I spent twelve years avoiding this industry. It got me anyway.

My dad sold insurance. My mum worked in insurance. I watched them build careers, raise three kids, and retire from the same company they met at in the 1970s.

I spent twelve years trying to work anywhere else.

I am not entirely sure what I was resisting. I knew the industry. I had grown up adjacent to it, heard the language at the dinner table, met the colleagues who became family friends, understood in some vague way what the work involved. I had every advantage a person could have for starting in insurance early.

I just didn't want to.

Eventually, in 2012, I stopped resisting and joined The Co-operators anyway. Same company. Same logo on the door my parents had walked through forty years earlier. I was thirty years old and apparently out of better ideas.

What I found when I got there did not surprise me the way I expected it to.

The work was familiar enough. What struck me was the people. Not in a grand way. In the specific, ordinary way that you notice when a professional environment has a particular character to it.

Insurance people tend to be friends with other insurance people. I had seen this my whole childhood without registering it as unusual. The people around our kitchen table at Christmas, at my parents' colleagues' 25th wedding anniversaries, at the retirement parties that seemed to happen every few years — they were almost all from the same industry. Different companies, different roles, different cities sometimes. But the same world.

I have now worked inside that world for over a decade. Canada, Germany, and now supporting brokers in the UK. I keep finding the same type of person: straightforward, professional, usually underestimated, genuinely decent. I find the dismissal of this industry irritating. Not defensively. Just honestly. From where I have stood, the people in it are some of the most reliable professionals I have encountered.

There is a gnome in my memory that I cannot locate in real life anymore.

He was carrying a briefcase, which I always found quietly funny. At his feet was a small stone tablet that read: Honesty is the best policy. My grandmother gave him to my dad as a joke. My dad was selling life insurance at the time. The double meaning was the point.

I was young when I first noticed it and felt pleased with myself for getting the joke. A policy as a principle. A policy as a legally binding contract. My dad sold them. My mum understood them. The gnome sat there on the desk and said both things at once.

I have no idea where he ended up. Somewhere in a move, probably. Or in a box in my parents' basement that nobody has opened in fifteen years. But I remember him clearly enough that when I found one that looked almost identical, I took a photo of it. Close enough.

The memory is the part that stayed.

I started UK Broker Support because of what I have seen over eleven years inside this industry.

Most operational problems in a brokerage do not arrive as emergencies. They accumulate. A renewal that slips. A document in the wrong inbox. A follow-up that gets pushed to tomorrow. None of it is dramatic. Over time it creates friction, and friction slows everything down in ways that are hard to point to and harder to explain to anyone outside the work.

I have spent eleven years inside that work. Not managing it from a distance. Inside it. In a contact centre representing over 150 agents across Canada, learning each agent's risk appetite and client profile, making decisions on their behalf. At CUMIS handling complaints. At MSIG in Cologne as the only English speaker in a Japanese industrial insurer's European operation, figuring out how to keep things moving across systems and languages I had not encountered before.

I am not coming to the UK market from outside the industry. I grew up in it, resisted it, and came back to it. The gnome on my desk has been around longer than any of that.

If you are a founder-led broker in the UK carrying more of the operational load than you should be, I would like to hear from you.

Not a pitch. Just a conversation.

What is your insurance origin story?