Worcester-based Hazelton Mountford entered 2025 at a strong pace, announcing its acquisition of Lydney-based White Knight Group’s general insurance customer book of business. The deal is the Chartered brokerage’s second in five years and marks its expansion into a third location, in addition to its HQ in Worcester and its office in Evesham.
Discussing the acquisition in an interview with Insurance Business, managing director Gordon Hazelton (pictured centre left) highlighted how it underscores the value still placed by many in the market on being privately-owned. “They’re independent and so are we,” he said. “And they wanted their business to be looked by somebody who knows what it means to be independent. They didn’t want it to just be absorbed by a consolidator.”
The geographic fit of the business made the deal a natural progression for Hazelton Mountford, he said, while the addition of Michelle Howells, who will lead the brokerage’s new Lydney base, was described as a great fit for the business. The firm has been focused on measured growth since it started from scratch in 2008, he said, and most of the time that growth has been strongly organic.
Now standing at £16.5 million GWP, the firm might be smaller than some of its peers but it’s also seeing that this is a helpful differentiator. “We’re not a consolidator, we don’t have private equity funding or anything like that,” he said. “So, everything we look at and everything we do has to stand up on its own merits and be able to get a return for us. Our biggest success has really been in acquiring great account executives who haven’t wanted to be with the consolidators.”
Hazelton noted that talent attraction and retention had also been integral to the business’s growth over the years, and at the heart of that is finding people who fit the culture of Hazelton Mountford. “We don’t always get it right and we’ve made mistakes along the way,” he said. “But we do the best we can to get the right who have the right ethos to fit in with us. We’ve found that it’s finding the right people that’s the key to success, while the wrong people are the ones that cause the most trouble because they don’t fit in with our core values.”
As to how brokerages can attract and retain the right people, he advised on the importance of making every effort just to be a “really nice place to work”. As a smaller, privately-owned brokerage, the easiest way to outcompete the big insurance companies vying for the same great talent is by creating a nice work environment where employees are supported and have access to great employee benefits. Whether its pension contributions, good sickness benefits, or putting people through professional qualifications such as the CII exams, there’s a lot that even smaller insurance employers can do to take care of their people.
“I also think people like working for a place where the owners of the business are hands-on and not anonymous,” he said. “The other thing that account executives who have come to us have said is that they didn’t realise that the type of business we do tends to be on the larger commercial end that they find more interesting. We don’t do a lot of micro business at all, like a lot of the small independents. We tend to push up against some of the larger consolidators and bigger independents to compete for that business, which makes it a bit more interesting for our people.”
Hazelton highlighted that being part of a nimbler independent business has proven to be a value-add for clients as well as staff, particularly as its clients tend to be those larger, privately-owned businesses which don’t want to be supported by a faceless broker. There has been an interesting market shift since COVID-19, he said, where the firm is now finding that these larger companies are actively seeking Hazelton Mountford out.
“They come to us saying that they’ve been with a broker who has now got acquired and seems to have lost the touch,” he said. “They’ve been bounced around to different account executives and they want to get back to the personal touch. We’ve done a quite a number of cases like that, which is very rewarding.”
With the White Knight Group acquisition a done deal, he looked at what’s next for the business and emphasised that continuing its organic growth remains the name of the game. “We can’t sit back and wait for the market,” he said. “Because it’s that organic growth piece of acquiring new clients and new business that’s key. We’ve got to go out there and find it. We’ve built up our account exec base strongly and they’ll be pushing for further growth. And that’s our focus for 2025 – we’re not stopping here.”
