The Key Learning Points:

1.The challenges of being a young and confident woman in a male-dominated industry.

2.Top tips for developing a resilient mindset.

3. How fitness, one day, could have a place in the corporate world.

On this week's remote Risky Mix podcast, we're joined by a rising star of the insurance industry. Sophie Vickery was named Employee of the Year at Allianz early in her career and was one of Insurance Business Magazine's Young Guns in 2018. Having moved to Simply Business in mid-2019, she recently won the SB-er of the Year award and alongside her insurance career, juggles a wide variety of other activities - including being a fitness and dance instructor.

Sophie explains that she has two main passions – people and health and fitness. It’s these passions that led her to start a number of side hustles alongside her career in insurance, which we speak more about later in the episode. Sophie has spent five years in the insurance industry so far and found her first role after looking for a sector that combined her love of English and Maths. She lives in Guildford which placed her perfectly for a role at Allianz but admits: “I knew absolutely nothing about insurance. I’d bought maybe two policies for contents insurance, that was it!” Sophie’s role involved looking after brokers and she held various roles in personal and commercial lines. Having started at the insurer when she was just 22, Sophie explains: “I look back now and I’m like, ‘I don’t really know how I did some of those things!” Sophie worked at Allianz for three to four years when she received a knock on the door from a recruiter who presented the Simply Business role. She was attracted to the prospect of working for a new, tech-focused company, which would enable her to develop new skills and experience. Sophie has now been at Simply Business for just over a year. 

We speak to Sophie about her experience in the broker space as a young woman. “Being a young woman in the industry certainly had its challenges.” Sophie explains that there were so many times when she was the only woman walking into broker meetings: “You walk in and you feel it.” Sophie’s approach was to make sure that she was adding value - bringing expertise that they didn’t already have in the room: “I need to know more. I need to be ahead!” She would put in extra work before meetings to get rid of that “back-foot feeling” and aimed to come across as strong and assertive, even though she admits that at times she didn’t feel very comfortable, but it was her way of setting the tone. “There were times when I’d leave meetings and be in the car on the motorway and be in tears because I found it exhausting to put on this big confident aura.” Sophie also noticed that her age held her back, possibly more than her gender in the early stages of her career. Sophie speaks a lot about getting yourself into the right headspace and building resilience: “It does take practice. It does take a lot of grit and confidence.” For her, audiobooks and podcasts really help, and she shares her top recommendations:  Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, Girl, Stop Apologising by Rachel Hollis, Annie Mac’s podcast, Changes, and Positively Selfish by Robyn Lee.

We move on to chat about Sophie’s numerous side hustles. She’s been a fitness instructor for around six years, starting out in the world of Zumba, explaining that she “fell in love with the class.” Sophie was initially teaching in studios but C19 has meant that she now runs all of her classes online. “The future of fitness is going to be a bit of a mix of in-person, online, virtual pre-record. I think it will be a whole host of things and you know what, that’s fantastic because it means it’s more accessible for people.” Sophie is looking to expand her Zumba business and her dream is to bring it together with the corporate world – you heard it here first!