Episode 31: Looking Back at 2023 and Ahead to 2024 with Paul BrocklebankLaura Beth: Welcome to the Haulin’ Notes podcast by Canal Insurance Company. I’m your host, Laura Beth Medley, VP, Chief Human Resources & Corporate Communications Officer at Canal. This month I’m thrilled to be joined by Paul Brocklebank, our President & CEO. In today’s episode we’re looking back on 2023 and revving up for the exciting road ahead in 2024. I hope you enjoy our conversation, now let’s get rolling.
Laura Beth: Happy New Year, Paul.
Paul: Thank you, Laura Beth.
Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us on our Haulin’ Notes podcast. We are excited today to take a little bit of a look back at 2023 and then look ahead to 2024. So I’d start off. I’d love to ask you when you look back at 2023 what achievements or milestones stand out to you from this past year.
Paul: It’s funny you mentioned milestones. We like to talk about milestones at Canal because we think of our businesses as a journey and milestones remind us where we are and how far we have left to go. For Canal, the current journey involves embracing technology and leveraging data. Our 2023 milestones included binding our 3,000th TestDrive client, launching our new Miles per Canal product, and preparing to ensure our first fleet of electric trucks.
Laura Beth: All right, Paul, you mentioned the 3000th Test Drive bind. That’s obviously growth with that product and I believe our premium also grew in 2023. What factors do you believe contributed to that growth this past year?
Paul: Whether it was this past year or really the past several, much of our growth at Canal has been driven by a renewed commitment to the owner-operator segment. The owner-operator segment oftentimes in our industry is neglected, but it’s a huge part of who we are. Some of the growth in this space was by design, but a lot of it’s driven by macroeconomic conditions and technology advancements that actually favor the owner-operator. So we’re fortunate to have doubled down our investment in the owner-operator space and look forward to continuing to do so in 2024.
Laura Beth: What about challenges in 2023? What challenges may Canal have faced? And how did we overcome those?
Paul: There’s no secret that the commercial auto insurance industry remains a distressed space, and that’s evidenced by the number of our competitors who continue to either exit the space or significantly retrench in terms of how they price the product. We’re not immune from these industry challenges, and so it’s important to us to do a better job of managing these problems, things like claims and underwriting, so that we can provide stable capacity as our competitors continue to falter.
Laura Beth: What role did innovation play? I know you mentioned at the top Test Drive and Miles per Canal and data. How did innovation fold into all those milestones and advancements in 2023?
Paul: We often fashion ourselves as a 10 year old startup inside an 85 year old company. So Innovation reigns supreme in terms of how we think about our jobs day to day. We’re proud to be an industry pioneer in utilization-based products and in using telematics to advance that proposition to provide fair and transparent pricing to our clients. That’s a big part of what Test Drive represented, but that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of where we intend to go with that in the future.
Laura Beth: You also mentioned the owner-operator. Customer experience is key in everything we do here at Canal. How do you believe that our customer experience was enhanced in 2023? And what do you look forward to us doing to make that even better going forward?
Paul: It’s no secret again that technology continues to bring us closer to our clients. That’s true in some traditional ways, but also some unexpected ways. And truth be told, we’ve learned an awful lot from 3,000 Test Drive clients in terms of how they receive the technology, some of the blips that happen along the way. Nothing’s perfect out of the gate but it’s improved over time and it’s improved in part because we listen closely to our clients and we actually have a team deployed to do just that. As we continue to expand the use of telematics technology, I think you’ll find us reaching out even more through the customer experience to help make the product better and understand and contemplate what the next generation of product can look like.
Laura Beth: Partnerships and collaborations are key, whether it be our GA partnerships or our technology partners. Tell us about some significant milestones we made in 2023 on that front, Paul.
Paul: You’re right, partnerships are absolutely imperative to our success. I think one of the things that’s unique about Canal, given our size, is our agility, and you don’t become agile without lining yourself up with some fairly important strategic partners, and we’ve done that over time with our general agent partners, but also more recently, we certainly have become fully immersed in the technology realm by virtue of partnerships, and 2023 saw us make major strides with Clara Analytics in terms of improving our ability to manage claims, particularly litigating files through data, and Clara is bringing us a wealth of insights to the table is as we work hard there, but also in the telematic space. Not only do we continue to rely heavily upon Samsara, but we’re also very excited about a new relationship we have with Trucker Cloud, which allows us to be more technology-agnostic, if you will, in terms of expanding the utilization-based products with their platform and the ability to harness data from a variety of different hardware solutions.
Laura Beth: It’s exciting to have those external partners, but I wouldn’t be doing my HR duty if we didn’t reflect on our internal partners and teammates, too. So talk to me about our employee experience in 2023.
Paul: As you point out, at our very core, we are a people company and we depend upon our employees to deliver on our operating results and help challenge us to be a better company each year. In 2023 we hired 42 new employees at Canal. It’s an exciting time at the company in terms of growth. We spent a year now in our new office space, which is a little contrary to how the rest of the world is looking at things in terms of being remote. We enjoy collaborating and working to-face and together and we’re excited to be back in an office space that facilitates that. wWe’re also promoting from within. We’ve got 35 internal promotions, which given our size, 240 employees, is quite remarkable. It speaks very well of how motivated our people are and how committed they are to not only the Canal strategy, but servicing our customers. And we’re also very involved in the community because it closely aligns with how our employees see the world, and making a difference in the community is a big part of the employee experience at Canal and we’re pleased to participate in community impact areas like Meals on Wheels and the United Way and helping a local middle school through Hands on Greenville. All those things make it very meaningful to be part of the Canal employment experience and we’re not only proud of that impact, but also fully committed to that as we go forward.
Laura Beth: Thank you for that Paul. It’s been a great year to be here watching our employees grow and develop and also seeing what impact we can have within the insurance community in our business, but also within our local community here doing things hands-on in Greenville. Before we wrap up today, I think no reflective end of year or new year podcast would be complete without maybe talking about some resolutions. Do you have any resolutions for Canal as an organization that you are excited about seeing through in 2024?
Paul: The first one’s kind of boring and that really involves stability, consistency and measured growth. It’s what’s defined us over the last several years in terms of our market position, and I think it will continue to speak to our future, and that’s very appealing to both shareholders and directors. A little sexier probably is the opposite of what I’m doing today, which is talking. We intend to listen to our customers intently in the coming year because as we continue to aspire to develop new products and enhance the ones we currently have, it’s a two-way street. As I mentioned before, we’ve learned a lot from 3,000 Test Drive clients, but we have an awful lot more to learn. The day we become the smartest person in the room is the day we fail as an organization, so we’re going to continue to listen and take full advantage of the customer feedback we receive.
Laura Beth: Those are pretty simple, but I think huge as far as the impact that those two actions will play for our organization, and I’m excited to be a part of the team delivering on those this year. And with that Paul, I want to thank you for your time today. I think it’s been great to look back at 2023 and also exciting to look forward to all that 2024 has in store for us.
Paul: It’s been a pleasure Laura Beth. Thanks to the opportunity.
Laura Beth: Thanks for joining the conversation with Paul and I today. Please make sure to stay tuned for future episodes. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe for episode notifications. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time on Haulin’ Notes!
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