Breaking the ice: meet Barrack Broking & Graeme Hay

UNIBA Partners is constantly evolving; new Partners join, IDMs and Senior Contacts change. Although we have the chance to see each other face-to-face, most of the time we are meeting behind our laptops. And in this online environment it might happen that you’ve missed a new Partner joining or a contact changing, right?  Through this new article-series we will make sure that that doesn’t happen anymore! With ‘Breaking the ice’ we will introduce new Partners, thier companies & specialisations, and, perhaps more importantly, the people behind it; what makes them tick? why did they join? what do they enjoy? Because what is UNIBA Partners if not a business network of friends?

In this month’s edition, the first of its kind, we will introduce our new Australian Partner Barrack Broking and its Director and Senior Contact Graeme Hay. Although some of you already had the pleasure to meet and interact with Barrack and Graeme, for those that didn’t, let’s jump right into it.

To start off, can you please introduce yourself and your company?

I’m one of several directors that started the company nearly four years ago. My fellow director and I worked together before and we saw an opportunity to start something fresh and client-centric, a company independent of the local cluster groups here. We started back in October 2019, before the pandemic, and right now we’re a team of eight. We have an office in Sydney and one in Brisbane and we’re growing rapidly, constantly expanding our footprint. Our goal is to become a national represented business in Australia within 10 years.

On a more personal note, my passion, from a sports point of view, is football. I recently retired from playing, but my passion lives on through my three boys. They are mad fans of football. Being born and bred in Sydney, Sydney FC is my team, but my family is from Scotland. I lived there for a while, so if I have to pick a team in Europe it’s Hearts.

Let’s dive back into the business side of things. Why is “international” important to your company?

We started to work with companies that are based in Australia but are expanding rapidly overseas. Think of exciting tech solutions with global applications. One company in particular, they recently set up entities in Europe, USA and South America and I’ve worked with them personally, even before Barrack Broking.  I really enjoyed working with them and I would hate the idea that at one point we would no longer be relevant to what they do. I think that aligns very well with both our personal values and those of the network: in everything we do, we try to be very client-centric.

Whilst that was the initial driver, we also realised since then that there’s a strong interest in risk management within the network. Personally, I worked in that space in a previous life and knowing that there’s interest there, I’m looking forward to contributing more towards that space.

You’ve already touched upon this, but where do you see your company contributing most in the next year?

As mentioned, risk management would definitely be a field, given my personal background and the genuine interest from the network. We are also specialised in events and event cancellation insurance, including business-type of conferences throughout Asia . That’s something we want to share with the network, specifically with our Partners in Asia.

And how do you think UNIBA can support you and your company?

Firstly, access to market information in jurisdictions where we are not represented. Now that we’ve got acquainted with the network and its many options, we learned about the Centre of Excellences. Take for example the Marketing Centre of Excellence; we would love to see how our marketing colleague can learn from that. On that same note, when we joined the network, we received many welcome mails with company presentations. Just browsing through them we can learn a lot in terms of branding and marketing.

Let’s move back to the personal side of things again. Is there any book that inspired you, be it personal or professional?

There’s one book that I’ve talked about a lot on the work floor. It’s called ‘Legacy: What the All Blacks can teach us about the business of life’ by James Kerr. As you can derive from the title, the book is about the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team and talks about applying their skills and mindset to a business environment. There are certain policies and practices that we implemented withinin Barrack that can be derived directly from the book.

To close it off, if you could have lunch with anyone in the world, who would it be and why?

I’m a F1 fan, so more than likely I would pick a F1 driver. It always fascinates me what type of person puts themselves in a car, drives 300km per hour, gets out and shows up in front of a camera to do an interview. I’d love to know more about how they are as people.