Big Interview: Movo’s Lea Cheesbrough

She was meant to be a GP, but now Lea Cheesbrough is celebrating her 20th year in the insurance industry.

The Movo Partnership’s managing director says she is “very lucky” to be in the position she finds herself, having forged a very different path to the one her parents had hoped.

“I started out in life wanting to become a GP,” she says. “I am not sure what went wrong, but after I came out of university, I wanted to be a doctor.

"But after 15 months, I realised I really did not want to be a doctor. And so, to appease my parents, I ended up going into nursing.”

But soon, Cheesbrough realised nursing was also not the career path she wanted.

After a while, she found herself submerged within the world of insurance and 20 years later, she is still here.

“I am 20 years in insurance. I do not know where that's gone. I started off as a Willis Network broker, but after six years I needed some more management experience and found myself at DAS.”

Chance meetings

Cheesbrough joined DAS in 2009 but would only be there for around one year as soon after joining she had the first of three “chance meetings” that shaped her career.

At a Chartered Insurance Institute dinner in Manchester, she says: “I just happened to be sat next to someone who then phoned me at work the next day.

"He was just about to start something called Power Place, and he said: ‘My name is Matt. I sat next to you last night. I want you to come in and be our northwest regional director’.”

So Cheesbrough left DAS to join Matthew Reed at Power Place back in 2010.

Power Place was a Towergate product, and the then group deputy CEO was Amanda Blanc.

In 2011, Blanc left Towergate to return to Axa, taking Reed with her, and soon after, in 2021, Reed brought in Cheesbrough.

“I ended up being a regional director for Axa,” Cheesbrough says.

But Cheesbrough says an insurer is not where she felt at home as she is a “broker at heart.”

So, when the next “chance meeting” came along, she says it gave her a way to get back to where she wanted to be.

“I was asked to go and speak to these people who wanted to start a brokerage,” she explains. “I always had a real passion for broking. That was where I came from. Somebody called William Stobart had rung up Axa’s head office and said, ‘We want to start a brokerage. How do we get an agency?’"

Axa decided to send Cheesbrough.

“I got sent down to Manchester to see if we can help them at some point. It was the weirdest meeting,” she says. “It was three hours to talk about: what you should do as a new brokerage, this is how to do it, this is how you earn money, this is what you need to do in compliance, etc.

“Then at the end of the meeting, they just turned round to me and said: ‘We want you to come and do it.’ I told them that they couldn’t afford me. But then they put a figure on a piece of paper and handed it over.”

This seemed to do the trick, as Cheesbrough was on the phone to Reed that night.

“I rang Matthew to ask, ‘How long is my notice period.’ He let me out the next week.”

So Cheesbrough joined Stobart’s as its insurance director, tasked with starting up a brokerage.

She recalls how it was a completely different world, but after a while, it had run its course.

“It was just another world, but that was amazing. I learned so much. But after 12 to 18 months, it was time for me to go.”

Cheesbrough then found herself at Broker Network, and here she found something a bit closer to what she would find herself doing for years to come.

“I could just really indulge myself in my passion for independent broking [at Broker Network]. I absolutely loved that job.”

Move to Movo

Cheesbrough would be at Broker Network for nearly five years but she then felt she needed to start her own network.

“I started to look around the market, see if I could get some backing,” she says. “Plenty of people would offer me cash to go and start a network, but it was all on their terms. It felt as though I didn't want to just go back into the blender again. I wanted to do something that made a difference.”

This led to Cheesbrough’s third and final “chance meeting”.

“I met Golan [Lambranzi], who had this idea about setting up an appointed representative network, but didn't have a clue how to do it. He had five teams, five brokerages lined up, and he wanted to do something.

"The one thing that Golan and I share to this day is a passion for independent broking and for starting-up businesses and supporting our industry.

“So he asked me to come in, sort the businesses out, and help him get this right. That was kind of how we started.

“We took on our first pilot broker in May 2019, who is still with us now. And then we took another one and another one. And from there, we launched officially in September 2019.”

Fast forward to today, Movo now has 70 brokers within its network, with another 13 joining this year, Cheesbrough says.

“We've had 12 join us this year already. We control £70m GWP at this moment in time.”

At the top of the Movo pyramid is Movo Investment Group, and within one of that group’s investment is Movo Partnerships.

Movo is a business designed to help independent brokers, usually consisting of a few staff, get off the ground. It would offer advice and training for entrepreneurial brokers looking for some help, and potentially back them financially.

Cheesbrough explains: “The idea being that we would offer two options: for brokers to join us who were coming from another AR network, or who will produce an established book.

“For those who wanted to start off, but perhaps just didn't know how they could do it and didn't have the funds to do it, we were then going to take a stake in their business and back them.”

This has led to Movo taking a stake in 24 businesses at the time of Post's interview.

Cheesbrough said: “That is what we do – we take a stake to help brokers get started. Or it might be that we want to release somebody from somewhere where succession is a big thing.

“We have been involved in a number of businesses where you've got an older founding director, and a younger director who wants to buy out the existing partner but can't afford to do it.

“We'll give them the funds to do that, and we will take a stake in that business in exchange for putting those funds up.

“We are very much an investment company and it's all our own money. We have no debt in the business at all.”

Growing pains

But it has not always been plain sailing for Cheesbrough and Movo. Especially early on, she says it was difficult to get the backing.

“Trying to get insurers onside in the early days was a challenge,” she says. “You've always got one that you want to work with that isn't quite getting the programme. Making sure the insurers are happy and keeping everyone updated has been a big thing for us.”

But a big challenge came for Cheesbrough when Movo announced it was leaving Hedron Network, owned by GRP, to “become a completely independent appointed representative (AR) network.”

Cheesbrough explains: “We had some growing pains, certainly last year. I made no secret about the fact that we were leaving Hedron. When you disengage from any third-party provider, problems come.

“For example, we needed to replace our accounts team, so recruitment was massive hurdle. At some points, I didn't think we were ever going to overcome it. We needed 10 staff, just for our accounts team. That was that was quite full-on. There were times that me and the financial director were working overnight.”

Cheesbrough says recruitment is “the biggest issue” Movo has faced in the last two years.

Future prospects

Despite initial growing pains, Movo is continuing to expand and there are two types of investment opportunity it is looking for at the moment, Cheesbrough explains. 

For brokers, Movo wants to bring into the partnership, she says: “We are looking for professional brokers who have a minimum five years of experience at senior level, from preferably a broker background, but we have taken an insurer background on before. We of course need it to be fit and proper, we need everything to be fully disclosed to us, we need to know that they are technically capable of giving the right advice.”

However, she says that “quite often, they haven't got any experience at all at running their own business”, but that Movo will help with business consultancy, tax advice, and so on.

“We try and give them all the training and support, not just around how to upsell and cross sell. We try and give them real time help just setting up their own business.”

But for those that Movo is looking to buy, Cheesbrough says she wants people who want to run their own businesses.

She says: “We do not want to run brokerages, that's not what we are about, we want to invest in them.

“When you go into a business that does want to sell, you are looking for individuals that have the right profile fit, because we have to work with them. We do not want someone who is going upset our insurers.”

Insurance investment

Elsewhere in the market, investment has slowed down, with just 685 insurance deals by the end of November 2022 – the lowest volume since 2019, according to S&P Global.

Recent weeks have seen more M&A deals and book buying, such as the acquisitions of By Miles and RSA’s motor book by Direct Line and Ardonagh Group, respectively.

Cheesbrough believes deals are being made, but companies are taking time to settle with the deals they have already made before looking for more.

“I think some of the bigger players have definitely stepped back,” she says. “There’s been a huge growth boom in the last three years. I think some of those companies that have bought so many brokers need to get their controls and processes for integration and migration in place.”

But even if companies are stepping back, Cheesbrough believes the money for investment is still there, but firms are being more strategic around their purchases.

“There is still enough [money] around. People who are buying up brokerages, but I just don't think there is as much to go after. So those that are buying are being much more strategic about where they want to buy.”

Launch of an MGA

Movo recently announced the launch of Moveda Underwriting, a new commercial lines MGA. With limits available up to £5m, the MGA will provide Commercial Combined, Liability and Property solutions across the Movo Group including the brokers within its Movo Partnership and Durell networks.

Cheesbrough says: “One of the things that we have always wanted to put in play is around having our own MGA, which has always been a really important thing for us.

“It has been something that I have driven for such a long time. It will become another AR of Movo Partnership, but essentially will be independent of that.”

What ambitions does Cheesbrough have for the MGA?

“We just want it to support our brokers. I am sure the capacity providers have very high expectations, and that is great. But essentially, this has been put in place to really support our broking community, both across Durell and Movo.

“It is an extra string to our bow. I think to be able to join a network that has its own MGA for support, and you can pick up the phone and have conversations, which is really good.

“We will grow it. We will add more stuff to it. We will go outside of Movo and Durell, potentially. But for now, this is an exclusive offering.”