We've undertaken a refurbishment. Recently We've also closed one of our offices because commercially it didn't make sense for us to try and man and staff up and resource two separate offices.
Speaker 2:So we've consolidated our offices and invested in a refurbishment, and the primary reason for that refurbishment isn't to make it look all pretty. It's actually to enhance how we operate, so really create a dedicated customer service area, which has been a bone of contention since we had it, because we have had clients who have come in and been clients for us for 20 years and some of them hate it, and we're going through an evolutionary process of how we listen to their comments and we try and constantly evolve and actually make small improvements so that we can try and appease, because some of them are actually very valid. But I guess that's a culture that I'm really trying to implement and really breed within Masbro Is this continuous improvement. We don't have to stay still for another 30 years. We've made some changes and we're going to continue making changes, ultimately to serve our customers better.
Speaker 1:So, james, there's loads of changes coming. So, listeners, there's going to be loads of changes, and Masbro said keep an eye out for that. James, just before I let you go, there's this question that I ask all my guests, and they probably all hate me for it, but it's that final question and, looking back on your career, or maybe some of the things you've shared with me today, was what's that one lesson that you know now that you wish you knew sooner? It could also be like what's that one piece of advice, something that you find invaluable, or you live by.
Speaker 2:I think it's quite interesting, I'd say, ultimately, when things got really challenging and I needed and had to sort of question the trajectory of where I was going. You know, really, had I been, had I had that clarity when I was a 21 year old or 24 year old, and, be you know, I consider myself at that age relatively self-aware, which I perhaps was emotionally, but in terms of the foundations of what I was trying to achieve, or or some of the conditioning that I was naturally subjected to via, via media and advertising, etc. Yeah, really understanding what was important to me and what that which I now know, if I knew it back then, I would probably have made some different decisions, albeit we wouldn't be here in Gibraltar, and Is that?
Speaker 1:that's a kind of what if, moment, right, but I guess it's knowing maybe the priorities that you have now and the journey you're on now. If you were young you would have known, you know, just have that maybe value, it value certain things differently, right maybe?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, it's a tough question because Right now I'm very happy, even though we've, you know, that I guess it's a tough question because actually, without those learnings, where you end up could be very different. I'm actually, if I look at how things are working out for for us as a family here in Gibraltar, things are working out brilliantly, you know. The kids are in a super safe environment of great schools, my wife's, you know, throwing herself into her work and excelling. I'm doing all right at work as well and, you know, very fortunate to work with amazing people and and yeah, so actually had I known what I knew now when I was younger, I might not actually be here and I might be even more.
Speaker 1:Maybe, maybe, you know, you never know again it's balanced right. So maybe if you were a bit more aware of it it could have maybe, maybe, made the darkness this dark that is true, but so, james, yeah, I won't keep you anymore. Thank you, thank you again pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for coming and joining us today, so I'm sure this is something that doesn't need to be asked, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. Who is Jim Samson? What do?
Speaker 4:you do so. Thank you, harriet. So Jim Samson is a mental health charity that was set up six years ago to Provide a helpline for people who are suffering from emotional distress and suicide. So we set it up on the back of the number of suicides that had been happening locally in Gibraltar and it's reducing those numbers. So that's what we're the aim is and to do that, we provide the helpline, we provide the chat service. We do a lot of work in the business community and in the community very important work as well, I would say.
Speaker 3:And what's new with the tip sounds like you've got a few exciting things coming up in.
Speaker 4:September we launched the break silence campaign, which Is breaking the silence around mental health and all the stigma that goes with that. So we've launched our talking toolkit, which is an informative booklet that helps people understand more about how to listen properly. You know what is active listening, because before I joined jibs am, I thought I was a great listener, but then I realized that I was a great fixer, so I would kind of Be listening but wanting to fix it, and that's not active listening. And also we you know we talk a lot about it's okay not to be okay and you know we talk a lot about getting people to talk. But actually what do you do with that? You know it's quite scary if actually you say to someone how are you and they say I'm not okay, like if you've not had the training that we've had in jibs am, you could actually just freeze and not know what to say and be scared of saying the wrong things. So then you don't say something. And you know we see it with bereavement and grief that when somebody passes you don't know what to say, so sometimes you don't say something. You know I've heard people say to me well, you know, my friends, they cross the road rather than speak to me. So those things just compound the issue and the problem. So this to talking toolkit gives you ideas, suggestions on what to do, how to do it, why to do it, so it. For me that's a brilliant booklet that everybody should be reading. And then we've got our well-being at work awards.
Speaker 4:So One of the big things that we've done in the six years that we've been going is that we've targeted the workplace, because we spend so much of our life In the workplace and you know there's always been issues and you know bullying or, as you know, moods.
Speaker 4:You know if you, when you go to work, if you've had a bad morning, like the kids have been playing up, the traffic's been bad, raining or whatever you don't walk in and all of a sudden be happy, smiley, right.
Speaker 4:And if you then walk in and somebody throws a deadline at you that's got to be done in an hour and you're like, really you know you're not going to be in the best emotional mental state and then somebody that might come by and Nudge you in the coffee goes and your papers that you know it will put you in a bad mood.
Speaker 4:So it well being needs to be at the heart of the business needs to be, so that you know, if you need to have a dovey day, have that dovey day you know, be able to say that, because the pressure of not being able to say that means that you actually will then maybe end up going off with anxiety, stress, you know, maybe being a real horrible person at work. You know that person that nobody wants to talk to and you know they're all talking about you. And so we Do our well being at work to see, encourage companies to be better at well being and put that at the heart of what they're doing, because we realize that companies who do this and we've seen this in the last five years is that they actually have a better workforce, they have a happier workforce, they're more productive. So, whatever cost it may be, you're actually going to get that back in the end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Okay, thank you very much for coming to talk to us. If people would like to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?
Speaker 4:So they can contact us via info at gypsum dot g I. If they want to volunteer, they can contact us on volunteer at gypsum dot g I and if they need to call the helpline, it's one one, six, one, two, three and they can access our chat service through the website.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much for coming to talk to us, brenda, today. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And that's a wrap for this episode of the Gibraltar business podcast. Thank you to our guests, james and law and Brenda cubie, and, of course, to a new team member, how it's, as well as our sponsors, the Gibraltar international bank. I'd like to thank everyone who contributes to the project and keeps the podcast going from strength to strength. Last but not least, thank you to you for tuning in. I hope you found this episode informative and engaging. If you want to contact me or the show, do so in any of our social channels. Please click subscribe if you haven't already to. So it's a goodbye from me and Harriet. Remember, keep striving for success and focus on your goals, and I really hope you achieve your balance. See you next time.