Ian Jerrum - An illuminating tale

Searchlight Insurance Training does very much what the name suggests. We are a specialist provider of face-to-face and e-learning training services to brokers, insurers and various other providers to the insurance sector. We also author a lot of learning materials for other insurance e-learning systems. Although we employ around 50 specialist trainers and authors, we have just eight staff working full time at our head office in Leatherhead.

What insurances do you place?

We have all the usual insurance policies that you would expect of an SME in the service sector: professional idemnity, directors' and officers' and office combined. For the last three years, we have gone to Woodstock Insurance Brokers for all of these. Woodstock is based in Maidstone so it is not exactly local since we moved from Crawley to Leatherhead. However, we have always had excellent service from them and so we have no plans to go elsewhere.

Describe your broker relationship.

I have worked in and around the insurance industry all my working life, as have several of my senior colleagues, so you could argue that a broker has less to offer us in the way of advice and we could maybe think about placing our insurances direct. That said, I'm a great believer in playing to your core strengths and I would much rather work with an experienced and capable broker that can ensure we have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's and find us a good deal while it is doing so. Woodstock has always given us sound and timely advice and provided a sense of security and continuity.

What would you like to see improve in the insurance industry?

Selfishly, of course, I would like to see premiums come down. However, I know enough about the industry to understand that the price we are paying is fair and I don't have any concerns about broker remuneration. Obviously, the major fluctuations in pricing we have seen over the past decade are not particularly helpful for smaller businesses but there's not really too much that brokers can do about it. A bit more certainty about our future insurance costs would be nice but, in fairness, Woodstock does keep reminding me that I could smooth things out by letting them arrange premium finance for us.

What are the main challenges in your sector?

So far, we haven't experienced much discernable impact from the credit crunch. Our business is not especially capital-intensive and we can afford to fund our investment in developing the business out of current income. If we sold training services to estate agents then I would certainly be more worried, though people and companies will always need - and in many cases be legally obliged - to buy insurance. As such, I think that our clients have some insulation against the immediate effects of the credit crunch.

Ultimately, the main issue for us is the extent to which brokers and insurers choose to invest in training. Financial Services Authority regulation has been a factor in that context but training has been just one of a whole raft of things that the regulator is looking at and, aside from a brief flurry of investment immediately prior to the FSA taking over general insurance regulation a couple of years ago, we haven't seen any huge increase in training spending across the industry.

As I keep telling brokers, Woodstock included, the real argument for training is not that it will keep the regulator off your back but that it will make your business more professional and more profitable. To be fair, Woodstock is among the minority of firms that does seem to have taken this message to heart; it is using training as a tool to generate competitive advantage.

Although progress sometimes seems frustratingly slow, I think the general trend in future will be towards greater investment in training; we are extending our service offer into a broader range of training and competency and human resources-related consultancy services just in case. In the meantime, ours is a relatively low-risk business. If the office burned down tomorrow then we could be back in business within hours and I am very confident that, with Woodstock's help, we have all the relevant covers in place to protect us from the risks that we face.