By Matt Bartlett, Director of Apex Insurance Brokers Limited
I run a professional indemnity broker out of Bristol. The office is on Queen Charlotte Street, a short walk from the harbour. Most days that’s where you’ll find me, on the phone to solicitors and surveyors and accountants, talking about run-off cover and aggregation clauses and the small print that becomes important on the worst day of someone’s career.
But I’m not from Bristol. I grew up in Barrow-in-Furness, in a corner of Cumbria that doesn’t get written about much unless someone’s launching a submarine or closing a factory. Barrow sits at the end of a road. You don’t pass through it on the way to anywhere. You either live there, or you’ve left.
I left. And then, like a lot of people who leave, I quietly kept the connection going. That connection is now an Apex-branded football kit on the shoulders of about [NUMBER OF KIDS] children playing youth football every Saturday morning, several hundred miles from anyone in my company except me.
This is the story of why.
Barrow is a shipbuilding town. It always has been. The yard is the gravitational centre of the place; every other job in the town is either upstream or downstream of it. My family weren’t shipyard people, but you couldn’t grow up in Barrow without it shaping you. The skyline, the sirens at shift change, the buses queuing on Michaelson Road, the way the whole town’s rhythm followed the yard’s rhythm — that was the wallpaper of my childhood.
It’s a particular kind of place. People are direct. There isn’t much pretence. You don’t get away with being grand in Barrow because everyone knew your parents. There’s a humour to it that I miss when I’m not there — dry, a bit sideways, never showy. And there’s a quiet seriousness about work; the people who built the boats took the work seriously because they had to, and that attitude spread into everything.
It also wasn’t easy. The town’s economy has been tied to one customer — the Ministry of Defence — for generations, and that means good years and lean years. I watched friends’ parents lose jobs in the lean years. I watched the high street thin out. I watched some of the kids I went to school with stay, and some leave, and the choices behind those decisions weren’t simple ones.
When I left, I didn’t leave because I wanted to be done with the place. I left because the work I wanted to do wasn’t there. That’s a different thing.
When I started Apex, I had it in my head — somewhere in the back of it — that one day I’d put a bit of what the business made back into where I’d come from. Not as a tax-deductible CSR line in a marketing plan, but actually back into it. The question was always how.
The answer arrived in a roundabout way. A family friend in Barrow mentioned that the local youth football team I’m now involved with was looking for a kit sponsor. Their old sponsor had pulled out. The cost wasn’t enormous, but for a club run by volunteers on Saturday mornings it was the difference between a season of football and not.
I said yes before I’d really thought about it. And the more I thought about it after, the more right it felt.
Here’s why youth football specifically. Three reasons.
One — it’s the bit of the community that creates the next generation of everything else. The kids in those shirts are the apprentices, engineers, project managers, teachers, nurses, solicitors and shop owners of Barrow in fifteen years’ time. Whatever I do for them now, I do for the town in 2040. That’s a long horizon. It’s the same horizon I take with my own work — professional indemnity is a long-horizon product, you’re often insuring something that won’t go wrong for ten years — and I’m comfortable thinking that way.
Two — sport teaches the things I rate most in the people I work with. Showing up. Doing the unglamorous bits. Losing without sulking. Winning without showing off. Listening to your coach when your coach is right and pushing back when they’re wrong. Being a teammate to people you might not have chosen as friends. I work with professional services firms all day. The best ones — the partners I’d put my own money behind — have all those qualities. Sport doesn’t manufacture them, but it surfaces them early and gives kids practice at them.
Three — it’s local and it’s small and the money doesn’t get diluted. A big national charity is a fine thing, but every pound I put into a national pot pays for fundraising staff and admin and brand consultants and the postage on the appeal letters. A pound into [TEAM NAME] pays for a corner flag, or half of a goalkeeper’s gloves, or a bit of the petrol for an away match. That’s not a slight on national charities; it’s just an honest description of where I felt my contribution would land hardest.
I don’t want to overclaim this. It’s a youth football team. It isn’t curing anything. But spend a Saturday morning watching a match — and I have, more than once now — and you see what the team actually does for the place.
You see parents who’d otherwise not see each other talking on the touchline. You see grandparents in folding chairs. You see kids who at school are quiet finding a voice on the pitch, and kids who at school are loud learning to be quiet when their captain is speaking. You see [COACH NAME] and the other volunteer coaches putting in unpaid hours in the rain in November because someone has to.
You also see something that’s harder to put into words. In a town that’s had a difficult thirty years economically, there’s a particular value in things that just keep happening. The team keeps happening. The fixtures get played. The kit gets washed. The post-match orange slices appear from somewhere. It’s small and it’s reliable and it tells the kids growing up there that their town is a place where things work.
The parents I’ve spoken to — and I should say I’ve not put a microphone in front of them, this is just touchline conversation — talk about it in the kinds of words you’d use for something quietly important. One mum said her son had had a hard year at school and the team was “the thing that’s holding him steady at the moment.” I think about that line a lot. [PLACEHOLDER FOR PARENT QUOTE TO BE CONFIRMED WITH PERMISSION]
Three things, in no particular order.
Resilience. Football is mostly losing. You don’t win every match. You don’t get picked every week. You miss the chance. You have to come back the following Saturday and do it again. That is — and I’m not stretching the metaphor — exactly the texture of running a professional services business. You lose pitches. You lose clients. You make a call that turns out to be wrong. The bit that matters is what you do on Monday morning.
Teamwork that isn’t fake. A lot of corporate “teamwork” is theatre — the away day with the rope course, the values posters in the kitchen. Real teamwork is more like a five-a-side: you’ve got specific people, with specific strengths, who have to read each other in real time without anyone calling a meeting about it. Kids learn that earlier on a pitch than they do in any classroom.
Ambition that doesn’t apologise. Barrow kids — and I’m allowed to say this because I was one — sometimes get told, gently or otherwise, that their horizon is the end of the peninsula. I want the kids in those shirts to know it isn’t. Some of them will stay in Barrow and do brilliantly. Some of them will leave and do brilliantly. Both are fine. What’s not fine is feeling like the choice was made for them.
If a young player ever pulls on one of those Apex shirts and decides, even unconsciously, that the world is bigger than they were told it was — that’ll do, for me.
I won’t pretend this is a purely sentimental exercise. Apex is the business that makes the sponsorship possible, and the business benefits in obvious and less obvious ways from having a director who’s visibly invested in something beyond the next quarter’s revenue.
What I’ll say, as straight as I can: Apex is an independent FCA-authorised broker, based in Bristol, that arranges professional indemnity and related commercial insurance for professional services firms — solicitors, accountants, surveyors, architects, IFAs, consultants. That’s the day job and it’s the day job that funds everything else.
The Cumbrian connection is genuine. We don’t have a Cumbrian office and I won’t pretend we do. But I know the place. I know the way a Barrow engineering firm talks about its work, because I know the people who grew up to do that work. I know what a Lakeland chartered surveyor is dealing with, because I know what the landscape and the building stock and the rainfall actually look like. When a Cumbrian firm picks up the phone to a broker, that broker is usually in London or Manchester. It’s a small thing, but I think there’s a difference when the person on the other end of the line has actually heard of Askam or Dalton or Walney.
If you’re a professional services firm reading this, in Cumbria or anywhere else, and your PI renewal is on your desk and you’d like a second opinion, get in touch. I’ll either be the right broker for you or I’ll be honest about who is.
And if you’re a parent on the touchline in Barrow on a Saturday morning — thanks for letting me be a small part of it. See you at the next home game.
Matt Bartlett is Director of Apex Insurance Brokers Limited.
Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is an independent UK insurance broker specialising in professional indemnity and commercial insurance for professional services firms. The firm is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FCA firm reference number 724952. Registered in England and Wales, Companies House number 07014570. Trading address: QCS, 53 Queen Charlotte Street, Bristol BS1 4HQ. Registered office: c/o Westcan, 5 Anglo Office Park, Bristol BS15 1NT. Telephone 0117 325 0027. Email info@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk.
Author: Matt Bartlett, Director. Reviewed by Matt Bartlett. Last updated: 25 May 2026.
Related pages: About Apex · Sectors we serve · Apex in the community · Cumbria
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Apex Insurance Brokers serves UK professional services firms and commercial businesses. Call 0117 325 0027, email hello@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk, or request a quotation.
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