S4 EP65: Going one level deeper to challenge the givens - Steve Dukes, CEO, Confused.com

The Insurance Coffee House

“Many people you'll work with and meet in business will be happy to accept information and explanations in the way it's being presented to them.

Some people you work with will have a real appetite to go one level deeper because they'll want to know the drivers of the things they are seeing.

They'll want to have a proper understanding about how that part of the business or that part of the market or that customer behaviour really works”, says Steve.

“My push would be to go one level deeper than that. When you work with people that want to understand not just the drivers but the drivers of the drivers or the footnotes of the footnotes, often that is where you find the opportunities that others have missed.

One thing I am really passionate about is some of the best opportunities exist there. It's really worth going one level deeper to not just really understand your market, but to discover things that other people haven't and in a really competitive business, those are the things that can separate you.”

On the Insurance Coffee House Podcast this week, Steve talks about how his early career working as an analyst on the equities trading floor in a Dutch investment bank, taught him about the importance of discipline and attention to detail.

“But when businesses came to see us to talk about how their business was performing, I had a real feeling of envy. I really wanted to be on the other side of the table. I wanted to be in businesses and solving the kind of problems they were solving.”

A move in to start-ups followed, providing the opportunity to work in high-performance, fast-moving environments.

“Anyone who's had a career in the early-stage part of a business, will know that you get some real successes and you get some failures along the way as well. We had both.

But I learned a huge amount, worked with some fantastic entrepreneurs and learned about thinking big.

The other thing I got to see firsthand, that value can be created out of thin air. Working in a successful start-up or scale up will really teach you to see that with your own eyes and to know it can be done is quite a powerful thing to experience. It gives you a lot of confidence for the future.”

Moving in to product leadership and general management roles at bigger, more mature businesses took Steve on a journey to joining insurance price comparison business Confused.com as COO in 2019, before becoming CEO in 2023.

Steve reflects on his leadership journey, saying:

“I used to look at my career path almost like a game of Trivial Pursuit, where you were trying to collect all the skills that you needed to be the ‘rounded leader’.

You’d go around the board, collect those wedges and when you had them all, you could move to the centre, and that's the game complete.

But unlike trivial pursuit, when you move to the middle, you don't win the game, you just discover there's a whole new game below, and you start again.

I realised that it’s going to be an infinite journey. Instead of just accepting it, it’s really learning to love the experience of learning new things.”

In this podcast episode, Steve talks to host Nick Hoadley about:

• if you acquire a lot of skills and experience, your next career move will be obvious
• how price comparison businesses are the main distribution channel for UK general insurance
• why he looks for super smart people and insurance leaders who want to go one level deeper and challenge the givens
• why he wants Confused.com to be the place where people do the best work of their careers
• and the one lesson his career has taught him, he thinks everyone should learn

“Whatever your career goals are, be open to the fact that the moment you hit them, there'll be a whole new mountain to climb. Learn to love that. Get yourself into the frame of mind of enjoying the journey.”

Connect with Steve Dukes on LinkedIn or find out more about careers at Confused.com

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