Caspian Insurance

Caspian Insurance Caspian helps companies protect their business, their key people, and their shareholders when the unexpected happens.

With decades of experience, we work with limited company directors and business owners across a wide range of industries, from growing Here at Caspian Insurance, we take the time to understand your individual needs before recommending the products best suited to you. With a combined experience that is now approaching 200 years in life insurance, we guide our customers and provide them with ample i

nformation, so that together we can make informed choices with their families’ best interests at heart. The Caspian customer service team contact customers after their policy documents have arrived, to ensure that they fully understand their policy and are happy with the high levels of service provided.

Inheritance tax is the most predictable liability in British financial life. It is announced decades in advance, calcula...
02/06/2026

Inheritance tax is the most predictable liability in British financial life.

It is announced decades in advance, calculated against rules that are public, and levied against assets that are usually known to the family.

And yet it remains the tax that most often arrives as a shock — not because the bill is unexpected, but because no one decided, in advance, where the money to pay it would come from.

The estates that handle it well are not the ones with the most aggressive structures.

They are the ones whose owners accepted, early, that the bill was coming, and chose to pay for it on their own terms rather than leave the choice to their children.

In May 1990, Jim Henson went to a doctor with what he thought was a bad cold. Four days later he was dead at 53, from a ...
01/06/2026

In May 1990, Jim Henson went to a doctor with what he thought was a bad cold.

Four days later he was dead at 53, from a bacterial infection that was, even in 1990, entirely treatable with antibiotics if caught early enough.

He had delayed seeking treatment. By the time he was admitted to hospital, it was too late.

He had just agreed to a $150m sale of his company to Disney. The deal collapsed within months.

The next fifteen years were brutal; multiple restructurings, a sale to a German media group that went bankrupt, a family buy-back at a fraction of the original valuation, and ultimately the sale of the Muppets themselves to Disney in 2004 for a small fraction of the 1990 figure.

It wasn't a dramatic trigger like terminal cancer or a heart attack in his eighties. It was a treatable illness that a busy, healthy 53-year-old didn't take seriously enough.

When your business depends on one person, the things that take them out of the picture don't have to be dramatic to be catastrophic.

The "what if" isn't dying in your eighties, it's being unavailable for the six months that mattered.

If your key person was admitted to hospital tomorrow for an unexpected six months, would the business still be on its current trajectory when they came back?

In 1999, Thierry Henry was struggling at Juventus and openly considered walking away from football. He signed for Arsena...
31/05/2026

In 1999, Thierry Henry was struggling at Juventus and openly considered walking away from football.

He signed for Arsenal for one reason: Arsène Wenger had given him his debut at Monaco, knew what he could become, and was the only manager in Europe willing to back that judgement with £11m and a switch to centre forward.

Henry didn't sign for the badge. He signed for the man.

It wasn't a one-off. Vieira, Pires, Touré, Fàbregas, Anelka — almost every defining Arsenal player of two decades was there because Wenger personally found them. The scouting reported to him. The recruitment ran through him. The pitch to a player was, in the end, him.

When he left in 2018, Emery lasted 18 months. Arteta then spent two full seasons rebuilding the football operation from scratch. Six years and a near-total rebuild — to recover from one person leaving.

The most dangerous founders are the brilliant ones who never built the layer underneath them. The best hires, customers and deals come through their network. That looks like operational excellence. It's often an operational dependency in disguise.

In the last twelve months, how many of your best hires, customers or deals came through your company — versus through specific people?

If the answer skews heavily towards people, you don't have a business with key person risk. You have key people with a business attached.

When Sir Terry Leahy retired from Tesco in 2011, the business was Britain's biggest retailer, profits had risen every ye...
30/05/2026

When Sir Terry Leahy retired from Tesco in 2011, the business was Britain's biggest retailer, profits had risen every year of his fourteen-year tenure, and the share price hit a record high on the announcement of his successor.

Every box on the textbook succession checklist was ticked.

Within four years, Tesco had issued multiple profit warnings, written off billions on a failed US expansion, lost meaningful market share to Aldi and Lidl, and become the subject of a £263 million accounting scandal.

The CEO who replaced Leahy was gone. The recovery took the better part of a decade.

The most dangerous succession scenario isn't the founder who walks out under a cloud. It's the long-tenured leader who hands over to a well-prepared internal successor, and everyone exhales because it looks textbook.

What gets lost isn't visible on day one — it's the accumulated judgement, the institutional memory, the sense of which numbers to trust and which to question.

If your most experienced leader retired tomorrow, what would you genuinely lose that isn't in the handover document?

In 2006, The Body Shop was sold for £652 million. In 2023, it was sold for £207 million. In February 2024, the UK busine...
29/05/2026

In 2006, The Body Shop was sold for £652 million.

In 2023, it was sold for £207 million. In February 2024, the UK business went into administration and half the stores closed.

Anita Roddick wasn't a CEO running a beauty company. She was the brand. The activism, the refusal to test on animals, the refusal to play the industry's game — those weren't marketing positions.

They were her personal convictions, embedded into a business that existed because she did. Customers weren't buying body butter. They were buying a worldview, sold by the person who genuinely believed it.

Under successive owners after her departure, manufacturing moved offshore for margin, discounting became the default marketing lever, and the ethical positioning quietly faded. None of those decisions look unreasonable in isolation.

A decade of them, made without the original conviction filtering them, is how a £652m brand becomes a £207m one.

Some businesses are extensions of a single person's conviction. The product is competent, the operations are repeatable, but the reason customers care is one individual.

How much of what makes your business worth more than its operations is one person's conviction?

If the answer is "a lot," key person risk isn't just a continuity question. It's a question about what the business actually is.

In 2020, Disney executed what looked like a textbook CEO transition. Bob Iger handed over to a 27-year company veteran w...
28/05/2026

In 2020, Disney executed what looked like a textbook CEO transition.

Bob Iger handed over to a 27-year company veteran who had been groomed for the role. The plan had been years in the making.

Less than three years later, the board fired the successor and called Iger back. The company is still working through the consequences; strategically, financially, culturally.

The most reassuring sentence a board can hear is "we have a succession plan."

It is also, sometimes, the most misleading. A plan transfers a title. It doesn't transfer the judgement built over fifteen years, the relationships nobody documented, or the instincts that don't appear in any handover.

For any growth-stage business: having a named successor for your founder, CTO or commercial lead is necessary. It is rarely sufficient.

If your key person stepped back tomorrow and the named successor stepped in, what would honestly change in the first six months? That's the conversation worth having before the handover, not after.

In May 2024, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned. A month later he launched a new company with...
27/05/2026

In May 2024, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned.

A month later he launched a new company with no product, no revenue and no public roadmap.

By September 2024 it had raised $1bn from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and others. Within a year, it was valued at over $30bn.

Investors weren't buying a business. They were buying access to one person's judgement, and betting it would compound faster than the alternatives.

It is the clearest example in modern tech of how the market actually prices key person risk, and it cuts both ways. If you're a founder, your judgement and reputation are a measurable portion of your enterprise value, whether you've quantified it or not.

If you're an investor, the person you backed isn't a line item on the cap table. In many cases, they are the cap table.

What percentage of your company's valuation is honestly a bet on one or two specific people?

If that number is non-trivial, and for most growth-stage businesses it is, then key person risk isn't a soft governance topic. It's a valuation topic.

When Charlie Munger died in November 2023 at the age of 99, Berkshire Hathaway didn't lose its CEO, its founder, or anyo...
26/05/2026

When Charlie Munger died in November 2023 at the age of 99, Berkshire Hathaway didn't lose its CEO, its founder, or anyone with day-to-day operational responsibility.

He had been winding down his role for years. The succession was as expected as a succession can be.

The market still re-priced the business. Analysts started talking about "Buffett risk" differently.

The eventual transition that had felt theoretical for a decade suddenly felt closer.
Nothing operational broke. The risk premium just became visible.

The key person in your business isn't always the CEO. Sometimes it's the co-founder without the title, the Chair who shapes every major decision, the technical advisor the team quietly defers to, the investor whose presence at the board table calms everyone down.

None of them show up on the salary sheet as critical. All of them can be load-bearing in ways that only become obvious when they're gone.

Beyond your founders and your CEO, who is the person whose judgement your business quietly relies on? That's also key person risk. It just doesn't show up on the org chart.

There's no single policy that protects a limited company director entirely.There are six strategies, each covering a dif...
25/05/2026

There's no single policy that protects a limited company director entirely.

There are six strategies, each covering a different part of your exposure. Your income. Your shares. Your business loans. Your key people. Your team. Your family's financial security.

Which ones matter most depends on your business structure, your ownership, and where the risk actually sits.

This post covers all six. If you want to know which ones apply to your business, the link in bio is the next step.

Most limited company directors have some insurance in place.Buildings. Contents. Liability. The obvious stuff.But the ri...
24/05/2026

Most limited company directors have some insurance in place.

Buildings. Contents. Liability. The obvious stuff.

But the risks that can do the most damage, what happens to your shares if you die tomorrow, what happens to your personal guarantees, what happens to the business if you couldn't work, those are the gaps we see most often, in most businesses, right now.

They’ve never had anybody walk them through it properly and that's where we come in.

Click the link in the bio to get started.

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