Open Skies

If the wide-open Prairie skies had any impact on Keith Wilson, partner at Orr & Associates Insurance Brokers Ltd. in King City, Ontario, it would likely be that they ingrained a sense of limitless potential within the young broker.

In an industry struggling to draw and retain new talent at a time when the majority of brokerage owners are pondering retirement, Wilson is living proof that young brokers have the potential to step up to the plate and shape the future of the industry.

Wilson served as president for both the Insurance Brokers Association of Saskatchewan (IBAS) and the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada (IBAC) before his 40th birthday. He also bought two brokerages in Saskatchewan — he bought his first one when he was 22 — and, just to keep things interesting, a small brokerage in Florida a few years later.

Like many others in the industry, Wilson grew up in the business with his father, who owned and operated a small brokerage, PineLand Agencies, in Wilson’s hometown of Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan. And no, Wilson explains with a chuckle, the hamlet is nowhere near the iconic body of water.

There is some irony in Wilson’s career trajectory, taking into account that the brokers recently won a political victory when the federal government, at the end of its 2005-07 Bank Act review, decided to uphold a ban on banks selling insurance from their local branches. “Believe it or not,” Wilson says, when the time came for him to pursue his post-secondary education, “when I left to get my degree, I was thinking of getting into the banking business. How ironic is that?”

In the end, Wilson and his new wife wanted to set down prairie roots and begin a family, and the banking business would have required too many relocations and road trips for that to happen. He went back to his father’s office at the age of 20; two years later, in 1991, he bought the family brokerage. In 1995, at the age of 26, Wilson purchased a competing office “and everything just kind of went from there.”

EDUCATION BY ASSOCIATION

Wilson says it was never his intention to rise through the ranks of the provincial and national associations. He first entertained the idea of joining the IBAS after taking a week-long Canadian accredited insurance broker course. The friendships he formed during the experience grew stronger the following year, when he took another class with the same group of people; they encouraged him to get involved with the regional brokers’ association.

He joined IBAS’s board of directors in 1995. Under the encouragement of his peers, he served as association president in 1999-2000.

“I was really lucky to have a great group of people around me,” he says. “Otherwise I would never have done as much work with the association. If I have a gift, it would be always having a great group of people around me to allow me to do those things.”

Meanwhile, back East, Ken Orr was serving as the Insurance Brokers’ Association of Ontario (IBAO)’s president during the same period. The two met through their mutual involvement with the national association, IBAC. Orr would become a mentor of sorts to Wilson, and Wilson followed Orr through the natural progression of IBAC’s executive structure, until Wilson eventually became IBAC president in 2004. “We just got to know each other,” Wilson says of his current business association with Orr in King City, Ontario. “We both think in the same direction. I was looking for a change after completing my term on the national board and he was looking for someone to come in and partner.”

In 2006, Orr made an offer to Wilson that opened a whole new set of challenges: sell the Saskatchewan business, move to Ontario, and become a partner in the firm Orr & Associates.

The firm has three locations: Richmond Hill, Tottenham and King City, Ontario. Wilson accepted the challenge; in January 2007, he packed up, headed east and began the next phase of his career.

CONFIDENCE BOOSTER

Wilson says his involvement with associations helped him to get to where he is today. Such involvement introduced him to a range of people — such as insurance company CEOs, policymakers and fellow brokerage owners — he would otherwise not have had the opportunity (or been too intimidated) to meet.

Involvement gives a young broker a sense of confidence and a wider perspective on the industry, as opposed to, say, “getting inside that bubble of your office every day, where you get so involved in all of the paperwork and you can’t think outside and figure out why the paper’s moving,” he says. “Well, it’s because you sometimes can’t see the forest through the trees. Getting involved may give you the perspective to see the forest.”

For young brokers just starting out in the industry, Wilson stresses the need for continuing education. “The key is to stop thinking about it as a job and start thinking about it more as a career,” he says.

Young brokers “have to be focussed, they have to be educated and they have to get involved with their associations — whether they be at the young broker committee level or on the provincial association level,” he stresses. “They’ll get a broader perspective of the industry as a whole. I think once you have a little broader perspective, you’ll have more confidence to talk with your brokerage owner and other people in the industry. I think it rounds you out a little bit better.”

Wilson acknowledges it is a two-way street. Brokerage owners, he says, may hesitate to allow their young talent to become involved in the brokering community for fear of having their young protgs cherry-picked by competition. But if a senior broker creates the right atmosphere in the brokerage — allowing his or her young brokers to mingle with the brokering community to help scout out new business opportunities, and encouraging young brokers to become involved in their brokerage’s business and strategy planning — then the threat of losing new talent to competition should be diminished, Wilson suggests.

BUILDING MOMENTUM

Wilson still remains involved at the national association level, as the chair of IBAC’s Young Broker Committee. The goal, he says, is to help foster the many young broker networks and societies developing and growing across the country. Broker networks over the past six or seven years have been established in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. In the past two years, a new crop of rookies has sprouted in other provinces, and “that’s a great sign for brokers,” Wilson says.

Momentum is building, Wilson continues, but as the next generation of brokers marshals its forces, it will need the collective support of brokers everywhere, because the industry young brokers are about to inherit is politically charged. Two future hurdles for young brokers include the independent brokers’ ongoing battle with direct writers, as well as the phenomenon of insurers swallowing up brokerages at multiples hitherto unknown. Of course solutions to the issues do not rest solely on the shoulders of the young generation, Wilson says. Veteran brokers need to play their part, too.

With any luck at all, in five to 10 years’ time, brokerage ownership will go back into the brokers’ hands, Wilson says. “But we have to work hard as individual brokers to make that happen.”

Brokerage owners need to “get creative with financing and they have to think today about their plan of exit, instead of the day before,” he says. “I know our associations are working hard to make sure that happens, but we have to find our direction and our focus. It’s about being proactive, rather than reactive.”

And when it comes to distinguishing an independent broker from a direct writer, “we’re going to have to market ourselves better than the direct guys,” Wilson maintains. “I know that [IBAC] has been working hard to lead us down that path, by encouraging brokers to market themselves better. It’s really up to the brokers to market themselves, to differentiate themselves from the directs. It’ll require a shift in thinking. Brokers tend to be extremely service-oriented; they don’t tend to market themselves very aggressively.”