SRG committed to further people-led acquisitions – Anderson

Specialist Risk Group (SRG) has “always been an acquirer of people”, which came before it became “quite a decent acquirer of businesses”.

That was according to the broker’s deputy chief executive Lee Anderson, who spoke to Insurance Times at a briefing as the firm celebrated its sixth year of being in business, having launched in 2019. 

Since its launch, SRG has completed over 30 deals and, last year, reached both £1bn in premium and 700 employees. This year has seen no slowing down and SRG has continued to complete deals with the backing of investors Temasek Holdings and Warburg Pincus.

Recently, as well as more traditional business purchase M&A, the broker has announced a number of “people-led” team acquisitions. For example, September saw it acquire motorsport specialist James Hirst and his team from Seventeen Group-owned broker James Hallam, which was intended to bolster the firm’s offering in this area. 

And, in April, it acquired a team from Lloyd’s broker Tysers to build out a credit and political risk function. 

Anderson explained: ”I make a distinction between what the market is doing generally and us, because we’ve always been an acquirer of people, but have become quite a decent acquirer of businesses.

“There’s a big narrative in the marketplace that [companies] will now double down on trying to get people into their teams, because they actually find it quite hard to acquire businesses, so their strategy changes. They present that as an active decision, but actually it’s completely by default.

“We’ve always done both. By the end of this year we will announce an additional three people-led strategic initiatives and we’ll almost certainly announce another three [in 2026]. It’s far easier to seek out people now that we have some scale.” 

People-focused specialist

SRG has made people-led team acquisitions part of its growth strategy since its launch, acquiring a team from AFL Insurance Brokers in 2021 and another team from Bridge Insurance in 2022. 

Part of the reason for familiarity with this type of deal comes from Anderson and chief executive Warren Downey’s backgrounds in the coporate world. 

Anderson explained: ”Our background [as founders] is big corporate, where you don’t acquire to grow. You win clients, retain clients and ask clients to introduce you to new clients and then you try to surround yourself with good people that you handpick. 

“We did that for years, which is why the model here was never actually to acquire. In many ways, the reason we’ve become good at it is because we don’t follow a playbook. We decided to build out the infrastructure and platform on the premise that, once you have scale, people will actually present themselves to you.

“It was quite hard in the early days to attract the type of people we wanted, but now it’s quite hard in that we have to turn people away.” 

However, in discussion around SRG’s desire to continue with people-led acquisitions, Anderson was keen to emphasise that the broker was not committing to a lift and shift strategy to constructing teams. 

He explained: ”We’ve never taken our teams from just one place. We actually built them. For example, when we built our entertainment, media and sport business, we acquired a team from Tysers. But then there were also people from Marsh, from Gallagher and from Aon too.

“We try to build super teams – and that’s what I think you’ll see a lot more of.”