Do you ever wonder where you could have ended up, had you done things a little differently?
Cathy Garner, Active Underwriter for ANV Syndicate 779, has achieved a vast amount in a short space of time. She took the Kiln life syndicate from £300,000 of GWP to £30 million, is one of only a handful of female active underwriters in the Lloyd’s market, and is now taking ANV’s life portfolio from strength to strength (whilst also defying the ageing process). In light of her achievements it’s hard to see where she could have taken different paths whilst climbing the career ladder. But, she has given us an insight with the benefit of hindsight into where she could have accelerated her career, had courage in her own convictions, and how she almost ended up spending her life in a lab coat...
‘If you know who you are and what is going to make you happy when you are young, you are very lucky.’
Cathy studied genetics at university with the intention of progressing into scientific research, getting a PhD and ‘work[ing] in an area that was pushing the barriers of science’. Following university she got a job in a government research agency as a microbial geneticist. However, whilst the work was initially interesting, it became repetitive. ‘Trying to get consistent results was a challenge - bacteria don’t stop growing, and going into labs on the weekend at the age of 21 was really not fun.’ Realising that she didn’t ‘love’ science coupled with having bills to pay made her reconsider her career choice.
At the time she shared a house with six friends, half of whom worked for Friends Provident, and who mentioned to her that their company ran a graduate training scheme. Having ‘nothing to lose and not knowing what else to do’, Cathy applied, and having somewhere in the two day interview process mentioned that she ‘quite fancied underwriting’, found herself on the underwriting trainee programme rather than the management trainee scheme that she had applied for. She comments: ‘If you know who you are and what’s going to make you happy at an early age, you are very lucky’, and: ‘Giving some consideration to what to do if things don’t work out may have proven useful earlier on.’
Whilst being ‘entirely happy with where [she] has ended up and not wanting to be anywhere else right now’, Cathy can see that there are other places that she would have been happy had she taken the active decision to pursue the opportunity. Cathy very much enjoyed life underwriting, but the medical aspects of her job made her seriously consider going back to university and training as a doctor. Why didn’t she? ‘Going from earning a wage to then not earning a wage again wasn’t appealing.’ She also had a friend who had started to train as an underwriter after being a junior doctor, and after hearing her experiences, Cathy ‘didn’t like the thought of having to work a minimum 70 hour week whilst being responsible for patients’ lives.’
‘You can make life a lot easier by having courage in your own convictions early on.’
Whilst working at Friends Provident, the largest mutual life insurer at the time, Cathy attended an underwriting training course run by a large life reinsurer, M&G Re. She thoroughly enjoyed the course and the culture there: ‘M&G people proved that you can do this job well, have a lot of fun, but also be respected as a professional at the top of your game’. So she waited until M&G Re had a vacancy and applied. This led to a ‘very informative and useful 3 years learning about many different aspects of reinsurance and “challenging” risks, and meeting lots of friends and contacts’.
Swiss Re bought M&G Re in 1996, and around that time, Cathy was approached by a head-hunter to see if she was interested in taking over a Lloyd’s life syndicate that hadn’t grown as originally anticipated. She spoke to the managing agent 6 or 7 times before deciding to go for it. But, she says, she wishes she had been able to take the plunge and do it after the first meeting: ‘You can make life a lot easier by having the courage of your own convictions early on.’
Cathy spent 17 years at Kiln, and ‘learnt an enormous amount’. However, she ‘didn’t help herself by asking the right questions’ and ‘learnt by making mistakes’. She says that she ‘would have loved to have realised there is no such thing as a stupid question and to have felt able to carry on asking questions at every stage.’ She says, ‘It’s not your fault if you don’t know how to do something. You don’t know it because you haven’t been shown it properly.’
Given the opportunity to start her career again, Cathy says she would have sought more opportunities to learn from people and pursued them. Cathy believes that ‘continuous feedback [is] needed to progress’, and would have liked to have found a mentor figure to help her at this stage of her career. During her first years at Kiln, Cathy feels that there wasn’t a support network available for her. Cathy highlights the importance of mentors, and has been involved in mentoring schemes herself: ‘Mentors are enormously helpful technically as well as for promoting confidence and encouraging you to do things you might not otherwise do.’ When she did ask someone to mentor her who said yes, the mentoring relationship didn’t come to fruition, and Cathy ‘probably wrongly’ assumed that this was because the other person didn’t want it to. ‘You need to push these things. If you haven’t heard from somebody it may just be because they are busy, send them a quick e-mail to stay on their radar.’
‘You have to streamline everything and make sure everything is working for you.’
When Cathy started at Kiln she reported directly to the Active Underwriter, and when she left she had a team of people underneath her and the Syndicate was ‘basically running itself’. She had been offered opportunities to leave throughout her time at Kiln, and instinctively said no, because she felt that had more to learn and achieve where she was - she ‘had to wait until the right time to move on’. But becoming a single parent gave Cathy a jolt into considering what she wanted. ‘Children have an effect of focusing your mind, especially when you have to do it by yourself. You have to streamline everything and make sure every part of your life is working for you.’ She realised that she didn’t find her job as challenging, and no longer felt that she was having a wider impact on the company.
Cathy mentioned that she was looking for a new opportunity to the A&H underwriter at ANV, who told her that ANV were setting up a life syndicate. It transpired that ANV would eventually buy Jubilee, and what was originally mooted as the task of setting up a syndicate from scratch (which was very similar to what Cathy had done before) turned into a new challenge - taking over an established syndicate that needed to grow, whilst managing legacy accounts.
Cathy was attracted by the idea that two agencies were coming together, but also by the stimulating and proactive culture at ANV, where it’s ‘obvious that if you want to make a difference anywhere you are welcome to do it. If you have the time and inclination, everyone welcomes your help. It’s a much smaller and newer agency, and whilst everyone has job titles, we are all in it together and we all pull together’. Looking back, Cathy says that she would not have left it so long to move. ‘It’s easy to become institutionalised when you’ve been somewhere so long’, but Cathy feels that she ‘could have been a bit more ruthless’ with herself and now ‘been a few years further down the line’ had she left earlier.
So what next? One particular focus for Cathy is ‘bringing business into Lloyd’s that should, because of its specialist nature, already be there - but isn’t.’ ‘This could be because potential customers don’t realise that Lloyd’s can accommodate such business.’ Cathy wants to ‘shout about term life at Lloyd’s’, noting the hard part of this is trying to get this message out to people that don’t know that term life is even written in the market. Whilst at the moment there are tough market conditions, there is lots of potential at ANV. The group of syndicates are at the beginning of their journey together, and Cathy plans to take syndicate 779 ‘as far as it can go.’ ‘Watch this space.’
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