Acrisure's CCO, CBO Elliot Bundy Shares 3 Stadium Branding Strategy

Elliot Bundy, Chief Communications and Branding Officer for Acrisure and Financial Narrative board member, sat down with Financial Narratives to describe the genesis of the insurance giant, its three-stadium branding strategy and let us in behind the curtain of how his team works best and the growth they're enjoying in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The big takeaway: Acrisure, before it took over some of the biggest stadiums in the country, might have been the biggest insurance company you never heard of; the fastest growth in the industry, ever, came organically by acquiring like-minded independent brokers, who, themselves, finally lobbied the parent to rebrand everyone under one umbrella.

Driving the news: After going deep with a digital marketing strategy to get the word out and unite its now-giant team, the team took advantage of a suggestion by one of its oldest clients -- that happens to build stadiums -- to step up to a strategic branding opportunity.

Closer to home: Before the first stadium was completed, a second came online, and then a third, close to home, was greenlit -- actually, right in their back yard, in Grand Rapids, and tied to a larger neighborhood redevelopment project that's giving Acrisure more local street cred in the community, beyond being the area's biggest employer.

'Life moves fast': Internally, the firm's communication and branding departments pull from a lot of disciplines and value broad-based expertise -- because you never know what a day will bring... As Acrusure says in its tagline: "Life moves fast, so we help you get the insurance you need, now."

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

Limitless is a phrase we use a lot around here, and it's really just meant to be like this, the opportunity continues to be driving something that is not bound by what other people think it should be, but by what we as a team think it could be for the benefit of our customers.

Elliot Bundy

My name is Elliot Bundy, I'm the Chief Communications and Branding Officer for Acrisure. Acrisure is a fintech focused on the insurance brokerage and financial services spaces that generally have a risk or insurance adjacency. We're about 17,000 people, about four and a half billion in revenue, and present in 22 countries. Today, as of this recording, it'll probably be somewhat larger than that by the time someone watches this.

I'm originally from Alaska, but spent most of the last 20 years on the East Coast or other far-flung reaches of the country, and spent about the first 10 years of my career doing political work, political communications, in specific, and made the jump to insurance and financial services because my wife's friend Stephanie got married in Bermuda, which that was the coincidence to it all. I ended up reconnecting with an old friend of mine who was running an insurance company headquartered in Bermuda, we happened to be there for a wedding, and left that weekend with a job offer that I wasn't expecting.

But, in reverse, like most things in life, you realize the timing of all that just really fortuitously lined up. I was having a great time working in political work, but it kind of reached the point where I stopped finding candidates or office holders who I agreed with on most of the issues, at least personally, and I was never somebody who was kind of in it for kind of the journeyman nature of politics, plenty of people I know still do that. In between that political work and moving into financial services, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to spend about a year working at an M&A and kind of crisis communications-focused IR and public relations firm.

And that was really just a grounding in like how do you apply the skill set of communications that I had been practicing to a different sector, and how do you think about those stakeholders and their interests and what motivates the people in that sector to be successful? So I fortuitously came up to an opportunity working in financial services with some people I used to know from a different life came up, and I've been doing that since then. Most of that time in the insurance space, both on the underwriting carrier side, as well now on the brokerage side of things.

At Acrisure

At Acrisure, I've been here about five years. The company's doubled in size since I joined, but more, the numbers: a lot of people know the numbers, if you know the company, just in terms of the rate at which we've grown is pretty substantial. And, in the insurance brokerage category, at least, we're pretty certain we're the fastest growing company that's ever been in the sector. It's a sector that goes back several hundred years, so some of the record keeping gets a little foggy, but we feel reasonably confident about that statement.

The more impressive thing, I think, has been how we've strategically shifted. I remember when I had the interview with our CEO co-founder five years ago, his pitch to me was basically, look, this is a company that's growing really quickly.

We have a really broad base of consistent business in the insurance brokerage space. We're doing a lot for our customers, but if you just think about the rate at which we're able to grow, at some point down the road, we're going to get to decide what else do we want this company to become. And that's really where we are now.

We're taking this company based on a very broad foundation of insurance brokerage and adding additional products and services to our portfolio for the benefit of our customers. And we're using some really cool investments in AI and other technology to improve the processes our salespeople go through to identify those needs for customers. It's really trying to be something that actually isn't only an insurance brokerage.

One-Stop Shop for Risk

It's not only a broad financial services provider, but it's really kind of a one-stop shop for our customers when you think about those particularly risk and risk-adjacent products that they need. And last thing I'll say is that the most numerous type of customer we have, at least in the United States, is a small business owner, someone who has about 50 or fewer employees.

And we're actually going through a process right now where we're actually trying to calculate this because we think it's an interesting thing to figure out, is the amount of time lost or friction created that one of these customers would have to go through in working with multiple providers for different things. If you think about, you're starting a business, insurance is obviously something that you're largely required to buy, but also it's good to have for a number of different categories of insurance. There's things like setting up payroll, cybersecurity systems that all of us need now, things that, you can bring into the ecosystem for the benefit of employees like mortgages or mortgage origination or related brokerage services in the real estate space.

All of those things that you have to go through in starting or maintaining a business, particularly a small business, if you have to work with multiple providers of those services, there's a friction to that, that we're trying to eliminate and simplify. That's really the vision is continue to add products and services for the benefit of current and new customers.

Telling a brand story that people had no idea existed

And I think most interesting to me joining from a communications perspective ties into also what I'm most proud of as of today, which is really creating a brand and telling a brand story that people had no idea existed.

And maybe that's an obvious answer in terms of why we're kind of in the communications or branding sector anyway, right? I think people who are drawn to it like the ability to tell that, but that's just the truth for where it is. When I hadn't heard of the company, even being in the insurance business for it, I think, or insurance industry, I can say for probably close to 10 years at the point at which I got the call about the job at Acrisure, I hadn't heard of the company. And really outside of people who were following insurance, but particularly just the sort of this Venn diagram of brokerage, private equity, and some other sort of M&A and startup focused businesses.

Even within the insurance category, we weren't all that well known when I started, unless you were following one of those things. Fast forward five years and through a mix of a lot of different levers, like we're telling a story that is increasingly becoming a household name. And that's just like I said, off camera earlier, that's it's exciting when a plan comes together, right? And that's sort of you had a vision for what that could become when I started.

And now you can really start it, you can start seeing it come together in a way that's really exciting.

M&A

There was a lot of M&A happening in the insurance brokerage space first. The theory we brought to it was, well, we could do it better if we changed a couple of things that were really common in most of the M&A models.

And if we did it faster and at a higher volume of transactions than our peers, we could essentially just outdo everyone in that growth capacity. So that's what we did. I mean, it was it was averaged about 100 deals a year for about five to six years, kind of in there.

We've slowed that down a little bit now because of what we're focused on now. But the point was, amass something as quickly as you could that you were really proud of and you could build from. And the theory around a lot of that M&A doing it differently was that the firms which we acquired or partnered with in our language kept their name and kept their brand because they had a lot more brand equity in their communities than an Acrisure brand that no one had ever heard of.

And with, again, so much of our concentration of clients being focused on individuals and small businesses, those relationships were really strong and we didn't want to disrupt those client relationships when we partnered with a firm. What changed in that was about, about two years ago, we said, this company's gotten to be big enough, probably about 15,000 employees at that time, maybe a little bit fewer, around 20 countries. And the realization from really our partners, our operating partners, was that we were starting to leave stuff on the table by not joining it up more, by not bringing more of a common story, because they were telling the story to their customers about being part of this global organization and getting the benefit of multiple teams of people working on their behalf.

But they were doing it through an unbranded dialogue. The common story was you'd have a sales professional from agency X and one from agency Y down the street that go and go to a common customer, but they'd come with different business cards and have to explain the story of Acrisure and who they're a part of. So not mandating the change to a branded company on our operating partners was super important.

We wanted it to come organically and have everyone realize that the time was right together and that that occurred. The other thing that occurred was an incision to build a direct-to-consumer business. And so now you can transact through our website.

And we actually, again, as of this recording, we have some new capabilities we're about to launch probably in about a month. We're continuing to invest in the direct-to-consumer channel. But, obviously, if you are going to sell direct-to-consumers, consumers have to know who you are.

A Branded House

There was kind of the concurrence of things between this organic moment of realization in the company that, OK, now it's the time to put this together in a branded house and this interest in selling direct-to-consumers. We launched a strategy that was really two-pronged. The biggest effort has been a highly targeted digital media spend just to raise brand awareness.

And that's using models that take our existing books of business and match it to a whole bunch of data sets that are both our own as well as acquired data sets and really just try. And we've been building impressions. Probably about three billion impressions in about 18 months just around current and prospective customers just to get the name out there.

And then the other piece of that strategy was a couple of headline-generating moments that would give some more tangible notion to what the brand is. And then we so we determined that some naming right entitlements was a good way to do that. Started actually the first one we decided we were going to do is what is now called Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs.

That was done in partnership with a client of ours called Oakview Group that's building a lot of arenas, really first-class arenas around the country and internationally now as well. And they were a client and we found a lot of mutual interest in strategically doing something together. And then timing-wise, what ended up being announced first, even though that the California one was what we were going to, we decided we would do first timing-wise, what got announced first was Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh.

And that was a big moment for us. It's changing the name of a long-held stadium and what was called Himes Field at that point pretty beloved there. So we knew there would be some turmoil and angst among the fan base because it was a surprise.

But the question it generated was, was, who's this company? Which is exactly the question you want to generate when you decide to do something like that. So we're continuing down those tracks. We've got a partnership in UBS Arena where the New York Islanders play.

That is another Oakview Group relationship. And then a couple other smaller things kind of around the country. We'll probably do more of that in the future, but we feel pretty good about how that two-prong strategy around just a really solid foundation of digital impressions.

And then a couple of headline generating moments where we feel really strong about where that's gotten us. Closer to home, we announced that we would help with the funding and took the naming rights to what will be called the Aperture Amphitheater. That's a brand new venue soon to start construction in our corporate home of Grand Rapids.

Community Engagement

The interesting thing about that one is we view that there will certainly be tangible brand benefits to doing it and already has been. But really for us, that was much more about community engagement. I mean, that is a project that will unlock a lot of development in a very specific part of Grand Rapids that has been kind of a vision, an envisioned area where a lot of things could come to fruition over time.

I've lived in Grand Rapids for about four years, and even just in the time that I've been here, like there's a specific area where this will be has always been talked about as something like, wouldn't that be cool? Civic leaders and others got together and after a lot of studies decided that an amphitheater and a couple other large projects, which are also being built there in that in proximity, are really going to be that community unlocking for the next phase of development in what is our corporate home. For that one, we think of that one much more as kind of doing the right thing as a large employer in this area to help the community continue to thrive and particularly downtown Grand Rapids continue to thrive. So that's cool to be part of.

And then, the insurance world is global. It is headquartered, or I should say anchored, maybe most often in people's minds in your large financial centers. It certainly has historic roots in London.

It certainly has historic and ongoing financial centers in Chicago and New York. Singapore is another one. Bermuda is another one.

To be headquartered in Grand Rapids might seem a little far-flung for people who are like really students of the industry. But it's a global product. Everyone needs it at some level.

And and it's just technology and other innovations have made the location probably a little less important to the development of the industry than it once was. We feel very good about being here. The other thing it's allowed us to do has really been a dominant player in the form of talent attraction in this area.

If you think about that there's, in West Michigan, where we are headquartered, there's a ton of colleges and universities with talent coming out every year that really want to stay local or are interested in at least coming back home for great job opportunities because a lot of people might have gone to school somewhere else and come back. SI've lived here about four years and the majority of people I know were born and raised in West Michigan or have roots here and have come back.

The AI Question

I'll say in terms of the AI question, we will take some credit internally and with our investors and others where we talked about our strategy to say that we were thinking about this, I won't say early, early because certainly others were ahead of us.

But I do feel like we were on the front edge, certainly before things like ChatGPT and others sort of made this a household term in the last year. If you go back to 2020 and the largest acquisition, I think still, I think the largest acquisition we have made up to that point and still was an AI company. And we made a joint venture investment with a company that was deploying AI and other machine learning and other technologies to kind of disrupt some longstanding industries.

We entered into a joint venture with them to build, basically test out a case around building a digital insurance brokerage, a digital first insurance brokerage. That was super successful. And so we ended up acquiring all of that joint venture.

And then the team and technology that was part of that effort came inside and is now fueling much of what we're doing from the way our client advisors and sales professionals prospect clients to the way that they are identifying product needs that current clients may not be aware that they need. And then it's also fueling a lot of our just digital marketing in the form of where we seek to build impressions. We are very much using it as a strengthening of enterprise.

It's sort of how do you, our head of innovation used an analogy the other day where he referred to it as kind of an Iron Man strategy, right? You want to take your talented people that you have and make them even more talented with better tools and technology. We're pretty proud of what we're doing in that space and feel good about the fact that we were earlier on than a lot of our competitors. But obviously there's still a lot left to do and it's going to continue to transform things for us and others.

Marketing ROI

In terms of marketing ROI, the thing we are really focused on right now is still building brand awareness. We're tracking a lot of through surveys and other methodology tracking, tracking awareness of the actual name. We want to know not only familiarity with the name, which we certainly are helped by things like stadium entitlements.

I think just people that know the name now. But we are always looking at the deeper understanding of people who not only know the name, but know the name and can tell you what we do. And that's really where we're focused on, the spend matched to the increase in that percentage versus our peers is what we look at the most closely.

And then, of course, we're internally focused on organic growth and several financial KPIs that we're driving. And I'd say, broadly speaking, marketing is tied to those and communications is tied to those. That's more of I think that's as much art as it is science, right? Because you feel good about the things you're doing from an internal comms point of view to drive sales and engagement with your product set as much as we look at external spend around brand awareness.

And it's a big dashboard of things we're looking at. And we are probably equally as focused on internal measurement of engagement and connectivity as we are on external things right now. Because this effort we've been going through of putting the company under one brand, integrating people, integrating systems through all the acquisitions we've done, that's a lot of work.

It's a lot of change management. And one of the ways that we are tracking success in that is building a dashboard of internal engagement. There's, again, probably 20 to 30 metrics that we look at to measure or get a sense of, is the colleague workforce continuing on this change journey in the way that we want and expect as we put the company together under one brand?

And then ultimately, we will be able to, I think, look at the correlation between an engaged workforce and financial metrics like organic growth and product sales and figure out, are those things lined up in the right way?

A Stoic Leader

Probably, I'm mostly known as a stoic around the office. And I think that's a reflection of, if you want to use like a real philosophical term.

And I think that's a reflection of starting my professional career in political communications and really kind of developing a persona around just navigating, kind of being the calm one in a crisis, right. And that's just often what I had to do. And still the case, I mean, crises are less often now than they were in that setting.

Luckily, knock on wood. But that ability to be calm when others aren't, I think is kind of an overarching philosophy that I try to drive with the team. Because it just speaks to, there's a literal aspect of that.

Like when stuff is hitting the fan, people are looking to you to be that kind of guiding and calm voice to help from a calm perspective, get the organization through. But there's other implications to that around focusing on the work, not letting inner politics that come up in any organization or team get anyone down, right, really kind of focus on the task at hand. I try to be as kind of even keeled and level headed about that stuff and instill that in the team and the team around me.

I will say that a learning has been though, that there are times when people need to see kind of your true self. And so I have my moments of emotional outbursts like everyone else. And it's actually helpful for your team to get to know you on that basis, too.

It's how do you rationalize that approach to kind of when it's most appropriate and from a leadership perspective, realize that you got to let people inside as much as you're trying to be that concourse for the rest of the company as well. And this is probably an obvious answer, but it's learn as much about the disciplines that are involved in your team as possible so that you can be that person who really either helps other executives understand what your team is doing at a desk level across every function that you have. And if you're in a comms marketing branding team, there's a lot of functions that you're probably a part of from, it could be from public affairs and government relations all the way to internal events that your company is running.

There's a lot of variants in there. Really trying to understand and help others understand what you're doing and what the value your team brings to the organization. I think being an advocate for your team, I think that's really important for aspiring leaders.

And, it's not something we're probably the best at as a function in general is taking credit for the work we do and the value we bring, because we do spend so much time focusing on executive X being the spokesperson or CEO being the spokesperson for the company, which is the right place to be. But the downside of that is we can often, I think, overlook or have others overlook the value that we do bring. Knowing how to be the squeaky wheel for attention when it's appropriate is and being an advocate for your colleagues and what they're doing.

Finding Talented People

I think that's super important. The way to think about it is we are constantly growing and we are constantly interested in finding talented people. Whether or not that means there's a role today or one kind of three months from now, I don't know, but we're, I'm really happy to have people reach out to me and, or our HR team, because we've doubled the company in terms of revenue and size since I've been here and we'll probably do the same in the next five years.

Being part of that growth engine is something we're always looking for, talented people who want to be part of it.