Interview: David Ross, Towergate

Towergate CEO David Ross talks to Stephanie Denton about how he intends to make his employer the broker rivals love to hate again.

Ross revealed to Post earlier this year he has taken acquisitions off the table for 12 months but that doesn’t mean never: “The priority is to never allow yourself to fall back in the same trap that the integration can be somebody else’s issue. You have to care about integration the day you’re doing the deal, but you have to bring anybody you’re acquiring on that journey with you, so you’re not imposing change on them. You’re making them a stakeholder in the integration process.”

But is anyone left to buy? “There’s plenty,” he laughs. “If you look at the quality of the people that are in this organisation, there are people that are finding opportunities all the time. We’ve got an investor that’s got fierce ambition in this space, so anything that comes along that’s truly compelling, if Towergate can’t do it today, we need to find a way to do it in such a way that Towergate can benefit from it.”

And when questioned if the investor Highbridge has its eye on its exit strategy already, Ross says: “Not even close. The good news is that the vulnerability that was in this company a year or two ago has gone. There’s no anxiety and there’s no pressure for us to do anything in the short term other than execute.”

He believes Highbridge is invested heavily in the company and its leadership team: “One of my requirements was that we needed to be able, every single day, to make a decision as if this business were going to be independent ten years from now.”

Finest hour
And Ross thinks this is “probably the company’s finest hour”. He explains: “What will emerge from this entire era is a very resilient and incredibly strong, well-grounded business that’s capable of doing great things with the wisdom of having changed people’s perception about distribution, but humble enough to learn from the mistakes it’s made.”

He adds that he hopes staff are going to have “an awful lot of fun enjoying getting back into a spot where we walk into a room and we’re the last beacon of independence in the market of any scale”.

“The priority is how we handle ourselves. We must always keep one eye over our shoulder on where we’ve come from, so we can learn from the good and the bad, and then handle ourselves in exactly the right way, not just for our customers but for our partner markets, who’ve been incredibly supportive,” he concludes.

“The simple fact is that for all the formerly independent businesses that are now part of bigger houses, they failed to survive, and yet Towergate, for all of its difficulties, is the last one standing.”