News Flash! Peter Burns to Become IBAO President

During the insurance industry’s debate about recruitment and succession planning, some have said the insurance industry should consider poaching talent from industries with transferable skills. Like the community newspaper business, for example.

The connection between insurance and community newspapers may elude many, but for Peter Burns, president-elect of the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (IBAO) and founder of the Tillsonburg Independent, the connection couldn’t be more obvious.

Insurance is “a people business, and I was coming from a people business in the newspapers,” Burns says. “So the people side of it really enticed me.”

As a community newspaper founder, Burns was involved with the paper and in the community in many different ways. To help get the paper up and running, he sold lifetime subscriptions for $100 in the streets. He did writing, he produced the paper, he drove it to the printing press in Brantford and, for a time anyway, he even delivered the paper.

Successful insurance brokers, he noted, have the same high degree of involvement in their communities.

“You look around at successful communities and what happens in them?” Burns says. “Insurance brokers always play a large part in that community. It could be through sponsorships, or by means of the presence of financial leaders in the community. When you look at the boards of the local hospitals, or the minor hockey associations or the golf course or the school councils, I guarantee you will find brokers in every successful community in Ontario.”

Backing up a little, Burns came to the media by way of finance, which in itself isn’t an obvious career trajectory.

Burns was born and raised in Toronto and went to the University of Waterloo, where he worked on a degree in Economics and Geography. He graduated with a Bachelor degree in Environmental Studies. At University he met his wife-to-be, Lynne.

Burns went on to work for four years in branch management at the Bank of Montreal in London, Ontario, between 1979 and 1983.

Along with a business partner, Lynne’s father, a former president of both the Ontario Community Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association, owned six or seven community newspapers in the Tillsonburg area of southwestern Ontario. The papers covered areas such as Ingersoll, Port Colborne and Paris, to name a few. “[Lynne’s father’s business] partner decided they wanted to slow down a little,” Burns says. “So the partner’s son and myself both started the same day working with them in 1983, and that’s when we moved back to Tillsonburg. Largely, I was very much in favour of [the move] because the community is a fabulous place to live and it’s a pretty place to bring up a family.”

Burns acted as vice president of finance in the family-owned newspaper business because of his financial background. A few years later, the family sold its interest in the papers to a larger company. [Now it is owned by Sun Media.]

One year after that sale, the new owner said the company no longer wanted the family in the business anymore. “So within two weeks, we had a new newspaper on the street called the Tillsonburg Independent that we started from scratch,” Burns recalls. “That was one of the greatest experiences starting a business like that from scratch. For seed money, we sold lifetime subscriptions. And honest to goodness, we had people running up to us on the street and giving us cheques for $100 for a lifetime subscription. It was fun, it was a lot of fun.”

Still, at some point Burns realized the newspaper would not grow large enough to suit his preference. At that time, he started to see if another kind of business opportunity would keep him in Tillsonburg.

“So I was contemplating where I wanted my life to go at that point and was actually having lunch with a friend of mine that I met, an older gentleman in Tillsonburg,” Burns recalls. “I was explaining that we’ve got these babies and I want to bring them up in Tillsonburg, and I’m looking for something. And he said, ‘Well, have you ever thought about my business?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And within a week, I owned half an insurance brokerage. I bought half of his brokerage, and then he retired two years later.”

The learning curve was definitely steep. Within a year of buying the brokerage, Anderson & Banner Ltd., Burns had obtained his Level 2 broker license. The business acumen he acquired through owning and founding newspapers helped him with aspects of his education that gave other licensees trouble. “For me, in the level 2 licensing, the easy part of it was the management side,” he says. “Usually with brokers, it’s the other way around. The hard part for me was the insurance knowledge.”

When he bought into the brokerage, Burns worked with two other people. Now, after four different mutations through mergers and acquisitions, the brokerage (now called Burns Meyer Associates) has 13 employees and does a business volume of $100 million. The operation is split about 60-40 between commercial and farm insurance lines and personal lines.

Burns became involved with the Oxford County Insurance Brokers Association, an IBAO affiliate, in the 1990s. He did a four-year term as president of the Oxford association. During this time, two territory directors, Dan Danyluk (now executive director at the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada) and Randy Carroll (now executive director at IBAO), asked Burns to consider moving up the ranks. But the timing wasn’t right in terms of raising his family. Later, after his children reached a certain age, Burns made the leap with the support of his wife, Lynne.

Needless to say, given that his entire professional and personal life have revolved around the importance of family, Burns says succession planning is a key issue for him as incoming president of the IBAO. “Obviously succession planning is important to me,” he says. “Succession planning is one of my key goals, something I would like to see us work hard on.”

Planning and preparation for the 2012 Bank Act review is another given. Burns said this review will be held against the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2008-09, which revealed to regulators in other jurisdictions the perils of banks having their fingers in too many financial pies — including insurance.

And of course, there is Ontario’s auto reform, which allows consumers to a certain extent to customize their insurance product by making certain benefits and coverage optional. For Burns, implementing the new reform package represents a golden opportunity for brokers. “This takes this product, which was very much going towards being a commodity that could be bought with a click of a finger, without advice, back into an advice-based product,” he says. “That is our bailiwick. That’s what we do. Every one of us is a communicator.”

Spoken like a true newspaper man.

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Insurance is a people business and I was coming from a people business in the newspapers. So the people side of it really enticed me.