Mike Ashurst:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s ICMIF webinar, Making insurance simple: Sandbox Mutual’s rebrand and CX journey. Thank you for joining us. Before we get started, just a quick reminder that if you have any questions about today’s presentation, you can send them via the question box on the GoToWebinar platform, and we’ll aim to answer as many as possible at the end of the presentation.
So I’m delighted to be joined today by Rob Jones, president and CEO of Sandbox Mutual Insurance in Canada, and Rob will be sharing the story of how this century-old insurer transformed from Saskatchewan Mutual into Sandbox Mutual, embracing a bold new brand and a customer experience strategy designed to make insurance delightfully simple. Rob will walk us through how the company’s grown its digital presence, connected with the younger customer base and the challenges and lessons learned along the way. Rob, over to you.
Rob Jones:
Good morning, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you’re joining us from today. As Mike mentioned, I’m Rob, I’m president, CEO here at Sandbox. We’re actually quite excited to share our brand and CX journey with you all today. I hope you have a little bit of fun. I hope you engage in some playful banter with us, and I hope you think about insurance just a little bit differently after our session today. Just see if I can navigate the slides. There we go.
So, in terms of an agenda today, I just want bring you up to speed in terms of who we are here at Sandbox, kind of where it all began and how we became Sandbox. I want to talk quite a bit about what our brokers and policyholders had to say as we went through this journey. We also put in some kind cool metrics to help tell us what they were thinking and feeling about us, and then I want to talk about a few of the CX priorities that we have focused on for the future, based on our journey. And every project comes with a few lessons learned, so what we would do differently as an organisation, and then I also want to give you a bit of a sneak peek into what’s next for Sandbox.
So I’m guessing many of you aren’t aware of who we are as an organisation. I do warn you we’re a little bit different than most insurance companies, and our goal is to make insurance interesting to our peers, like the people on this call, to our brokers, our policyholders and our employees. So we are actually, at a very high level, a Western Canadian Property and Casualty Mutual Insurance company that offers auto, personal property, commercial, farm insurance, and we do all of this through a 100% broker distribution model.
So 2025 is a really, really big year for Sandbox. We’re actually calling it our Gold Medal Year. It’s the final year of our current strategic plan that we began way back in 2020. At the time we went through a scenario planning exercise, which really helped us imagine four different versions of ourselves, and we ultimately landed on what we like to call the Figital Strategy. So this is a growth strategy that’s committed to meeting brokers and policyholders where they choose to do business with us.
On the slide, you see what we call our plan on the page for 2025. We share this with each of our staff members to communicate our strategic vision, but we also want to make sure they understand what our priorities are for the year. We anticipate hitting $180 million in premium in 2025, which would double our premium volume when we began the plan back in 2020. As you’ll see through the presentation, it took significant change to get us to where we are today, particularly in the brand, customer experience and technology side of the business. Ultimately, we’re on a quest to make dealing with insurance delightfully simple.
But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, so I’d love to take a few minutes and go back in time with you. So Saskatchewan Mutual Insurance, also known as SMI, was founded by a group of farmers back in 1908 to provide insurance coverage that was difficult to access at the time. Over the years we saw a few name changes, but we’re a company that’s very proud of our roots. We’ve been living a century of mutual values, and we’re committed to Western Canadian communities that we serve today.
As we embarked on our strategic vision back in 2020, we held several introspection sessions with brokers, policyholders and employees, and the following attributes were identified as to who we had become as a company, strength, stability, broker partnerships, dependable coverage. I’m sure you would say, “Rob, hold on a minute. This sounds like just about any insurance company actually in the world,” and we agree. It was time to make a change that altered the future of Saskatchewan Mutual Insurance forever.
The next step in our journey was to really engage with a vendor to help us truly understand the makeup of our policyholders and our brokers. So they actually helped us segment into what you see on the screen today, which included demographic research, psychographics, channel preferences, buying habits. And on the right-hand side of the wheel that you see, we were naturally attracting six core groups of policyholders. However, we were completely missing the mark on the left-hand side of the wheel in the other five areas or segments. The right-hand side represented a much older baby boomer and Gen Z demographic, while the left-hand side represents a more millennial and Gen Z group. Our average policyholder age was in their mid-fifties back in 2021, and it was pretty obvious we were going to need to evolve, and it needed to happen quickly.
So there were four key reasons we felt that we needed to evolve as an organisation. Number one, we had to be different. We tended to blend in with everybody else in the insurance space in our area. Number two, our home province of Saskatchewan was in our name, but we were trying to do business in three other provinces, and it was hurting our ability to grow. Number three, the next generation of policyholder was demanding a very different approach to insurance and a different way of doing business with their carrier. And number four, our brand was confused with another insurance company in West, and we had virtually no brand recognition within our trading area.
So in preparation for the next few slides, I need to provide a disclaimer. What you’re about to see is not for the faint of heart. What we’re going to show you is a transformational journey for SMI, but not only SMI, but also the industry as a whole in the Canadian marketplace. This is the story of how we are transforming a century-old insurance company perceived as complicated and very, very… I can’t stress the word very enough, boring into the most un-insurancy insurance company ever. And we did this just by listening to our customer base.
The first thing we had to do was create a new story, and if you’ve been insurance on a long time, this is going to feel like a bit of a shot in the heart because it felt like that to us as well. But our story sounded like this. It’s time we recognise our place. People don’t really care about insurance, and we don’t blame them. Picture an insurer that stays out of your hair until you actually need us. While you’re living your best life, we’re working to perfect the most delightfully simple experience so when the time comes, you’ll be happy you deal with Sandbox.
I’m sure you’re asking me, “Why Sandbox? How did this come into play?” Well, the name reflects a place of creativity, of curiosity, experimentation, and a place where we could all come together to create or to build. We intended it as a metaphor for building better insurance and sticking with our mutual roots. We felt the need to do it together with brokers, with policyholders, our peers, and our employees. Once again, we were on a quest to make dealing with insurance delightfully simple.
The other key piece that we thought we had to bring into the mix early on was a set of experience principles that our staff could utilise on a day-to-day basis to understand what was expected of them in terms of their interaction with our stakeholders. The first one was a relentless pursuit of simplicity. Nothing is ever complete. We’re always looking to make things easier. Secondly, we wanted to get to the point. We wanted to use fewer words, reduce the number of steps and remove barriers to the insurance purchase and claims perspective. Number three, we wanted no dead ends. Digital or offline, we’ll never leave you hanging. The options are clear. We aim to guide you every step along the way.
As you can see here, we kind of showcase our visual identity. We really needed to evolve to the needs of our customers. There simply was no choice for us. The old logo on the left was designed with old technology that we couldn’t really even use in promotional opportunities. The new brand or logo that you see on the right focused on a much more modern approach. If you look at the right-hand logo a little more closely, it probably appears like something’s wrong with the X. At the end of Sandbox, we actually flipped the X on its side. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the letter X is used as the foundational letter when developing new fonts. We saw this as a perfect alignment with the brand and why we chose Sandbox because we see Sandbox as a foundation to a new world of insurance.
As you see here, we went from a very traditional approach in both our pictures and our phrasing to something that was much more modern, fun and playful in an attempt to reach a younger audience. We also wanted to pay a little bit of homage to our rich history. So the little castle icon that you see in the circle was actually a turret that we pulled from the original castle used in our very first logo. We just modernised it a little bit, and then we use it now as a centrepiece for our social media and our visual identity.
This is just a slide to show you the essence of our brand as it’s presented to the marketplace. It’s fun. It’s playful. I actually think it might be oozing with a little extra personality. It really introduced a whole new way for us to think about and engage with your insurance provider. We’ve done a lot of playful use of Murphy’s Law and for those that are unfamiliar, this is essentially what can go wrong, will go wrong, and Sandbox is always there to help.
Originally, I had wanted to show you a short video about how one of our employees viewed the new brand change, and really unfortunately the video isn’t going to play for us today. But the key here was that there needed to be a strong alignment between our values as a company and the values of our employees. We actually had to make an intentional shift in our mindset. We went from this concept of being a traditional insurer in the marketplace to being an insurer that was focused on several new things: customer experience, innovation, being fun and playful, and actually standing out in the property and casualty marketplace. One of our employees described it probably better than I could describe it myself. “We used to be a 117-year-old company. Today we’re a 117-year-old startup company.”
As I’m sure most of you do as well, Sandbox spends a significant amount of time and investment listening to brokers and policyholders, and I wanted to share a unique way that we capture how members believe and feel about not only insurance, but Sandbox and the industry as a whole. To understand our consumers better, we engaged in primary research to better understand not only how customers made decisions but why they made the decisions. We actually worked on a new metric called a customer emotional quotient metric, or a CEQ, which tells us the most important feelings and beliefs that drive their behaviour as consumers or as brokers.
So the way we did this… This is an example of the consumer CEQ. We actually measured them through surveys, and I think we looked at about 400 consumers originally. We actually measured them in a survey on 16 Levers of Loyalty that you see here. The ones in yellow are based on feelings, and the ones in black are based on in beliefs. And what this told us is coming here on the next slide. It told us that policyholders feel a certain way and expect a certain way that we’re going to show up for them. So, first of all, we had to be uncomplicated. We had to make dealing with them easy. They expect us to be predictable. We have a consistent experience regardless of when and how they deal with us. They wanted us to be dependable. They wanted Sandbox to have their back, and finally they wanted to be joyful. Insurance can be one of the most stressful experiences for the end consumer, and we need to bring the right level of energy and joy into the situation.
These scores also allowed us to understand in a little bit more detail what was important to our policyholders. Showing that how we make them feel is important to consumers than the beliefs we hold as an organisation. I just want to say that again because it was huge in our step forward. Showing how we make them feel is more important than the beliefs we hold as an organisation. And our purpose as an organisation and our people are what they connect to even more so than our products. So they connect to our purpose and our people more than our products. So the lesson learned is we couldn’t do any kind of differentiation work necessarily on our products. We had to focus on our purpose and our people.
On the broker side, we did something very similar. We did another survey of about 80 of our brokers, and we looked at 16 Levers of Loyalty with them, both feelings in yellow and our beliefs in black. And they kind of told us a bit of a similar story. Honestly, I’ll get to it. There we go. Very similar in that they wanted us to be predictable with consistent experiences, uncomplicated by making things easy, dependable by having their back, but they added a new component for us, and that was, to be honest. There was this sense that we weren’t transparent. We weren’t open, so we had to change the way we interacted with our brokers to ensure we demonstrated this moving forward.
The next area that I want to talk to is really in relation to the old adage that what you measure, you focus on as an organisation. And we’ve developed a couple of key metrics that help us listen to our brokers and policyholders. The first one is probably not going to be a surprise to many of you. We just use it a little bit differently than what some other people use it. It’s not about a number for us, and it never has been. It’s about a way to listen, learn and make real improvements. The more feedback we get, the better we can fine tune what we offer and the better we can show up for our policyholders and our brokers.
And so what the Net Promoter Score information has told us, I’ll present here in the next slide. From a promoter perspective, they love how easy the website is to navigate. They indicated that we provided very fast and simple… It was very fast and simple to make a claim, and everything seemed to be done well and our phone calls were answered properly. Those passive respondents said, “Well, most of the time you get back to us on your quotes in a timely manner. I think that some of your ability to speak to an underwriter is starting to get better, and I also think the filters in relation to our website to find forms and documents could be a little bit better.” Those that we’re representing detractors said, “Sometimes we have a bit of trouble reaching the team. Updating banking information has been painful and no confirmation.” So a couple of areas that we needed to work on as an organisation.
The second area that I want to talk about, and this relates to the CEQ, is the scores we received, and we’re going to use the broker scores as an example. So on the left-hand side you see a score of 43 out of 71 versus in 2024, on the right-hand, you see a score of 31 out of 67. So the white box represents what our potential is. We obviously aren’t, from a loyalty standpoint, going to hit a hundred percent, nobody is, but this is the potential that we feel we can reach. The yellow box is kind of the median score that survey respondents gave us.
So, as you can see, we as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, felt like we had great relationships with our brokers, but our CEQ scores were telling us something a little bit different. That we felt like we knew we were having some service challenges, but this actually gave us a measurable impact on the effects service was having on our relationship with brokers. We actually weren’t meeting their expectations, and we needed to do something about it. It also shows that product is considerably more important for a broker to choose us or recommend us as compared to the policyholder was. And from ’23 to ’24, you can see the importance of our people at a time when our brokers were telling us they couldn’t get ahold of us. So lots of opportunity for us to work on and improve our CEQ scores. So, from this information, we identified several key priorities on the CX side, and this is what we’re going to get into next in our discussion.
2024, we actually built out customer experience department at Sandbox whose sole purpose was to deliver on what brokers and policyholders had been telling us in our metrics. We didn’t just take on a new name, and we didn’t just make everything yellow. To really overhaul our brand, we approached everything quite differently. This started with focusing on three key areas: technology advancements, service overhaul, and developing a customer service mindset.
On the technology side, I’m just going to breeze over a couple of examples here. We’d never had a social media platform prior to our new strategic plan in 2020, so we rolled that out with key metrics to show engagement statistics. In the middle is an example of our website. It’s different, it’s fun. It’s exciting, and it’s easy to navigate. The top right side, we developed a digital find an issue solution for our homeowner policies. And then the bottom right, we built out a claims portal that was designed like a pizza tracker. So when you order a pizza, you have a tracking system that shows you when that pizza’s going to be delivered. We built our claims portal with five simple steps that show people when each stage is completed with a green bar. Alternatively, in alignment with our Figital strategy, they’re also given a direct contact at Sandbox, with someone they can reach out to if they feel like they need that human component tied to their claim’s success.
On the service side, we actually created a standardised customer service playbook, and we launched a customer service centre. Just to note, we recently won a bronze award for our playbook, through the Insurance Marketing and Communications Association. There were 300 entries that came in from more than 50 insurance companies. And in terms of values, we really focused on creating values that aligned our people with the expectations coming from brokers and policyholders. So we’re bold. We question everything because how it’s always been done just isn’t good enough. Progress matters more to us than playing it safe. We’re fun. We bring energy, personality and a bit of a spark to everything we do. We’re curious. We ask big questions. We chase bold ideas, and we look at challenges like they’re opportunities waiting to happen. We’re also human. We skip insurance speak. We talk like real people. We show up for our policyholders and brokers with empathy and honesty, and we’re disruptors. We are here to reimagine what insurance can feel like. If there’s a better way, we’ll create it.
So if you’ve worked on any major change in your organisation, there’s always a few valuable lessons that you learn along the way. Our brand and customer experience projects have been the most rewarding and humbling projects I think I’ve experienced in my career. Lesson number one, your brand won’t be for everyone. Here’s some of the feedback that we got. “It’s too yellow. It makes me think of a cat litter box. I don’t like the casual language in your phone messaging.” At times it was really difficult for us to not doubt that we were on the right path or that we’d maybe gone even a little bit too far, but we stayed strong in our belief that there was a market for something different in insurance. And since then, we’ve actually seen premium volume grow from 98 million in 2022 to 147 million at the end of 2024.
One of our key segments that you would’ve seen in the research on the slide earlier, we call her our Kelsey persona, has increased from about 30% in 2021 to 37% in 2024. This equates to significant growth in our younger demographic. Lesson number two, you will not get it perfect on the first try. And we introduced a service centre that hit several speed bumps along the way. At times it left us feeling like maybe we were better off before we had the service centre, but we constantly tweaked and adjusted the model to get to a point where our service team is now delivering a 70% resolution on calls at the first point of contact. And we’ve also adopted a mantra now in the organisation that it’s more about progress than perfection at Sandbox.
Lesson number three: always include the team in the process. We probably didn’t do a good enough job at the beginning, which could have really impacted our buy-in, but lately we’ve brought in over half of our staff to participate in one-hour interviews to share their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to help us get our brand stance or our why as an organisation. Also, to help us determine how we can set ourselves apart in the industry and why we are actually here. This another top-down vision or mission statement. This was developed from the ground up.
And, finally, lesson number four, continuous feedback is critical. So prior to launching these tools, we didn’t really have a meaningful way to communicate or capture policyholder feedback. We took a no news is good news approach and didn’t necessarily have our ear to the ground to know what they needed from us. The new tools now are giving us regular input on service levels and allow us to make real-time adjustments. We’re building stronger relationships because we know the way they expect us to show up for them.
So, finally, let’s talk a little bit about what’s next for Sandbox. We feel this is a never-ending journey, and we just wanted to give you a sneak peek in terms of what’s coming next. So in terms of a brand stance, we’re working with our team to develop a brand statement that helps drive our passion and fuels us every day. It’s why we exist. It’s actually what drives us to get out of bed in the morning. We’ve landed on an ambition to become the most interesting brand in insurance.
The industry itself is at a crossroads. For too long, insurance has been synonymous with dry jargon, soul-crushing paperwork, and a general sense of existential dread. It’s become the soundtrack to silence, the epitome of a necessary evil. Well, at Sandbox we’re here to inject a little bit of life into insurance. Turn adulting from a chore into a confidence stride, to be the partner that you actually want to deal with. This is our pledge to be the insurance company that’s refreshingly, undeniably, and unapologetically unboring. We are the most interesting insurance company.
Unboring Insurance? Well, it’s the act of making insurance interesting, and we’re going to do this by making it delightfully simple. We’re going to dismantle barriers with clarity, ease, and user-friendly experiences. We’re going to build trust and make our brand inherently interesting. We’re going to emphasise a human-centric approach that makes us relatable and therefore more interesting. Well, that’s our story: how by being truly customer obsessed, we transformed a century old insurance company, once perceived as complicated and boring, into the most un-insurancy insurance company. We always feel that we, including peers, policyholders, brokers and our employees, do things when we do it together. If you agree, we’d invite you to come play in our Sandbox.
Certainly open for any questions or discussion that we might have. And if this makes sense to you and you want to know more, we don’t want you to hesitate to reach out to us and have further conversations. Thank you.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. Thank you, Rob, for an excellent presentation. We have a few questions, so let’s get right into those first one: “How has the new brand impacted your perception among brokers and long-standing customers?”
Rob Jones:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I want to share a story with you. I think this is representative of our brand generally. So we had a smaller community close to our head office here. We had an elderly individual reach out to us and say, “I can’t believe you changed the name to Sandbox like that. It’s just horrible. We love the old Saskatchewan Mutual Insurance kind of name.” And then she went on to say, “You know what? We talk about you every day at coffee because on Coffee Row you are the topic of discussion in our small community.” And I thought that’s probably the first time we’ve ever been talked about on Coffee Row in this community. So while some of the older demographic I think looked at us from, “Oh my, this is a significant change,” I think the younger demographic saw us as a fresh, vibrant brand moving forward. But this lady also ended the conversation with me by saying, “You know what? You provide great service. We love you. I’m not moving away from you even though I don’t really like the name.”
I think we have a general sense of we’re really capturing from both a broker and a policyholder perspective that they really are enjoying and promoting this new brand. And I think it’s something so different and so out there in the industry that it’s really helped us to attract a lot of growth in the last few years.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. Thanks, Rob. We’ve got quite a lot of these coming through now. Saw more, my screen’s just jumped. “Could you explain a bit more about what a customer service playbook is and what it is that makes it award-winning?”
Rob Jones:
Yeah, so the customer service playbook was all about taking a different approach to serving our customers and doing it in a different way, essentially making insurance interesting. And it really gives our team a tool that is used throughout the organisation to deliver a consistent experience regardless of whether you’re talking to our service centre, our claims team, or our underwriting team as an example. And what made it I think award-winning is just a different approach to the way we speak to policyholders, and the way we speak to our brokers. It’s in a much more engaging and thoughtful way.
Initially when we rolled out our service centre and our playbook, it was more focused about delivering on specific times. And we’ve since shifted away from that to say, “No, we’re going to take the time to interact with you and to answer your questions in a meaningful way,” and it’s just a different perspective from what we’re seeing. Certainly for anybody interested, I know our brand team would be open to sharing the playbook and having you take a look, if you’d like to.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. Thanks, Rob. The next one, “The change management internally must have been huge. How did you go about it?”
Rob Jones:
Yeah. Change management is huge with any massive change in the organisation. Number one, it’s bringing your team along for the ride I think is fundamentally important. And I think the key win for us is, as we’ve gone through this massive change over the last five years, we’ve done something a little bit different on the awareness of change. First and foremost, we explain why the change is occurring, and we do it over and over and over again. And one of the rules of thumb for me is you need to tell people at least seven times why you’re making a change or until they tell you, “Stop telling me. I understand.”
The second key component with change awareness I think is telling people what would happen if we didn’t change. And so I think that’s where our message came through on the change management side was people started to understand that we as an organisation had a very older policyholder base and that if we didn’t make change, it was going to be difficult for us to remain relevant in the industry. And once you get the buy-in at that awareness stage, I think people naturally started to adopt the direction we’re going. The other side of things that I think worked in our advantage was the fact that we were transitioning from a much older employee group who are moving into retirement phase into a younger up and coming group. And so they really appreciated the new brand, and they really enjoyed participating in a new brand in a new way with new interactions with brokers and policyholders.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. And just aligned to that, if you had to do some work then to try to change the culture of the organisation as well.
Rob Jones:
Yeah, we did. And we’re actually going through that as we speak. I think I mentioned in one of my slides, we’ve recently actually brought in facilitators to sit down and talk to well over 60% of the team and just really elicit their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. And then we had these facilitators come in and present the results to the team, and we didn’t sugarcoat any of it. They presented some really positive and some really negative comments on how people feel about the culture in the organisation, and I think it kind of cemented the direction in which we’re going. And it also gave management an opportunity to start to show up for its employee base, and we’re starting to see the effects of that already take hold even in the last couple of months since we had these interactions with the facilitators.
Mike Ashurst:
And a couple of questions that I’m going to lump together. So, “Does it become expensive to continuously research with your customers?” And then, “What was the overall impact on your expenses of the whole rebrand?”
Rob Jones:
Yeah, rebrand is certainly expensive, don’t get me wrong. But I think one of the areas that you can’t cut costs on is the research side of things. I think the research is so meaningful in terms of where you need to focus in your strategic plan moving forward. So the research side is not where we sacrifice any of our expenses. If you are looking at any kind of significant change in your brand, you definitely have to budget significantly for that change because the awareness piece in getting your message out to brokers and policyholders is so significant. And I think I mentioned earlier, whenever you’re making any change, you need to communicate it over and over and over and over again until they basically tell you, “No, we get it. We understand who you are, and we don’t need to hear it again.”
Mike Ashurst:
Great, thanks. Another one here, more specific. “What approach do you think works best when selling insurance to Gen Z?”
Rob Jones:
Oh, that’s a good question. I think it’s about the values side of things. So I think I mentioned earlier in the presentation, they are looking at our purpose as an organisation, and they look at the people that they’re dealing with more so than the product itself. And so if you can connect with Gen Z at the purpose and the people side of things, you will definitely win them over. And that’s the feedback we’re getting. It would be a separate presentation for us, but we’ve really rolled out a key persona as an organisation here in 2025 that we’re looking to sell on. We named her Kelsey, and it’s a mother in the ages of 20 to 35 is kind of the focus area, and really for her it’s about her time. And in Canada here, we find she makes about 70% of the purchase decisions. So really connecting with her on a purpose and a people side really has made the difference for us up to this point.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. And we’ll just have a couple more. So this next one, “I love what you did with your brand and your company. It’s so innovative and modern. The change you made has made a huge positive difference. How did your competitors react to your change?”
Rob Jones:
That’s a great question. Thank you, whoever asked that. We are seeing our competitors try to duplicate what we’ve done, but it comes across as a combination of traditional with modern. It’s not coming across as a full-blown modern, and they’re not willing to take the plunge that we did to make insurance more interesting. That’s probably the best way I could answer that.
Mike Ashurst:
Right. And this last one, which is quite a nice way to end, “What advice would you give to other mutual insurers looking to modernise their brand and customer experience?”
Rob Jones:
The advice for me is sit down and talk to your employees. They’re on the front line, and they’re hearing consistently what your brokers and your policyholders have to say, and they have a lot of great insight. Don’t underestimate what it is they bring to the table. And then, secondly, your brokers. For those of you that have a broker distribution model, they are your eyes and ears to the general public, and they actually want to work with you and partner with you. One of the things we’ve done as a part of this brand rollout is we’ve built specific partnerships where we invest in our brokers, and we invest in their communities, and we invest in their customer base. And we help them identify where their customers are and how they fit with Sandbox, and I think that’s a key component. Spend the time. Everybody keeps moving towards, I say technology, don’t forget about the human side. Spend time with them engaging with them.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. I did say that was the last one, but there’s one more that’s just come through that’s sort of aligned to that. So how did you get your board on side with this change?
Rob Jones:
Number one, we haven’t told them yet. No, I’m just kidding. I think it’s a great question because when we first presented this journey to the board, they were… I’m not sure if sceptical was the right way, but you’ve got to present it to the board from the perspective of the consumer and the growth side of the business. So we actually demonstrated the return on investment to the board that our brand would have for us, and we demonstrated the growth that we thought we could achieve by changing our brand. And so it’s going to take time, and I think that’s the first thing you need to tell your board is, “It will take time to move this forward,” but once you get the base established, you really start to see it take off. For us, in 2023… We rolled out the brand at the end of ’22. In 2023, we only saw growth of 7% as a company. In 2024, we saw growth of 28%. So you need to get some patience, but you need to present them from an ROI perspective is where I see the need.
Mike Ashurst:
Great. Thanks, Rob. I think we’ll leave it there. So thank you so much for all those answers and thanks for everyone for submitting such great questions. As Rob said, if anyone does want to get in touch, you can contact ICMIF, and we’ll put you in touch with Rob. Okay. So, as usual, a recording of this webinar will be available on the ICMIF Knowledge Hub along with all of our other webinars and strategic intelligence assets, and the recordings and transcriptions of all past ICMIF webinars are available on this webpage shown here, which are exclusively for ICMIF members.
And a final thank you to Rob for a fantastic presentation. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We hope to see you again at another ICMIF webinar soon. Thank you, and have a great day.
