Sharon Brown - the sports therapist who climbed to the top of insurance

Sharon Brown’s journey to becoming Chief Sales Officer at Miles Smith is not your typical one.

Because while motherhood is often the career break that disrupts a female’s climb up the insurance industry ladder, for Brown it was the diversion that inspired her greatest (work-related) triumph.

Brown joined Willis at 16 and spent a number of years with them before leaving the industry behind in 1999 to have her second child.

After a short career break in 2000, she turned her attention to a long-held passion for sport, studying sports therapy and running her own successful sports therapy business.

Industrial athlete

But it was her five years of helping everyone from Premiership football players to cancer patients and office professionals that turned her back to the path of insurance.

“Working as a sports therapist I then started to think about the impact it had on the team if players didn’t get back to full fitness really quickly, ” Brown said.

“You’ve got 11 players and if your centre forward is out injured you’ve got to get him back as quickly as possible otherwise it changes the whole dynamic of the team.”

Brown related this risk of losing a star striker to losing members of staff to sickness absence in an SME setting. The same thing goes with industry,” she said. “You might have 10 people on a delivery round, but then if one of them is off work with a back injury, then it really upsets the dynamic. “You might have to get an agency driver in who doesn’t do it as quickly and doesn’t really know the route.

“Then all of a sudden the  impact of the absence is quite significant. They are kind of an industrial athlete and our goal is to help people get back to work as soon as possible.”

EIS

Miles Smith’s EIS (Early Intervention Scheme) was the result, a product which has grown to become one of the broker’s most successful.

Based loosely around a physiotherapy product Brown was providing to Miles Smith, EIS provides fast track access to treatment for employees who are absent from work as the result of a physical injury, stress, depression or anxiety, to help promote a speedy recovery and return to work, subsequently minimising the disruption faced by the company.

She said: “It was really important for me to see how injury rehabilitation and early intervention could affect insurance in terms of claims because I’d had that first-hand experience.

“I’d worked on patients and I’d worked with people and seen how good it was to get someone into treatment as soon as possible after something had happened.

“Under EIS, once the employee is off for three working days they are straight into treatment process to help reduce the longevity of their absence.”

And she was enthusiastic about the benefits on society.

She added: “It has benefits for the employer, benefits for the employee and for the NHS because you’re not utilising the NHS.”

Acturis

The product reached a new milestone in February this year when it was rolled out on Acturis.

Miles Smith has already seen new brokers requesting Tobas, as a result of the roll-out.

In the beginning there was a basic product but EIS evolved when Brown joined Miles Smith. She says that Miles Smith helping her develop the product has been a key part of its success, something that she couldn’t have done alone.

She added: “I didn’t really have the wherewithal to get the product out there, I didn’t really know how to do it, and it hasn’t been until recently that I understood our distribution and thought let’s get it out there again because it’s a really valuable product.”

Being on Acturis, she says Miles Smith has already benefitted from a brand new method of distribution.

She said: “We thought it was our niche thing, but in all honesty the distribution method is what’s taken the product out there.

“We weren’t really utilising that because we wanted to keep it to ourselves, but realise now there are a lot of people that can benefit from it, and it’s now hopefully one of our stars that we push out there.”

Success

Since joining Miles Smith in 2011, EIS has been Brown’s baby, and with it she has scaled the employment ladder.

Starting as a Client Relationship Manager, she became Broker Relationship Director in 2014, before becoming Marketing and Distribution Director, and this year taking up the Chief Sales Officer role.

And Brown says her unusual background in sports therapy has helped her succeed.

“It’s fresh eyes,” she said. “I was coming at it from a very different aspect. I didn’t really know a lot about commercial business insurance because with Willis I’d mainly worked in reinsurance in the marine and non-marine environments.

“I suspect that having run my own business, and having had to take out insurance myself for my employees, I saw a very different aspect of insurance, and working in sports therapy I’d particular see the injury side of things.”

And Brown is encouraging of all women who have taken career breaks to make a return to the workplace.

She added: “I didn’t know what I was capable of, I’d had children and hadn’t worked at Willis since I was 26. But Miles Smith gave me that insight into what I could potentially achieve in my career.”