PTBOCanada Featured Post: Exciting News For Darling Insurance
/If you pay attention to the news, sooner or later you’re bound to hear about a business acquisition where large Company A absorbs small Company B in an effort to move up the ladder.
Acquisitions like this happen on a regular basis, seeing smaller mom and pop type businesses swallowed up by bigger ventures, all in the name of eliminating the competition and further expanding an empire. They’re less about collaboration and more about power.
Photo by Patrick Stephen
Mergers on the other hand are more about unification and combining efforts. They happen when two things combine to work towards a common goal. In the case of Darling Insurance Bobcaygeon Ltd and JWK Insurance’s recent merger, they offer a chance to level the playing field, allowing two smaller companies to become a more powerful combined enterprise.
Years ago David Kennedy of Darling and Greg Kruk of JWK were classmates in high school. Long before they came to work in the same industry, they created a friendship that would one day lead to something beyond what they could ever imagine.
Photo by Patrick Stephen
While Greg and the team at JWK focused their efforts in Bethany and Brooklin, David and his team at Darling held an office in Bobcaygeon. Apart, they were covering a portion of Central Ontario and were both succeeding in an industry overflowing with competition. Ask anyone in the surrounding area if they’ve heard of Darling Insurance Ltd and JWK Insurance and more often than not you’ll get a resounding yes. To stay relevant and grow, however, they both knew they needed to make a change.
Top Row: James Grieves & David Kennedy; Bottom Row: Greg Kruk & Peter Blodgett
About two years ago, in an attempt to spread out, JWK and Darling decided to open a brokerage in Toronto’s ultra-competitive Liberty Village. They opened this as a shared office space between the two brokerages as a first step in working together, bouncing ideas off each other about how to grow their mutual businesses together in a much larger playing field.
Photo by Patrick Stephen
Having history together as high school friends, the duo knew they could coexist and thrive. Both brokerages were growing, in need of more resources (people), and realized they each had some areas of expertise that the other could benefit from.
JWK found that they could benefit from Darling’s head office technical expertise and back office support, while Darling could benefit from JWK’s sales culture and commercial expertise amongst other things. After a year of success in Liberty Village and after careful consideration, they realized that together they could achieve more. With that, they decided to make the move to merge, making it official April 1st, 2017.
David and Greg, along with Greg’s partner James W. Grieve and Senior Partner Peter Blodgett, are all partners that now drive sales and service in the organization—each offering their own expertise and experience in the auto, property, boat and commercial fields.
Together, they’re covering a lot of ground in their newly formed partnership locations in Bobcaygeon, Brooklin, Bethany, Fenelon Falls and Liberty Village. They’re making waves in an industry normally reserved for bigger names we’ve all come to know.
Photo by Patrick Stephen
