CEO Howard Lickens says private equity is the most obvious area to work with in order to fund the broker’s long term strategy.

Clear Group CEO Howard Lickens has confirmed the broker is looking into raising more funds in order to finance its strategy going forward.

Lickens commented: “I am not going to deny we are looking at financing.

“When you are as ambitious as we are private equity is the most obvious solution but I am not ready to say ‘open sesame, here we are’.”

He added: “We need some longer term support.”

Deals
Clear has an acquisitive strategy and last year bought Genavco Insurance and Robert Alexander. These deals have been funded with a £13m loan from Clydesdale Bank and according to Clear’s most recent results £5.8m remains.

Lickens noted that Clear would be continuing with making a couple of deals a year.

“It’s a disciplined consolidator model,” he noted.

“We believe in integrating and don’t want to do more than two or three deals a year because we want to integrate.”

Clear’s 2017 results showed that the business is expecting to complete on a £900,000 deal in the near future.

“That’s expected to go in the next month,” Lickens noted. “It will move into the London office.”

Growing
The 2017 numbers showed growth for the business across the board.

Lickens said that much of this was driven by the purchase of MPW in March 2017.

He commented: “The bulk of the growth is acquisition led but there is a solid undercurrent of new business and organic growth.

“I suspect it is a better market than it has been for a couple of year. We get 5-6% growth. We see most growth in areas where we are strong and where we have something that isn’t just vanilla flavoured.”

Legal indemnity, estates and corporate are all areas that are growing for Clear Group.

Looking to the future Lickens said the business strategy was to buy a couple of brokers a year.

“We are at about £115m GWP and the plan is to hit north of £250m in the next two or three years.

“We are in a good place in the market,” he concluded.

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