Meet the Wakefield dad who gave up retirement to found his own insurance firm

Although he enjoyed quality time with his family, after two years he started to get restless.

“It turns out that I’m really bad at this retiring lark,” he says. “I had this idea of investing in property and doing all sorts of things, which I did, but I came to realise that I had some unfinished business. I wanted to do something bigger and better.”

About a year ago Newall started out with a blank sheet of paper, knowing he wanted to do something but unsure what. Then fate took over.

“Last February and March, there seemed to be an increase in people ringing me for insurance broker recommendations,” he says.

“I couldn’t even count on one hand the brokers I’d recommend for good service in the Yorkshire area.”

He adds: “Between covid and overconsolidation It has blown my mind how standards in the insurance industry have hit rock bottom.

“I think there’s a glut of young people who have missed opportunities for being trained properly during the recent troubling years.”

Newall decided to launch a new insurance company - Prosura - a business and lifestyle insurance brokers, which will insure small-to-medium-sized businesses but also the house, car and holiday home of their owners.

He secured his first client while on a beach on holiday last Christmas, before the business had even begun trading.

Prosura officially launched in January this year with the ambitious aim of reaching a £10m turnover in five years.

Three months in and Newall has doubled his expected earnings over the first three months and the company already has a team of seven.

“It’s a bit scary that it’s going so well but it’s happy fear,” he says. “I’m focused on customer service as a point of difference. It’s really sad that I’m coming into an industry to disrupt it by doing my job right.”

Newall, 47, is a third-generation Insurance broker. His grandparents owned an insurance company which they later sold to Swinton Insurance.

After Newall’s parents divorced, his mother - a ‘fierce independent businesswoman’ - also set up her own insurance brokers under her name, Annette Lockyer.

“She was a single mum in the Eighties in Castleford, a mining town in the middle of the strikes, and she was an inspiration,” says Newall. “But I took it as normal.”

Newall began working in the office at the age of 15. “No one grows up wanting to be an insurance broker and I tried not to be one,” he admits.

His father was a prop buyer for Emmerdale, which was much more appealing to a teenager. When he was a student, Newall spent one summer driving the Dingle pest control van to and from the Emmerdale set at Harewood House.

He also moonlighted as a driving double for the character Butch Dingle because the actor didn’t have a driving licence.

“I put the same jacket one as him, drove the van up the road and got an extra £45 for it,” he says.

However, he found the industry too unreliable and when it came to choosing a career after school, he decided insurance offered more stability.

When his mother decided to close the smaller Normanton branch of her business in 2000, she sold it to Newall for £1.

“By that point me and my mum had very different ideas about insurance. It was a moment of madness but I wanted to prove my theories,” he says.

He found a mentor through the Broker Network in Knaresborough, wrote a business plan and grew the business, known as Lockyers, from a £1m turnover to £6m.

Newall decided to sell in 2018 after getting divorced, remarried and having two children. His father also died around the same time.

“I wanted to spend some time with my kids as they were growing up,” he says. “I’d had my foot on the gas as a self-employed person for 18 years and I just wanted a break. Someone offered me my dream number for getting rid of the business.”

The last few months of working in Lockyers was particularly difficult, says Newall. Forty per cent of its business was leisure and hospitality.

“It was a tough time emotionally,” he says. “These people weren’t just customers, they were friends and I had to tell them that they weren’t insured for a pandemic.

“For a small business it wasn’t really possible to buy pandemic cover. You just had to shop around until you found a policy that didn’t exclude it, which was 10 per cent or even less of policies. That’s changed now, 100 per cent of policies exclude it.”

Prosura also has an AI logic-driven portal where customers can get basic free legal advice. “I helped to develop it for broker use and we’re the first people to use it,” Newall says.

Meanwhile, he says he’s enjoyed face-to-face contact again as well as growing his LinkedIn profile.

However, he admits he had a bit of imposter syndrome coming returning to work after his hiatus.

“I was thinking ‘am I still relevant, is this going to work? Will I get my FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) licence?’” he admits.

Now the business is gathering momentum, Newall is already considering acquisitions. “I see acquisition as talent,” he says. “Those brokers have to fit our culture.

“They’ve got to be customer first or at least have the opportunity to be made to be customer first. I want to be seen as the place for an independent broker to exit with a clear conscience if our ideas align.”

Newall’s renewed enthusiasm for business is clear to see. “ I didn’t realise how much I valued going out of the door to work and coming back in at the end of the day,” he says.

“I love working again, it’s given me a purpose.”