Clayton Rowlings

Clayton came to insurance from marketing, and ran his own marketing business before he joined Consolidated Insurance Brokers in August 2021.

It is a less common route into broking, and a useful one. Running his own business gave him first-hand experience of the risks small businesses and creative businesses carry, which is the position a good many of his clients are in when they call.

Clayton pays particular attention to product and efficacy exclusions: the wording that can take cover away where a product or a piece of work simply fails to do the job it was meant to do, rather than causing damage or injury. It is easy to miss, and it tends to matter most to businesses that manufacture, supply or install something.

He also looks closely at the boundary between professional indemnity and physical workmanship. Design and advice sit on one side of that line and the physical work sits on the other, and the two are not always insured under the same policy.

So for a business that both designs and installs, his questions are about how the work actually splits. Which part of the job is design, which part is physical work, whether each part is properly insured, and what is being subcontracted out, because subcontracting can create exposure of its own.

The same thinking runs through the routine work. A pre-renewal review, a contract insurance check or a mid-term policy change is usually where the gap between what a business does now and what its policy was built around first shows up.

Clayton writes for the guides published by Consolidated Insurance Brokers on the subjects he deals with in his own accounts: subcontractors and liability, and the cover a stock-heavy retailer may already hold without knowing it.

Where he writes or reviews an article, the job is to make sure it reflects how these policies behave in practice and answers the questions construction, trade and retail businesses actually ask, rather than repeating a product description.