Scouting for Growth Sabine VdL

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Scott Ritzheimer, the co-founder of Scale Architects and author of "The Founder's Evolution".

In this episode, Scott will share his wisdom on breaking through the common challenges founders face, wanting to grow faster despite constraints, overcoming the limitations of being the bottleneck to scaling, and building an organization that can thrive beyond the founder's direct involvement.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Business is hard, there are challenges that come up of course, but at one point while the company was growing really fast the challenges started popping up faster than we could fix them. It felt like it got really hard again, which didn’t make sense because we were doing the same things that spurred the phenomenal growth for the last 5 years. The year end financials started dropping for two years in a row despite making cutbacks. We had no ideas how to fix it because there wasn’t one obvious reason for it.
Every organisation goes through a stage called ‘whitewater’, where the complexity of the business causes us to cause problems; there’s no one problem to fix it’s the complexity of everything has built up and it’s exceeding our ability to manage, lead, delivery consistent quality for our customers. That gave me hope when my business felt like we were flailing.
There are things you need to do organisationally, but you need to change how you show up personally as a founder, CEO, leader and how you need to build, structure and architecture your organisation. You have to do both. By doing this my company tripled its bottom line in a single year & went on to open 2 multi-million dollar business units & increased profit margins by 5% for the next 2 years.
For founders/entrepreneurs/CEOs/leaders, there’s so much more on the line than just us. When we get it wrong it’s not just about my profit margins, it’s about my life, my family’s life, my leaders’ lives, my teams’ lives, it’s about our ability to deliver quality for our customers & their experience. The opportunity we were able to create after getting to predictable success was night and day from the struggle that we had in whitewater.

BEST MOMENTS

‘If you don’t have profit, you don’t have anything to invest with.’

‘Folks need to know how & when to hire a coach & what to look for when they do.’

‘I don’t want any founder out there to not know what their next level is.’

‘Predictable success is the set of 7 stages that every business goes through, by understanding it we can accurately predict what challenges we’ll be facing & the highest leverage strategies we can implement.’

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Scott Ritzheimer is a seasoned entrepreneur and co-founder who has helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits.

Scott founded Scale Architects to help other founders and CEOs identify and implement the essential strategies needed to fast-track their organizations to predictable success.

Through his work, Scott identified a universal pattern that consistently created success. He distilled these insights into the Founder's Evolution framework, which outlines the seven stages every founder must navigate.

This roadmap equips founders with the clarity to understand their current stage, intentionally plan their growth trajectory, and focus on the critical strategies for each phase.

Scott is dedicated to helping founders break through the common challenges of wanting to grow faster despite constraints, overcoming the limitations of being the bottleneck to scaling, and building an organization that can thrive beyond the founder's direct involvement. Scott’s unique blend of entrepreneurial experience and passion for enabling founders' success brings valuable insights to help listeners navigate their growth journeys with greater clarity and confidence.

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ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and M

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to John Johansen, a senior technology executive & operational leader with over 25 years of experience in consulting & executive roles. She is also joined by Steven Abel, partner at Oliver Wyman.

In this episode, the two guests want to challenge & change current operational mindsets within large enterprises. They dive into the known tech challenges existing within our currently fast evolving digitalizing insurance space, why an experimentation culture is critical to drive the relevance & resilience business needs today, what are the most effective paths for evolution, reinvention & consideration, & insights on how businesses can leverage tech ecosystems to scale digitally-driven revenue models.

KEY TAKEAWAYS         


I started creating business applications when I was 13 years old & have been writing software ever since. I’ve been doing this in the insurance world for about 30 years. With Oliver Wyman we’ve been able to create a team that’s able to build tools at speed that really improve our clients’ businesses.
InsurTechs have admirable qualities of being able to runs experiments & take them to investors & get feedback even in the early days then pivot on the back of those results. They can quickly create real, tangible products that people can touch, feel & react to which creates a new round of experimentation including more people giving feedback, more experimentation & more changes. We wanted to bring that into a corporate environment that didn’t have the experience of that agility.
The idea of responsible innovation is super important. There’s nothing wrong with the big corporate machine because it does a lot of things well. It protects the risk agenda; it enables bullet-proof technology that’s very stable. We have a very large client that we’ve done innovation for & we’re beginning to scale that in the enterprise. We’re not thinking of this in three lanes: The innovation group, the BAU support group, and the enterprise architecture group.
One of the things that’s fraught with peril in any IT organisation is when we go from development to beta tests, to launch, to productions support. Are we doing those things better? Is there less drama? Thinking through those early experiments & really demonstrating to people that the process is yielding that benefit/business change faster, with less investment, than an 18 month requirement process, an 18 month build & then a 12 month implementation. With the right experiments & stakeholder team we seeing those metrics trending in the right direction.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘We’re still seeing some bureaucracy, which means it’s hard to maintain momentum. We wanted to break the bounds of the culture a progress in weeks not months.’‘There’s a lot that we can do to improve business processes & be responsive to our business users by running small experiments.’‘The most important part of measuring success starts with picking the right experiments up front.’‘We can begin to measure by throughput: Is this process of experimentation actually getting us to faster, better business results, implementations, & hand-offs.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

John Johansen is a seasoned senior technology executive & operational leader with a proven track record of success. Based in Naples, he brings extensive experience in driving growth & innovation within the technology sector. As part of Oliver Wyman, Johansen specializes in helping legacy corporations leverage startup culture to foster agility, accelerate digital transformation, & unlock new opportunities.

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Steve Abel is a dedicated partner at Oliver Wyman, leveraging his 25+ years of consulting & executive experience to help clients tackle intricate challenges & lead teams in delivering reliable insights. With a strong focus on smart technological implementation, Steve has a proven track record of generating valu

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Brian McDermott, Chief Information Officer at Victor Insurance.

This podcast will be a little bit different. As Steven Abel is going to join us to highlight the value of the Oliver Wyman relationship with Victor Insurance, as a subsidiary of Marsh McLennan. Indeed, in the complex world of business, speed to value when delivering technology is critical & Victor Insurance has found a critical partner in delivering tech among others with the Oliver Wyman team.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


An MGA is a company appointed by the insurer, typically the carrier, to exercise supervision & oversight on specific & targeted insurance programmes. We do everything an insurance company does but we don’t source the capital, the carrier is the source of capital for us, they manage the risk in terms of the capital. We underwrite the risk on behalf of others & we do a lot of the administration on behalf of the carrier, claims processing, servicing, transaction  processing, connecting with the broker, handling of insurance fees & processing of any financial aspects.
We operate in 8 countries. The majority of the revenues & premiums derive from the US, around 80% left-side of the globe, 20% right-side. But, we do see immense opportunity on the right-side of the globe because it’s an untapped opportunity in territories with products & service offerings that we can provide. That’s a key strategic focus as we proceed.
Typically, InsurTechs’ challenges include having great product but limited premium running through the platform because of the leverage they have with their carriers to bring those products onto the platform. 
We differ from Marsh McLennan in that we’re a full, front to back insurance company: We do placement of products through our digital portal experiences, policy servicing, claims processing, data reporting & analytics, & underwriting. Marsh McLennan are a re-insurance broker, they don’t typically do underwriting. Our technology environments differ in that they’re built for different scale – we’re low premium, high volume, March McLennan operate in a different market segment; enterprise, high-end businesses, we operate in small/micro market. We have to build scalable, fast products whereas Marsh is more of a heavy touch relationship-based business with their clients. So it’s difficult to align with them completely but there are a number of areas around complimentary services.

BEST MOMENTS

‘We’re trying to become the Amazon for brokers in the small, commercial & speciality marketplace.’

‘One of the key challenges I have is to make sure that we can modernise while we integrate as we go on our journey towards the future.’

‘We sit in the middle of the value chain with the broker on the left hand side, supporting the insured, & the carrier on the right, they provide the capital to us.’

‘We need to make sure that we harvest the data insights that we have: historical claims & underwriting data - & augment it with tools like machine learning, AI, data ingestion & enrichment.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Brian McDermott is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Victor Insurance, a leading global provider of specialty insurance programs & a subsidiary of Marsh McLennan.

Brian brings a wealth of experience to his role, with a career spanning more than 30 years in diverse industries such as retail, insurance, finance, & government.

Known for his disruptive thinking and innovation within the IT field, Brian is constantly exploring new ways to leverage contemporary technology & drive digital transformation within the insurance industry.

In his role as CIO, Brian is keen to embrace modern technologies & help drive the agenda within the broader Marsh McLennan corporation. His unique perspective, stemming from Victor Insurance's position as a high-volume, highly transacting business, enables him to provide valuable input on the digital connection b

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Steve Abel, Partner at Oliver Wyman. In this episode, they dive into the insurtech world & determine how to reinvent the InsurTech space by Leveraging Commoditized Tech for a Competitive Edge.

On this episode they discuss:


The common mistakes InsurTech startups make when investing in technology components with not well-thought-out architectures.
How InsurTech startups can leverage commoditized technology to focus on building unique value propositions.
The strategies for effectively orchestrating & assembling tech components into a symbiotic whole for faster go-to-market.
How InsurTech startups can focus on monetizing their algorithms rather than building the full tech stack.
The changing concept of differentiation in the InsurTech sector & how startups can leverage this to their advantage.

Useful links:Cyber security and Captive InsuranceSelf-insured actuarial servicesCapital modelling

KEY TAKEAWAYS


There are a couple of errors that founders make. The first is that you need to hire technologists to build everything for you in an undifferentiated way. Most of what you’re bringing to the market is not the proprietary or unique.  It’s a drag on money, speed & you may lose focus on what’s important to your business model. You don’t need to hire them; with the pace of change of tech, a year from now you’ll need different talent because the tech will be different, Rent tech talent at the beginning.
Most innovation that occurring in the InsurTech space is from founders & companies that you may be innovating or own, you’re toe force of innovation in this sector. That’s important for your investors because they want a return on their investment. It’s important for the sector because the huge advancements in the distribution & carrier space, to your customers are because of you.
Critically assess what technical talent is absolutely necessary to be core to your vision, it’s as important as thinking about your architecture & tooling in terms of what is generically available & what’s going to be part of your secret sauce.
InsurTech’s burn through time & capital fast, how can you assemble your solution in a way that you can test a market as quickly as feasibly possible? A lot of founders lose time tripping up over boring, platform tech.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Modern tooling, especially cloud-based, already scales. The idea you need to buy a specialised infrastructure or server is no longer important as it once was.’

‘Getting something in you customer’s hands as fast as possible to find out what they’re going to find valuable & pay for.’

‘If you’re a founder with a great idea, everything that’s core to that great idea you need to own.’

‘In order to make money it’s important to understand how your product is going to be used & sold. These are not the same thing & that can be a very costly mistake.’

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

As a partner at Oliver Wyman, Steven helps clients solve complex problems & lead teams to deliver insights that you can trust. Steve acquired over 25 years of experience in consulting & executive roles, delivering value to organizations via smart technological deployment.

Steve’s specialties include program management, operations, shared services, enabling technologies, business process reengineering, finance leading practices, insurance products & data, actuarial platforms, machine learning, AI, cloud solutions, business & technical architecture. 

Steve is passionate about helping clients achieve their strategic goals & optimize their performance, while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, & excellence.

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Oliver Wyman

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Steve Abel, Partner at Oliver Wyman. In this episode, they dive into the challenges & solutions related to legacy debt & system modernization for incumbent insurers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


A few decades ago there weren’t the number or complexities of systems in the insurance landscape. Generally, there was 1 or several admin systems which did everything. The cost & complexity of IT was relatively low compared to now. The proliferation of systems that solve business problems, the complexity of those systems has increased exponentially in part because of the sheer number of systems but also because the landscape has evolved to accept that implementing a claims/administration/finance system should take years or months.
A lot of carriers have made successful bets in the past; they’ve bought a system, customised it & to a large extent, historically, they have fulfilled their promise to the business. Perhaps they were a little expensive or hard to implement, but at the end of the day the stakeholders got what they wanted. 
Take a hard look at your technology. A lot of these programme fail – between 30-60% depending on who you ask. Ask yourself: Is it worth the investment for my business? If you have a generic business maybe the cost of customisation is very low, but if your business customises a lot & when you’re done you have a lot of spreadsheets, maybe that’s not a great idea.

BEST MOMENTS

‘There’s an emerging opportunity for insurance carriers to leverage a new ecosystem of tooling & providers that isn’t as monolithic & doesn’t require so many months & so much costs to implement.’

‘In modern (mostly) cloud-based technology, it’s possible to think of data as an enterprise/ecosystem asset, so you can keep that data in a structure that works for multiple business processes/calculations.’

‘Speed is now more important than ever in thinking about technology in an ecosyetem. It used to be that you could pace your development choices in years, now technology is moving so much faster – years and months instead of decades.’

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

As a partner at Oliver Wyman, Steven helps clients solve complex problems & lead teams to deliver insights that you can trust. Steve acquired over 25 years of experience in consulting & executive roles, delivering value to organizations via smart technological deployment.

Steve’s specialties include program management, operations, shared services, enabling technologies, business process reengineering, finance leading practices, insurance products & data, actuarial platforms, machine learning, AI, cloud solutions, business & technical architecture. 

Steve is passionate about helping clients achieve their strategic goals & optimize their performance, while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, & excellence.

LinkedIn

Oliver Wyman

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL introduces the a series of podcasts featuring Steve Abel, Partner at Oliver Wyman, Brian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Victor Insurance and Esther Becker, Partner and Captive Actuarial Leader at Oliver Wyman.

The objectives of the following four episodes are to:


create an all rounded viewpoint of what is happening in insurance 
demonstrate how an insurance managing general agent has grown its business to over 3 billion dollars in Direct Written Premiums (DWP)
and how the world of captive insurance is evolving when emerging risks are so present in our day to day lives.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Legacy system optimization is crucial for insurance companies to not only reduce costs but also to enhance the value of existing investments. By addressing the historical oversights and implementing effective strategies, insurance companies and carriers around the globe can extract comprehensive value from your legacy systems.
Insurers out there… You've made substantial investments in your core systems, but it's possible that some decisions that we made were not aligned with the best long-term outcomes of your business or enterprise. Revisit past decisions critically to assess whether they still serve your company's current and future needs. Look for signs as to whether you've been locked into proprietary solutions which may hinder adaptability or interoperability long term. I have talked about those with many insurers and this is certainly an area of concern today.
Implement APIs that allow more flexible interaction with your core systems and introduce modular upgrades that can provide new capabilities without a complete system overhaul. These targeted improvements can significantly increase value and extend the lifespan of your core systems, helping you stay competitive in a rapidly evolving insurance market.
Finally, I wanted to dive into the world of captives and self-insurance programs offer a strategic approach to managing emergent non-insurable risks. A captive’s ability to navigate complex technological challenges and optimize technology choices is crucial in reinforcing the relevance and efficiency of the captive’s operations.

BEST MOMENTS

‘To unlock the value from your core systems, adopt a three-pronged approach: Simplify. Innovate. Collaborate.’

‘When you invest in technology startups, scaleup and growth ventures… recognizing the common missteps is going to be essential to avoid them.’

‘In leveraging commoditized technology, your goal should be to build more relevant applications. Utilizing established technologies allows you to focus on innovation without reinventing the wheel.’

‘By proactively shaping your approach to these areas of advancement, you're preparing to meet the demands of 2030 and propel the insurance and insurtech sectors forward.’

 

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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