John Warburton and Vicky Ferrier: Konsileo committed to ‘secret sauce’ as broker comes of age

Commercial broker Konsileo is a business that many in the insurance sector have kept an eye on with interest.

It has it grown from 60 staff and £25m of gross written premium (GWP) – when Insurance Times last spoke to its co-founder and chief executive John Warburton in 2022 – to 160 employees and over £60m GWP in November 2024.

Furthermore, on 11 November 2024, the broker announced it had raised £8m of investment from a mixture of debt and equity financing to continue this expansion, with a focus on growing its team further and continuing to develop its own technology.

This entirely organic growth is not the whole story with Konsileo, however. The broker also sports an unorthodox business model based on the organisational philosophy of Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations.

Warburton’s interpretation of Laloux’s philosophy formed the guiding principle and “secret sauce” when he co-founded Konsileo in 2016 as an organisation that intended to emphasise the human aspects of broking.

As well as empowering staff with technology designed to facilitate human interactions, Warburton’s approach eschews a traditional top-down management structure in favour of allowing brokers to self-manage and collaborate with colleagues on projects in a fluid, organic way.

Warburton explains: “We’ve tried to design out anything that needs to be top down. The only thing we’re top down about is escalation mechanisms if there are compliance failures.

“As a management team, we don’t want to be making capricious management decisions in the centre. We deliberately designed the organisation for collaboration, so we make sure to put new colleagues next to brokers from day one so that they can work together in the way that they want to.”

People are the strategy

Konsileo’s focus on providing its brokers maximum autonomy does come with what Warburton refers to as “cat herding” challenges, however.

Brokers that join the organisation with notions of how a broker is supposed to work must adapt to different ways of working – and, because the psychology of every person is different, Konsileo has created both soft cultural and hard process driven nudges for new employees in an attempt to bring out the best in them.

One recent joiner with a big hand in this methodology is Vicky Ferrier, who holds an unorthodox dual responsibility for both financial performance and people as the broker’s first chief people and commercial officer.

Having originally joined the business in October 2022 as a non-executive director, Ferrier moved into her new role in May 2023 and set about helping Konsileo’s executive team draw up ideas around how it could solve the “cat herding” challenge while continuing to grow.

She explains: “Motivating people in an organisation just boils down to providing them autonomy, mastery and purpose. They want to be responsible for their own destiny, so for us, that means freedom of [risk] placement, the freedom to be unencumbered by bosses and the freedom to actually get better at what they’re doing.”

Providing this setting for staff is difficult, however, especially when new joiners come into the Konsileo environment for the first time.

Ferrier adds: “There’s a lot of human conditioning and instinct that we’re going against, in a way. We’re now really alert to the behaviours that you see when people begin floundering in the first few months – they go to ground, disappear and go in on themselves.

“Now that we recognise that pattern, [we] have put a lot more infrastructure in around the first six months [tenure] – for example, we have group coaching between colleagues and we’ve got a dashboard showing different leading indicators of performance.

“Importantly, we also mention in face-to-face inductions that staff may experience the euphoria of joining us, but then see a massive dip in around two months when they realise they are truly responsible for their own performance and motivating themselves.”

Scaling up

Most brokers do not have such an explicitly philosophical view of how work should be organised and carried out – or at least the majority subscribe to a traditional way of doing things that has undoubtedly created successful businesses.

“That happiness comes from our genuine investment in processes that unlock brokers’ latent potential and collaboration with others.” – John Warburton

But despite the extra work of reimagining organisational structure and creating an ethos that Konsileo has committed to, it continues to grow.

Warburton tells Insurance Times that this is because of the broker’s approach to organisational hierarchy and working environment – rather than despite it.

He explains: “Our future is to obviously scale the UK business and our target is to [employ] between 500 and 1,000 brokers in the UK.

“We think that’s possible because the mantra for our basic employment proposition to brokers is ‘come to Konsileo and you’ll be the happiest, best rewarded and most professional broker you can be.

“That happiness comes from our genuine investment in processes that unlock brokers’ latent potential and collaboration with others.”

As a management team, Konsileo’s c-suite does not set placement strategies or targets on which business lines it will enter next. It entirely relies on brokers to develop their own books of business – with a growth strategy reliant on staff taking opportunities for themselves.

It is this people-based proposition that Konsileo is betting on to drive its growth, with the thinking being that creating an unconstrained environment for brokers to do their jobs in the best way possible will attract the best brokers in the market, who will then – in turn – drive natural, organic growth.

As with any explicitly principles-based organisation, there are a range of staff working at the broker – from true believers who “drink the Kool-Aid and sit around the campfire to sing Kumbaya”, as Warburton explains it, to those who come into the organisation out of “pure self-interest”.

But, Warburton adds, “this is totally fine because what we really emphasise is that we are relentlessly insurance and concerned with getting back to the heritage of insurance – helping brokers to rediscover the roots of great insurance broking”.

Building foundations

Warburton and Ferrier emphasise that, despite the New Age philosophy that suffuses the business – with all the negative laissez-faire connotations this can potentially conjure up – Konsileo is emphatically committed to functioning as a successful commercial broker. 

“We are somewhat capital unconstrained for now and that means we can really pump up this growth.” - John Warburton

Ferrier says: ”The worst examples of this philosophy can be very consensus driven and come with a real ambivalence around performance and making money, which is a terrible outcome. So while we stand by our employment proposition, we also drive home that brokers will be making money for themselves, us and supporting their clients.” 

An absolutely essential linchpin of Konsileo is that, when it was founded in 2016, Warburton and co-founder Peter Henderson – who is also the firm’s chief technology officer – spent a number of years building a proprietary technology system that could facilitate and smooth out the broker’s unique way of working. 

Warburton says: “People asked us why we did something as stupid as build a system from the ground up when others existed, but the main reason is we couldn’t run our model of deep collaboration, self management and remote working if we didn’t have control of our tech infrastructure. 

“Our people processes are really the reason we need to have this bespoke technology. It’s our secret sauce that allows any number of people to collaborate on a single file and share commission automatically between them.”

With these foundations, Warburton believes that Konsileo has now “come of age” – the business is targeting ambitious goals in terms of scale and growth. 

He adds: “That’s our pitch to investors, that this is the future of commercial lines insurance broking. [Following our November investment,] we are somewhat capital unconstrained for now and that means we can really pump up this growth.”