Domestic & General CEO on pursuing growth in the UK market

That variety is the spice of life is a concept familiar to Domestic & General CEO Matthew Crummack (pictured) – whose career to date has seen him take on senior leadership roles across three key market sectors: consumer goods, technology, and insurance.

Yet exploring the trajectory which took him from P&G to Nestle to Lastminute.com to GoCompare reveals the through-line connecting each milestone role – his inclination to entrepreneurially-minded businesses set apart by their distinctive brands. With that in mind, coming to D&G was a natural evolution for Crummack who highlighted that the role “fit on so many different levels.”

Stepping into a CEO role entails significant due diligence, he said, and for him, that meant meeting D&G’s private equity backers and really getting to know the business and its people before coming on board. Early conversations revealed a natural alignment between him and the team, and he was struck by the partnership-first approach taken to doing business.

“Three things really stood out for me,” he said. “One was the relationships [D&G] has built up over decades with manufacturers and retailers, relationships which have really stood the test of time. What the business has managed to do is create a common commercial interest with lots of very big companies worldwide, which is so impressive to see.

“[…] The second thing was that D&G has built a product set and customer proposition which is well-priced and well-delivered. The business converted into an insurance-led business some years ago and, I think, really intelligently underwrote and priced that in a way that has allowed us to build a very big subscription business, with 4.6 million customers and covering about 21 million appliances worldwide.

“Thirdly, D&G has done an exceptional job at managing so much contact with customers. We have a network of 9,000 engineers in the UK alone that we work with and complete about 2.5 million repairs a year. We get well over 10,000 calls a day and have 2,000-3,000 employees on the phone at various points in time to manage that operationally.”

The scale and financial strength of D&G – which has grown consecutively in terms of both turnover and profit for 22 years – in conjunction with its exceptional team and strong brand have formed a solid foundation for the growth strategy deployed by Crummack and his executive team since he joined some 18 months previously. And setting that strategy has been their identification of new opportunities for the business to do things differently.

“From my perspective, the opportunity was that the business has been able to achieve everything it has without always needing to build the right technology to make that a bit more frictionless and a bit less stressful,” he said. “Because of my experience using technology in big B2B and B2B2C environments, I could see that by helping the business build software and use data in intelligent ways, we could give customers and our employees better experiences. [This] in turn, translates to better returns for the shareholders and to better conditions for the regulator and everybody else along that value chain.”

High on Crummack’s agenda was rejigging how the company works together, with a view to speeding up service delivery and improving metrics around contact speed and first-time fixes, which would boost its net promotor scores. These are obvious metrics, he said, but time spent around high-scale businesses quickly reveals the direct correlation between streamlining an offering internally and its downstream impact on customer outcomes.

The work done by D&G in this space is already paying dividends but for Crummack and his team, that’s a platform for further growth, not a resting place.

“We are pursuing growth,” he said of D&G’s plans for the future. “There’s such a big market out there and though we’ve done a good job in the UK, the market is much bigger than you might think. Today we’ve got 4.6 million customers who each have just under two appliances with us on average. But if you think about modern households, it’s not just about white goods now, it’s also about electric goods and each household has probably got 30-40 items that come under that.

“All those things have a life. And trying to figure out how to improve the sustainability of a household is around how we can repair or replace responsibly, allowing for a more circular economy and giving us the opportunity for immense growth… So, we’re thinking about how we can build technology and data solutions that will allow us to cover whole households and to price for that effectively and underwrite that responsibly.”

Getting this right means making the right investments into people and technology alike, Crummack said, which is essential to D&G’s growth agenda. The firm is recruiting everything from data science professionals to technology and data engineers, to digital marketing experts – to say nothing of the value it still places on having great agents able to pick up the phone and talk to customers.

“We’re an active business and we’re thinking about how to expand our footprint,” he said. “It’s interesting that insurance tends to be quite national in nature. It’s difficult for GI insurance to drag and drop across geographies but for us, it’s a lot more straightforward because a washing machine is a washing machine, and the lifecycle of that washing machine is quite similar across markets.”

Looking to the future, Crummack touched on D&G’s extensive expansion plans for the US market but emphasised that the UK remains a core focus. He’d like to see the business continue its strategic growth across the UK, he said, and he’s keen for that growth to continue in the same vein – steady, stable and consistent. With a great team in place, he’s positive about the future and already looking forward to what the rest of 2023 will bring.

“I can’t believe I’ve been in the role 18 months already,” he said. “I never believed my father when he said time seems to accelerate as you go, but it’s true. And the time has gone fast for the right reasons. We’ve done so much in terms of rewiring how we innovate for our partners and our customers here in the UK, but also in terms of accelerating our launch in the US where we’ve already validated our initial assumptions of the opportunities in that market.

“We’re also doing some exciting things in continental Europe where we have strong businesses in Iberia and are ramping up our work in Germany. It has been a fascinating 18 months and, in a way, I still feel like I’m learning every day but I’m incredibly fortunate to have the blend of leadership that we do at D&G and to be surrounded by a team all looking in the same direction.”

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