Bollington success down to keeping it simple

At the Glasgow and Bolton events, Stephen Wall, chief executive of the Macclesfield-based Bollington Group, talked about the rapid expansion of the broker.

Wall said: "Compared to some brokers, our story is a modest one. It does not involve alternative investment markets, sophisticated financial modelling or venture capital and, in the last three years, we have made only one acquisition."

In February 2003 - the time of its management buyout - Bollington's fee and commission income was £2.4m, and is now projected to reach £5.7m by the end of 2005.

Wall added: "We recognised the need to respond to change and gave our staff specific targets, while the Investors in People standard underpinned many of our efforts."

He continued: "Our greatest challenge is staff retention and recruitment, especially being based in a small, remote Cheshire village. Therefore, we have opened a commercial office in Manchester and will open an office in London next year. This will attract the widest possible number of candidates. Two years ago, we established a formal training programme for A-level students and graduates. This is already bearing the fruit of qualified and competent advisers.

"Another challenge is finding quality underwriters. Underwriting decision-making appears to have become increasingly centralised. We see business as being treated as core or non-core, standard or non-standard. We fight for each piece of business and try to demonstrate both to the insurer and the client that we understand the risk we are trying to insure.

"As an example, we started working with an organisation producing around 15,000 new commercial business leads per year. Remarkably, 80% of these clients were viewed as non-standard when the computer could not offer a quote, and this was happening 12,000 times. By applying some old-fashioned broking, we can now supply 70% of these clients with a quotation within 24 hours.

Bollington ran with a panel of underwriters that were prepared to commit staff and resources so, if the answer is "no", it is a person - rather than a computer - who provides that answer. The firm has also uncovered niche areas, for example, in 2002, it moved into the childcare market.

"Our clients are constantly implored to find a cheaper alternative, rarely a better alternative, by media advertising," Wall said, adding: "While advertisements are aimed at the private consumer, the decision-maker at a commercial enterprise is also a private consumer. Direct writers have eroded many brokers' positions in the personal lines market, and will turn their attention to commercial insurance."

He added: We must persuade clients that we offer value for money and a service worth paying for. We must resist the temptation to commoditise as this undermines our position as professional advisers. We may not be able to 'quote our clients happy', but we will be able to quote them intelligently."

- Also at the Bolton event, Pauline Quayle, of Chartwell, sent a message to the Financial Services Authority asking for regulation "to settle" before introducing more changes that were costing brokers money to implement.