Meet the Middlesbrough Concept Claims Solutions Franchisees: Turning Property Experience into Purpose

Following the video, you can read the complete transcription of our interview with Middlesbrough Concept Claims Solutions franchisees Junaid Shan and Nadia Hussain, in their own words.

I’m Junaid Shan and I’m a Director at Concept Claims Solutions Middlesbrough. My name’s Nadia Hussain. I’m the Manager of the Middlesbrough franchise.

What initially attracted you to the Concept Claims Solutions franchise?

JS: What attracted me was it was such a niche market. When I was looking at getting into an estate agency, there’s a lot of agents out there. There’s not many loss assessors out there.

NH: For 20 years, I’ve been in the property industry. So I was quite afraid to obviously dealings with, you know, contractors and things like that. And this fell really into everything that I really still liked doing with properties. The overall support that you get through concept is absolutely second to none.

How has the support from the team, inclusing training helped with your success?

JS: It does really help when you see it in action. Definitely puts it in perspective and makes it a lot easier. How real life conversations happen with loss adjusters. The mentorship shows you there’s more of a human factor to this as well, more like, you know, the policyholders we deal with, not just dealing with insurances and loss adjusters and conflicts.

What benefits have you experienced since joining the Concept Claims Solutions franchise network?

NH: The most significant benefits I think that we’ve achieved is having outside support from other franchisees. Being able to pick up the phone and know that everybody’s in the same position and you can always pick up the phone and speak to somebody else and get that support that you need to be able to, you know, to move forward.

JS: It has been great having experience especially from like Mike and the team that have got years of experience over me.

Have you encountered any challenges and how did you address them?

NH: There’s been multiple challenges, as anything would be, but I think having a good knowledge base, where obviously the training and everything comes into I think having a good knowledge base is always really good.

JS: We were quite isolated in the North East. There wasn’t much of a presence. Once we identified there was not much of a presence, head office did pick up on a lot of things. They got a lot more referral partners and claims and referrals for us. We’ve addressed this by really utilising our own network, going to networking events like BNI, meeting up with contractors, plumbers, emergency workers and build up a referral kind of network with them.

NH: Make sure you do all your homework, speak to franchisees, get a good understanding of what it is that you’re taking on because that will set the precedence moving forward. It’s always going to be a bit daunting obviously going into something that maybe perhaps that you’ve never been into, gone into before. Honestly, it’s the best decision that we’ve made.

How long has your franchise been in operation?

JS: We’ve been operational for three and a half years now. We did get off to a very slow start, but once we did get going, it really has grown exponentially. It’s been absolutely fantastic. Four years has had its ups and downs, but that’s like everything.

NH: It’s been definitely worthwhile. I think the response to the Concept Claims brand in our area has been absolutely phenomenal. We go out to claims and we speak to clients and they didn’t even know that the service that we offered was a service. And they’re absolutely over the moon by having or knowing they should have, you know, maybe met us 10 years ago, you know, when they had another claim. But yeah, it’s been an absolutely phenomenal journey. And like I said, very glad that we’ve done it.

What does the next 5 years look like for you as Concept Claims Solutions franchisee?

JS: Our aims and goals are to make concept and our business visible to a lot more people, not so much for profitability, but more so for helping people that are genuinely struggling with their claims. We pick up claims where people have been struggling for years and have been out of pocket for years, they’ve been sofa surfing. We want to be visible enough so those people know where to go to.

NH: But whatever the future holds, we are certainly looking forward to the journey.