This Saturday night, Clear Insurance CEO Lisa Carter (pictured left) and Goldsworthy General Insurance Services managing director Kate Greaves (pictured right) will stride onto the Dancing CEOs stage in Brisbane with a choreographed country-rock mashup, a team of professional backup dancers and a target. They intend to push the event's fundraising total for the Women's Legal Service Queensland (WLSQ) past $1 million. So between now and curtain-up, every rehearsal counts and so does every donation.
Carter and Greaves are two of 17 CEOs competing on the night from across Queensland's business community. At the time of writing, their current funds tally puts them in fifth position on the Dancing CEOs leaderboard. But both are openly playing the long game.
"On the night we like to have a few donations up our sleeve to add to our tally - to put us higher up on the ladder," Carter said, signalling that brokers and insurers reading this still have time to land a contribution that will shift the result.
The pair are rehearsing with Mad Dance House in Brisbane, the production team behind Dancing CEOs, whose choreographer recently worked on Rebel Wilson's latest film. On Saturday night, Carter and Greaves will be flanked on stage by professional backup dancers - and in a twist that says everything about the size of the Queensland broking world, one of those dancers is the daughter of one of Greaves's own clients.
"Queensland can be a very small place," Greaves said, in what may prove to be the understatement of the evening.
The training schedule of the two brokerage bosses has had to bend around two demanding day jobs. Both Carter and Greaves are still running their businesses hands-on while squeezing in choreography sessions. Neither is pretending the routine is polished perfection. Instead, they're leaning on a combination of professional choreography, professional dancers and by their own cheerful admission: strategic costuming.
"I'm of the impression that the more glitter and mirror stuff that we can wear, the light shines back in so they can't actually see our movements too much," Greaves said. "I'm working with that method."
Carter has taken the same approach to a logical conclusion. On a recent weekend in Sydney, she made a deliberate detour to House of Priscilla, the famed Surry Hills drag queen costume shop and assembled an outfit engineered to distract. Glitter, sparkles and what she described as "shiny bits" are doing the heavy lifting on dance-floor exposure management.
The performance is the public face of a fundraiser that has a hard edge. WLSQ's helpline answered 15,708 calls in the past financial year - an average of 63 Queensland women reaching out every working day. In January this year an average of 730 calls came in per week, one of the busiest months on record. Carter and Greaves are dancing against that backdrop and they want the industry visibly with them.
The case for industry support also resonates in other ways for the local insurance industry. Greaves said female-led broking businesses still operate against the grain in Queensland and beyond.
"It's amazing how, still in this industry, it's very much a man's world, and female owners and directors of businesses are still a minority group," she said.
Carter sees this collaboration as a template. "I think more brokers, more rival brokers, should come together and collaborate on fundraising and charitable initiatives for whatever cause they're passionate in," she said.
The Clear Insurance and Goldsworthy teams have not only worked side by side for other causes but they have also taken this collaboration a step further. The two leaders said they also consult each other about business challenges or when they need some inspiration or a new approach to a tricky issue.
That spirit is the one Carter and Greaves want the wider industry to mirror this week. Donations route directly through the Dancing CEOs page to their act. Corporate sponsors and insurers wanting to support the duo can also reach out directly with last-minute pledges held back to land on the night, when they can move the ranking.
