Ep247 Brian Duperreault: Playing the Long Game

Today’s guest is without doubt the most successful insurance executive I have had on the show.

He’s also completely unique in that he is the only insurance boss I am aware of to have run one of the world’s largest insurers and its largest broking group.

Brian Duperreault is insurance royalty. Having started his career at AIG, he then transformed ACE from a Bermudian upstart to a major global player.

He then ran MMC and set it on the road to a radical recovery, founded Hamilton Insurance and then helped AIG get a spring back in its step

He has now just founded Mereo Advisors in probably one of the most difficult funding environments for balance-sheet businesses in his long career.

But this introduction shouldn’t be a run-through of his superb résumé – most of you know all of that already.

Before this meeting I’d met Brian a couple of times. I had a brief interview with him once in the early days of the Hamilton era and had chaired him onstage at an Insurance Conference.

But today’s episode really showcases why the podcast can be a much more intimate and valuable medium than others.

In this encounter we had the luxury of less time pressure and what resulted was a long and expansive conversation that is something very different.

If you want to know how Brian has found success, listen on – it comes through loud and clear in every sentence.

Brian cares deeply about what he does, but it’s obvious he cares about all the people in the organisations he has run even more. He is a rare CEO, not because he is brave, morally upstanding, strategically audacious, a natural underwriter and risk-taker who is strong when executing difficult decisions and has a clear vision for how create, grow and run great insurance businesses – he’s got all of that in abundance.

But on top of that he is self-aware enough to know instinctively when he should hand over to a successor and try something new. As he puts it, he knows you can let a role define you and it can get really hard to leave when you’re the big successful boss and everyone always laughs at all your jokes!

Some of Brian’s most lasting achievements have not just been the growth and performance of businesses while he has run them, but the robust state he has left them in and the continued sustainable growth they have all achieved after he has moved on.

I could go on – but I think you get the picture by now.

Listening back, I think we managed to do the opportunity justice.

Brian’s also great fun and we ended up laughing a lot more than I had imagined when poring studiously over my research and reading the superb Biography that has just been written about Brian by longstanding former colleague Wendy Davis Johnson in preparation for this interview.

This podcast contains an enormous amount of highly valuable advice. My advice is to listen on and take it all to heart. If as a result anyone listening achieves even a tiny percentage of the success that Brian has, it will have been time well spent.

LINKS:

Faith and Purpose, The Life and Vision of Insurance Icon Brian Duperreault, is out now and available here:

https://duperreaultbio.com/how-to-order-faith-purpose/

I can highly recommend a read.

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo: https://www.advantagego.com We also thank audio advertiser, The Insurance Network (TIN), organiser of the highly-successful TINtech events series and Data Jam. www.tin.events