About
Emliss is Chris Buer.
Twenty years in the London insurance market. The last six building and leading marketing at Pro Global, from a standing start to a function the board relies on.
Pro Global ยท 2020 to now
I built the function you are thinking about hiring.
I joined Pro Global in October 2020 as its first Head of Marketing. There was nothing to inherit, so I built it: the brand, the agencies, the research, the digital estate and the PR, with a team of two.
Pro Global is a specialist insurance services business with clients across the UK, Europe, the US and Latin America. When I arrived it was a good business that could not say why. Six years on it has a position in the market that nobody else owns, a brand the board trusts, an audience four times the size, and a marketing function that runs on a fraction of the benchmark budget.
Over the same period the business grew quickly and profitably, and did it without adding a single person to the marketing team. Marketing is one part of that story rather than the whole of it. The part I will claim is this: growth that fast and that lean needs a business that knows what it is for and can say so. That was my job.
Before Pro Global
Fourteen years inside the London market.
Before Pro Global I spent fourteen years on the market side of insurance, at LIIBA and then Lloyd's.
At Lloyd's I project-managed London Makes It Possible, the brand strategy for the London insurance market itself, working with Interbrand and McCann Enterprise, and served as Company Secretary to the board of the market's electronic trading platform. At LIIBA I led modernisation projects across the market and the research that measured London's share of it. That is where I learned the hardest part of marketing: getting a room of senior people to agree what the thing is for, and then holding them to it.
What that means for you
Five things you get on day one.
- Speed
You skip the learning curve. I have built a function from nothing, so I know what to do first, what can wait, and what never to buy.
- Money
Your budget goes further. I have run a whole group's marketing on a fraction of the benchmark spend, and I know where money returns and where it leaks.
- The board
You get a straight answer. I have sat between a chief executive, a private equity owner and an acquirer, and written the paper all three had to sign.
- Agencies
Your suppliers do better work. I have hired, briefed, tendered and replaced them, and a good brief is cheaper than a bad campaign.
- Your market
Nothing needs explaining. Twenty years in insurance and financial services, and the discipline of selling expertise to sceptical buyers travels well beyond them.
The name
Two names, one word.
Emliss is Emily and Fliss, my daughters. Two names joined to make something that didn't exist before. It also happens to describe the work: a fractional CMO joins two things, a business and senior marketing thinking, into one operating whole. The join has to be precise, and it has to hold.
How I work
Four things you can expect.
- Sharp
I say what I mean in as few words as it takes, and I bring structure to messy situations.
- Warm
I am a person, not a firm. I am direct because I care about the outcome, and I am generous with what I know.
- Assured
I have done this before. I don't oversell, I don't hedge, and I am comfortable being the calm one in the room.
- Modern
I work in the present. Contemporary tools, current thinking, and no nostalgia for how marketing used to be done.
Talk to Chris
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes, no slides, to talk through where the business is and whether senior marketing thinking would move it on. If it would, I will tell you what I would do first.