Start-up to Scale-up with Channel 4 Ventures: Gender Equality + The Power of Resilience with Sam White

In this episode, I interviewed the brilliant Sam White, founder and CEO of Stella Insurance. We discussed Sam's journey into creating a female-centric motor insurance business, her challenges as a woman in a male-dominated industry, the difficulties in raising investment, and her unique approach to resilient entrepreneurship. Sam shares her experiences of starting her first company at 24, her struggles with financial institutions, and the innovative solutions she employed, including a media for equity deal. We also talk about gender disparity in business funding and highlight the importance of supporting diverse entrepreneurs.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Connect with Sam White on Instagram, Linkedin Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list,  Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter Transcript Teresa:Hello and welcome back to the Dream Business Podcast. This is episode 378, but it is number two in this special series that I'm doing with Channel 4 Ventures. [00:01:00] The first episode, which I aired yesterday was with Nikki Wicks, who is the brother CEO and creative director of Joe Wicks The Body Coach. And I loved that conversation, so I would love to hear what you thought of it. Today, I am interviewing Sam White, who is the founder and CEO of Stella Insurance, a female centric motor insurance business that's unapologetically led by women and designed for women. Now, this conversation was really, really good. I was super inspired by Sam. We had conversations around the fact of Why would you even get into insurance in the first place? I'm laughing saying it, but like of all the businesses that people set up, surely insurance does not seem like the easiest thing. And it doesn't seem like the most simple, it's a really heavily regulated industry. What makes someone starting a [00:02:00] business want to go into it? We talk about the fact that She was 24 when she started and that she loved solving problems and she was frustrated with some of the things in the industry. So it was her own kind of need for an answer that made her create the answer herself. We talked about how difficult it was for her as a woman, not only in this industry, but also to try and raise money and the difficulty that she had with financial institutions. And then we looked at what makes her resilient. How is she motivated? How did she pick a really difficult industry and go on to make a really successful business? I think you're going to be super inspired by this. I really loved her frankness. I really loved her direct conversation. It was a wonderful conversation. And I think that you are really going to enjoy this episode. So without further Here is the amazing Sam White. Welcome Sam to the podcast. How are you doing? Sam: Not so bad. Thank you for having [00:03:00] me on. Teresa: Well, thank you for giving me your time. I was just saying to you before we hit record that I don't think I've ever interviewed anybody who's in insurance or certainly not set up an insurance company. So I am fascinated about this conversation. Sam: So nobody ever, when referred to insurance, Teresa: think about like the entrepreneurial world, there's not many that, you know, go, this is the route I want to go down. So let's start there. So how, how is the big question and why did you decide that that was the business you wanted? Sam: Yeah, look, it's something that gets said a lot in insurance circles. People would say, nobody actually chooses to go into insurance. They fall into it. I think my path was probably quite different in the, I set up my first company when I was 24, um, and really just because I couldn't stand the thought of working for somebody else. I realized I was unemployable at a very [00:04:00] young age. Young age. And so I didn't really care what I got in. So as long as it meant that I could work for myself and be independent and not have to kind of live by somebody else's rules. So the first business that I set up wasn't actually in insurance. It was around insurance. I set up a business supporting insurance brokers with their motor claims. And the only reason I did that is because the only job I had. previously was in that sector. So it was what I knew and it seemed like a safer landing point. And it kind of evolved from there. Teresa: So 24 is very young to start a business. Was that something that had always been on the cards? Was your parents, were they entrepreneurs? How. Did you get into that? Sam: Yeah, look, we, uh, my mom had had her own business when she was younger, so there was probably some kind of seeding of that, that mentality as, as a [00:05:00] child. But I think, you know, as a teenager, I used to go out washing cars in the neighborhood to make money. I always had that energy about me of wanting to create something in the moment out of nothing. And I, I didn't like, you know, I had Saturday jobs. I had a job in Gregg's actually as a, my sort of first paid employment and I didn't get paid a lot and it was very, very hard work and I hated the rigidity That kind of structure. So I think I was always of a mind that I wanted to push out against that, that kind of framework. Teresa: Yeah. And I think I always, I used to joke, and I don't say it so much now that I'm like an accidental entrepreneur, because that was never, I wasn't one of those people. I follow rules really well. I love being patted on the head and being told I've done a good job. So the fact that I now have my own business is mind blowing. And again, I could never go back to [00:06:00] it. But I think like, if you've grown up and had that kind of passion, what Because again, even though you'd had some experience in that industry, that doesn't seem like a particularly easy industry to get into. It feels like there's loads of legal stuff and you've really got to know what you're talking about. Sam: Yeah, it is. It's heavily regulated. It's also extremely Male dominated, which I talk about a lot. It's, you know, it's financial services. So the majority of senior decision makers in the industry and male, it's not necessarily an industry that really attracts entrepreneurs either, because it's seen as a very capital intense area and therefore it, it puts people off. For me, I just like solving problems. And I, I kind of, I'd, I'd started because I'd started working in claims, I kind of understood the industry almost under the, the [00:07:00] hut in terms of some of the challenges that the market has generally. And as I'd started to build out a claims business and work with insurance companies, I was getting frustrated that there was things that I wanted to change. That I couldn't change because I wasn't in control of that part of the process. You know, it's funny you talk about the accidental entrepreneur. My personal belief is that 90 percent of us are accidental entrepreneurs, but some are better at lying about it post being successful because, you know, I, I, I don't believe in this really thing. Cookie cutter, clean plan that plays out exactly as you expected it to. And it's one of my big objections to sort of traditional VC is, uh, they, they, they tend from my experience of them to come from the big consulting firms. Come from a financial background. [00:08:00] So you sort of CFO mentality that says that everything works on a spreadsheet. Then real life happens. And, and, and that isn't how most businesses that I know and entrepreneurs that I know, and I've met a Tom that have been wildly successful. And when you're sat at that after dinner party and you're chatting and you really get to the honest nub of it with them, they've all had that rollercoaster of experience where they thought they were going in one direction and then they had to go in another and the pain points and the trauma and all that stuff. And it kind of flies in the face of the. The way that we expect them to present when trying to raise funds, the two of them really kind of fit together very well. Teresa: No, and I think, you know, this is where we look at like people's zone of genius. And I think to be an entrepreneur, to come up with those ideas, to have the guts to go out there and do it, to be [00:09:00] brave, to be scrappy in those early days, like they're not necessarily the, the spreadsheet type skills that you would...