The expensive moment usually arrives after a long sequence of ordinary ones. A maintenance item gets deferred. A renewal begins a month too late. An employee trusts an email that looks exactly right. Then a building owner learns how much can hide inside a routine decision. Sarah Thompson has built her public career around moving attention upstream, toward the point where there are still choices to make.
At HUB International, Thompson occupies an unusual junction. She has been identified as chief marketing officer for the brokerage's Coastal Region in Vancouver and, more recently, as its Canadian Real Estate Practice Leader. The titles put communication and technical insurance expertise beside each other. Her work explains why that combination matters: an exposure only becomes manageable when somebody can name it, put it in context and give people a next move.
Her path has included the close-up mechanics of property coverage. A 2018 team document listed her as Manager, Strata, the person connected to renewals and service for British Columbia condominium corporations. By 2019, she was presenting as HUB International Insurance Brokers' chief marketing officer at a condominium insurance forum. In 2024, a company Q&A introduced her as the Canadian practice leader discussing cybercrime with real-estate owners and operators across North America.
The work before the work
Thompson earned both the Fellow Chartered Insurance Professional designation and the Canadian Risk Manager designation in 2008. A decade later, HUB issued her its Specialty Expert - Real Estate credential. Those markers help explain the vocabulary of her public advice. She does not treat insurance as a product that begins at the quote and ends in a drawer. She describes it as part of a working system: maintenance, documentation, training, monitoring and conversations that start early enough to matter.
In a 2020 article co-written with Dave Barthel, Thompson described a hard property-insurance market in which carriers were restricting capacity and scrutinizing buildings more closely. The practical response was almost stubbornly unglamorous. Complete a risk assessment. Maintain the building before something breaks. Plan for water damage. Update aging electrical and plumbing systems. Get an accurate appraisal. Keep records. Understand the loss history.
Then came the part that sounds like marketing but functions as operations: tell the building's story. A strong submission, in Thompson's framing, shows the underwriter what has been maintained, what has been learned and how the property is run. The story is not a flourish pasted onto the facts. It is the structure that lets the facts travel.
“By building a story around your facility's renewal submission ... your broker can give the underwriter more confidence in assuming your risk.”Sarah Thompson and Dave Barthel, 2020
That observation makes her dual remit feel less accidental. Marketing in a technical business is often mistaken for simplification. Thompson's record points toward a more exacting job: preserve the important detail, arrange it so another person can act, and do it before the deadline removes the useful options.
Risk, made visible
Funds-transfer fraud as a share of cyber-related claims Thompson said she sees, compared with property-premium increases discussed in her 2020 hard-market article. The figures describe different risks and periods; the bars are not a common scale.
A payment goes to the wrong place
By 2024, the hidden risk in Thompson's field of view was increasingly digital. Real estate handles large transfers, repeated payment workflows and valuable personal information. It also contains enough routine that a convincing message can slip past a busy person. In her Q&A with HUB's James Stuart, Thompson said funds-transfer fraud accounted for about half of the cyber-related claims she saw, with losses running from $20,000 into the millions.
The scenario does not require a cinematic hacker. A buyer can simply be tricked into diverting money. Business-email compromise, ransomware and unauthorized access to personal information add other routes to damage. The direct loss is only part of it. Work stops. People spend hours reconstructing what happened. Trust becomes another damaged asset.
Her recommendations again begin before the crisis: two-factor authentication, employee education and security audits. She also makes a less obvious point about the insurance itself. Cyber coverage can include active risk assessment and alerts. The useful policy is not merely waiting for a claim; it can help monitor the exposure while the company is still operating normally.
“So it's not just a policy that you buy once and throw in a drawer, but active risk management as well.”Sarah Thompson, 2024
This is Thompson's recurring move. She takes the noun and turns it into a verb. A policy becomes monitoring. A renewal becomes preparation. A submission becomes a story. Risk management becomes a sequence of behaviors that can be assigned, checked and improved.
The ultramarathon operating system
There is another setting where Thompson's preference for preparation becomes visible: a trail-running weekend in Squamish, British Columbia. She has served as volunteer coordinator for the Squamish50 Ultramarathon Trail Running Weekend since 2012. Her public description of the work is wonderfully specific. More than 200 volunteers. Three days. Hours of planning. Thousands of emails. A large amount of organization and communication.
Thompson is also an ultramarathoner. In a recent LinkedIn post supporting a friend who was looking for work, she described the friend as a fellow ultramarathoner and connected endurance with a willingness to take on a challenge. The small detail rounds out the professional portrait. She does not only coordinate the aid stations and handoffs. She knows the distance from inside the event.
Volunteer logistics carry their own quiet exposures. Somebody must arrive before the runners. Somebody must know where supplies belong. Messages must survive fatigue, weather and three days of moving parts. The event can be known internationally, as Thompson says Squamish50 is, while the machinery underneath remains mostly invisible.
- See the course. Map the exposure before urgency narrows the choices.
- Prepare the handoffs. Give each person the information needed for the next decision.
- Document the work. Make maintenance, losses and responsibilities visible.
- Start early. A renewal and a race weekend both punish compressed planning.
- Improve the system. Thompson's own volunteer note ends with the belief that there are always ways to improve.
The overlap with insurance is observational, not ornamental. Both environments depend on clean handoffs and useful redundancy. Both ask leaders to imagine a problem before it becomes the only thing anyone can see. Both reward the person willing to send the thousandth email because one missed detail can travel a long way.
A network built in public
Thompson's public activity also reveals how she uses a professional network. She shares resources on EV-charging risks, wildfire response, property maintenance and insurance submissions. She promotes openings inside HUB. She uses the same channel to support a friend seeking a leadership role. The pattern is practical and relational: circulate the information, name the people doing the work, help the next connection happen.
After a RIMS Canada conference, she wrote about the conversations with clients, colleagues and industry partners, then singled out a fireside chat between HUB Canada President Tina Osen and Vancouver Fire Chief Karen Fry. She called both women inspiring leaders and credited the broader HUB team for bringing the conference together. The post reads less like a victory lap than a dispatch from somebody still processing what she heard.
The people who have worked with or taught Thompson describe a compatible character. One colleague mentioned intelligence, professionalism and a sense of humor. An instructor recalled her enthusiasm, participation, work ethic, appetite for learning and natural leadership in small groups. These are outside observations, but they fit the operating record: long volunteer tenure, technical credentials, public education and steady attention to other people.
There is restraint in the way this network appears. Thompson's posts tend to point outward, toward a colleague's opening, a friend's search, a panelist's idea or a checklist somebody can use. Even her conference reflection moves quickly from personal excitement to the people onstage and the team behind the event. It is a communications habit with operational value. Credit clarifies who contributed. Sharing an opening brings a potential teammate closer. Passing along a maintenance guide can put a task on the calendar before summer is over. The network is useful because information moves through it.
Readiness as a habit
Insurance tends to become vivid at the worst possible time. Thompson's contribution is to make it vivid earlier. She shows a property owner what an underwriter will notice. She shows a real-estate operator how a routine transfer can become a cyber claim. She shows how a policy can participate in monitoring instead of waiting passively for damage.
Her career arc also carries a useful lesson about expertise. The manager who handled strata details became the executive who can discuss a national real-estate exposure. The marketing leader kept the technical designations. The ultramarathoner kept coordinating volunteers. None of those identities cancels the others. Together, they create a style of leadership grounded in seeing both the message and the machinery.
A finish line looks inevitable only after everyone has arrived. A safe transfer looks routine only when the controls work. A smooth renewal hides the months of documentation that made it smooth. Thompson's work lives inside that hidden preparation. It asks a plain question before the expensive moment arrives: what can we do now?