From Timmy Mallett to climbing mountains; Andy Milburn talks to Peter Carvill about his career history to date and why his heart lies with financial services
Situated on the 31st floor of 25 Canada Square in London's Docklands, the UK offices of Munich Re automatically win the award for most awe-inspiring COVER interview location. Beyond a wall of glass, the eastern end of the offices looks out and over the Thames as it heads to sea, the O2 Arena (nee The Millennium Dome) a literal spitting distance away. At the western end, through the deathly quiet of the offices, is an equally imposing view that takes in the whole of central and western London up to Wembley Stadium.
In a meeting room beyond the front desk, Andy Milburn, the reinsurer's new head of marketing, is being interviewed. As the photographer snaps away, he outlines his career from Timmy Mallett's right-hand man to the present.
"When I left school," he says, "I had pretensions to work as a DJ and one of my first jobs was as studio assistant for The Timmy Mallett show on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester. Can you imagine the thought now of working with Timmy Mallett when you're grown up and sensible? It was a very strange experience, especially with 50,000 Man United fans queuing every night to lynch the scouse bloke who was on their radio show and shouldn't be. It came about through winning a competition and before I knew it I was presenting his show for him while he was on holiday. It was the first experience I had where I realised I was half-decent in front of an audience. I tried it for a while but it wasn't working; it was a time in the eighties when most DJs had kind of non-accented standard voices. So I looked around and thought, 'I need to get a proper job'.
First steps
"The first one I was offered was at Royal Life in December 1988. I thought I'd go into insurance for a couple of months until something better came along. It was something that happened by accident rather than being a deliberate move. Now 20 years later, those three months have lasted quite a time."
After joining Royal Life in 1988, Milburn spent nine years in a variety of roles, beginning with administrative work. In 1997, following a merger between Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance, Milburn went to work for the newly-formed Royal and SunAlliance in the life and pensions marketing team.
Product knowledge
He came to realise that not all marketing departments are focused towards their markets. "Someone who was far smarter than me thought that I might be better suited to a marketing role. It was lucky in a way because they had lots of people who were supposedly brilliant at marketing but few who knew the products."
The introspection of the marketing department swiftly became a point of focus for his long-term plans. While himself learning marketing techniques he resolved to help re-focus the unit towards products and customers.
At first though, there were some unforeseen issues: "I remember a meeting where there were 90 people in the marketing team. After a couple of weeks, we got them together and sat them down and only 10% admitted they'd spent time with customers and IFAs. Obviously, 81 people out of 90 not having done that in a marketing team was probably not the best news you could have. And it highlighted the fact that people in marketing can get trapped in ivory towers where they do not understand what life is like in the real world or listening to feedback from customers face-to-face or at industry events. So I took it on myself to be the voice of the market, bringing ideas in and briefing the team on what was happening out there."
This year, though, has been a tumultuous one. After 20 years in financial services, he decided it was time to move on from Royal Liver, where he had become IFA market manager in 2003, and take a break from the industry. In a surprise move he went to work for a Liverpool law firm as its head of marketing.
There were a number of reasons for doing this, he says:
Testing limits
"If you speak to psychologists and HR people, they will tell you that you need a new challenge every couple of years. It's like when you're climbing a mountain - you go from base camp to camp one, camp two and then camp three. Once you get to the summit and do all that you wanted to do, unless you're given a new challenge, you have to look around and figure out what the next mountain is that you're going to climb.
"I'd had a couple of chats with Munich Re but nothing significant and when I left Royal Liver, I felt that I was fed up a little bit of financial services, maybe felt a little stale about it, and I needed something new and different. I decided at the time that heading to a law firm dealing with mortgage advisers nationally was the right option but I think, as everyone is aware, that after a few weeks I realised that I actually missed a lot of people I knew and maybe I wasn't as fed up with as I felt I was. It would have been easy to try and correct the mistake, move on, ignore it a little bit and let it fester. But I thought I'd give it a few weeks and if I still felt like that, I'd try and put it right which is what I did by speaking to a few people who knew me and figuring out what was out there.
So it seemed like a natural progression to move into reinsurance and do something a little different but with keeping all the knowledge and contacts.
He looks around the office: "I'm really, really glad I've got this opportunity and I'm pretty convinced it's the right one; I've seen nothing to tell me otherwise. I think they're pretty happy they've got me, and they're looking for me to be the first non-actuarial person to head up marketing here in a while and seeing if I can bring different techniques to the business."
Stepping up into the big leagues of working for a reinsurer, Milburn is seeking to improve the visibility of Munich Re, especially because of the expert advice it can bring to the industry.
"We've got Andrew Francis on the Association of British Insurers (ABI) strategy committee. The ABI is looking at the long-term strategy in the protection market and if we can help in any way, as a reinsurer in the UK, to improve the consultation process and support them then we will. We'll have our views on what's been raised as well and there are all these extra critical illness conditions that providers have been adding over the last year. Are they going to be standardised? I think people are going to be keen to see what the scope is."
CV: Andy Milburn
2008 to date: Head of marketing, Munich Re UK life branch
2008 - 2008: Head of marketing, Goldsmith Williams
2003 - 2008: IFA market manager, Royal Liver
1997 - 2003: Various roles in life and pensions marketing, Royal & SunAlliance
1988 - 1997: Various roles in administration and servicing, Royal Life.
