David Pringle

I started off my working life in a cash office, but my eldest brother was working in Insurance at the time, so I got into insurance too, twenty-five years later I’m still in the insurance industry.

One of the most important aspects of my life is my wife, we met in 2004 after I spent the money I had been saving for an apartment in Dublin to go travelling; I jacked in my job, sold my car and went backpacking. I was in a hostel in Sydney when I saw this tall blonde girl, said hello and the rest is history. We kept the relationship going when we finished travelling, she went back to Yorkshire and then Manchester and we spent the next 18 months seeing each other back & forth with RyanAir. I eventually left my job with Marsh insurance in Dublin to go to Manchester to be with her, and started a new job with HSBC Insurance. We bought our first apartment there, got engaged, got married in Mallorca and then went travelling again for our honeymoon. Whilst on the other side of the world travelling my wife surprised me by saying “let’s move to Dublin when we get back” so we did. We came back and moved to Malahide in Dublin in 2011, bought a house in 2012, nine months later we had our first child and in 2013 my brother and I set up our own business.

In 2012 my brother said he wanted to set up his own brokerage and asked if I wanted to join him, as I always wanted my own business too, together we got to work to set one up. It’s hard in Ireland to set up from scratch so we bought a small insurance brokerage in 2013, it was me, my brother and a father and son from the business we bought. We grafted! I didn’t see much of my new son at that time, but we put the work in which eventually paid off. When I left Dublin in 2020 we had eleven members of staff, I put in the hours to get the rewards. Then … my wife tells me she wants to move back to the UK!

My wife is from Yorkshire, and she wanted to move back to England, so we did – happy wife, happy life as they say. Tunbridge Wells was initially recommended to us, and we had to find it on google maps, it fit the bill as we wanted to be close to London, and an airport. From what we read and researched the schools looked good, lots of parks for family life, football, rugby, golf clubs etc, it ticked all the boxes.

Flying over from Dublin to see Tunbridge Wells was proving difficult as it was 2020 and in the middle of a lock-down, so I never set foot in Tunbridge Wells until I moved here. We saw this guy on YouTube who did this forty-minute video of himself walking around Tunbridge Wells in 2019, it sold it for us! We had to rely on this video. We paused it, looking in the background, looking at the Village & Town and the way of life and we knew we could fit in quite nicely, so whoever you are, thank you!

We rented for six months when we arrived here until we saw a house that we fell in love with, we bought the house near the village area, and the more time we spend living here the more we love it. Our decision to move here proved to be the correct one.

Our children love the school that they go to, which was the most important thing, getting them settled. They love the area and the parks, their football, rugby and tennis and have made some great friends, we all have. My primary concern was to make sure the kids transitioned well from Ireland, once I knew that job was done I then had the freedom to set up my own business.

So I set up Pringle Insurance in November 2021 and I wanted to repeat what I did before in Ireland. My whole ethos is relationships; being clear and transparent with clients. Business’s may have an insurance policy for years but not know exactly what they are paying for, I break it down in layman’s terms for them, so they understand where their money is going and I like to think they buy from me, not the headed paper because it is all down to relationships.

I love hearing business owners stories and how they started out, that’s always been the enjoyable part of work for me.

I’ve been listening to stories and building client relationships for years – I must be doing a good job because my customers stay with me.”