The TopDog Programme for Chief Executives - David Robinson

The Problem

It was the year 2000 and David Robinson was a senior executive at Scottish Provident in charge of Marketing and Business Development. He was a Scottish Provident lifer and had been there for 30 years, having started business life as an actuary
David had spent the previous few years overseeing a strategic move into the personal protection insurance market - a highly successful move that had made Scottish Provident number one in that sector within four years. David was now looking for the next big growth idea for the business and had already been on a disappointing study tour of insurance companies in the US earlier in 2000
Initially David’s brief for TopDog was to give him stimulus around new ideas and new ways of doing things to take Scottish Provident on to the next level, but then something happened. As a mutual, it was difficult for Scottish Provident’s large profits to be passed to the owners of the business, the with-profits policyholders – to do this, they needed to demutualize. The eventual buyer was Abbey National. It quickly became clear that once the sale was completed, ten months later, most of the management team would then be surplus to requirements. Everything had changed
With only 10 days to go before the trip, David convinced a colleague, Tracey Ashworth-Davies, Scottish Provident’s HR Director, to go along too and be the eyes and ears focussing on people issues. He didn’t know where it would lead but had a gut feel it was going to be important

The Process
David and Tracey went on TopDog USA 2000 – visiting some of the most innovative businesses in the States.

During the intensive week they experienced:

half-day visits to SouthWest Airlines, Ideo, NASA, Enron, Xerox PARC and Cisco Systems amongst others. During each visit the Top Dog team met a cross-section of people in each business, including in-depth discussions with the senior team of each business
a joint learning opportunity with the 17 other CEOs and board members on the trip with them – a new peer group network of senior colleagues to continue discussions with post the tour

The Solution
It was the 5th November 2000 and on the long flight home from San Francisco at the end of the tour, David and Tracey talked almost the entire way. Their conversation continued throughout a delayed connection at Heathrow and throughout the flight up to Edinburgh. They stepped off the plane in Edinburgh having made a couple of fundamental decisions:

regardless of the success they had already achieved, they now knew that there was lots more that could still be done
but if they did not have a future with Abbey, they would want to take the things that they had learned on the tour and use them as the building blocks to launch something new and very different in the personal protection insurance market place

Over the next 2 months, David outlined a business plan for a new protection insurance business and developed the key themes along which he wanted to do business:

doing “the right things right” for the customer
doing “the right things right” for our people

Both these principles were directly drawn from what he saw on the TopDog tour - treat your customers right and your own people right and you have a head start in any business.

David then used this plan to obtain very significant funding for the venture (tens of millions of pounds) from Royal London, an old-established UK insurer.

The Results
Bright Grey was launched as a start-up new business with the backing of Royal London on 2nd September 2001.

Two months later David and Tracey were already sending two members of their senior team on the 2001 TopDog tour with the brief to come back with examples of how to create a fantastic service culture. That trip they stole ideas from Ritz Carlton and others, and you will find the team at Bright Grey starting each day with a Jumpstart (their equivalent of the Ritz Carlton line-up) amongst other ideas.

Several other Bright Grey Executives have also since been on the TopDog US and Scandinavia tours.

Bright Grey opened for business in March 2003 and in just two years had over 350 employees and a market share of over 6%, ahead of most of the old-established traditional insurers - and they’re still growing.

One example of Bright Grey’s approach to customer service was recently featured in The Independent newspaper:

Howard Tighe, 43, suffered a stroke in July 2004 that affected his speech, mobility and memory. He received a payout of £75,000 from Bright Grey. However, in addition, Bright Grey arranged for a neuro-physiotherapist to visit Howard weekly for nine weeks to help him regain the use of the right-hand side of his body, which was paralysed by the stroke.

"When the policy paid out I thought, 'Is the money all I'm worth?'" says Mr Tighe, who has since made an excellent recovery. "But the service I got meant the policy was worth more. Without it, I wouldn't be where I am now."

“TopDog 2000 came at just the right time for me. I went looking for inspiration and I found it in abundance, both from the companies I visited and from some of the people I went on tour with. I came back proclaiming that it was the best week that I had ever spent in business – that’s still my view! - and five years later I still hark back to some of the experiences and lessons I learned.

Bright Grey is about doing the right things right for customers, thinking about protection insurance from the customer end of the telescope. And giving our people the freedom, encouragement and right business environment in which to do the best for our customers. It’s obvious really - and admittedly much easier for a new insurer than an old-established one. But businesses often miss what’s obvious and without the inspiration from the tour, Bright Grey would probably never havebeen invented - or if it had been, it would have been very different and I’m sure nowhere near as successful.”
David Robinson, Chief Executive Bright Grey