My Perfect Broker Week: Clear Group’s Phil Williams

What constitutes the ideal start to your working week?

The beginning of the week for me is about ensuring the team are all working in unison. Having a standup to align priorities and set expectations is crucial to ensuring we hit the ground running. It’s great to start the week excited about all pulling in the same direction with clear achievables.

In terms of working in the office to home/other, what does your working week now look like?

I’m where I need to be: that might be visiting one of our offices around the country or it might be at home, but importantly, I enjoy spending time with people, so that means being in an office at least three if not four days a week.

I do value the flexibility and time at home, but for me there’s nothing better to really understand your business than by spending time in it, living real problems and looking at how we can be better in helping our people with their jobs as this is key in unlocking a fantastic client experience.

What does a productive in-person, in-office meeting with your own team look like to you?

The best meetings are clear in what they intend to achieve and have all the right people and resources in them to make decisions. I’m very focused on the action that needs to be taken, so updates need to be clear, purposeful and succinct and crucially linked to action that comes out of the back of meeting.

That doesn’t mean I think meetings need to remove the personality or fun to be productive. Quite the opposite. But having a clear outcome-oriented approach cuts through a lot of wasted time which I’m sure is what my team really want.

What does a productive in-person, in-office meeting with an insurer partner look like to you?

Again, I love purposeful engagement with our insurer partners, and I just don’t get as much of an opportunity to have those in office in person meetings as I’d like, especially as this isn’t my day to day with Andy Moses and his team looking after our insurer relations.

At a strategic level, Clear is a growing business and the best meetings I’m engaged in are with partners who can understand the context of our growth and work to find opportunities to work across the whole, that takes understanding and preparation from both sides.

What does an ideal lunch break look like to take your mind off the day job?

Lunch is usually on the go, more functional than anything else, but perhaps this is my ideal as I’m always keen to ensure I’m maximising my time. That said I’m grateful of my moments of mindfulness, even if it’s only in the two minutes it takes me to walk to Wasabi and back from the office.

We all know evening meet-ups are important for networking. What is the best after work event you have recently attended?

These events are crucial and are a great opportunity to immerse yourself in topics that you can bring back into your own organisation.

I’m often at Insurtech/AI events but one evening event that really stands out in the last year was the Premium Credit Women in Leadership event where I was kindly invited to speak. I am the board sponsor of our ‘Female Alliance in Business’ or FAB network internally and not only was the networking fabulous, but it gave me a real check in on how I can help make Clear even more inclusive!

Team bonding is also key to a successful broking business. What have you found is a successful way to keep team spirits up?

We hold a number of events across the group from our whole business awards to our leadership and network conferences. But communication is the most important thing, within small teams and offices and across the wider business, whilst we can systemise some of this through ‘town halls’ or our intranet, the most powerful thing is to have authentic and empowered leaders that can do this across an organisation.

Have you had a ‘workation’?

I’ve not had a workation. I do believe in taking a break and try to keep time where work doesn’t interfere with the time I have travelling with family. That said I recognise that flexibility and balance are useful when juggling priorities inside and outside of work.

What would the ideal ‘workation’ look like for you?

One of my team has just had a workation from Devon, clocking off and being able to hit the beach sounds alright to me.

On Friday evening how do you like to wind down after a busy week?

My youngest has Cubs on a Friday, so after work I’m usually straight in the car running him around, sorting out something to eat and preparing for the activities of a young family at the weekend. There’s no rest for the wicked!

Phil will be part of the panel Embracing Digital: Meeting the Latest Customer Needs at Broker Expo on 12 October at the NEC Birmingham. Sign up to join him – click here.