Welcome everybody. Am I on? Is the mic on okay? Good. Welcome everybody to the annual meeting of shareholders for Brown & Brown. It's always a pleasure. We have a wonderful turnout this morning, and of course, we have lots of good news to talk about, and business is very good. Without further ado, I would like to introduce our board of directors. We have a very hardworking, very outstanding board of directors, and I've been noticing from other proxies the investments in the company on which those directors sit across a broad spectrum, and our group of investors has a very large percentage of investment in the company relative to other comparable directors. That shows that not only are they there heart and mind, they got their ass too, financially.
I'd like for each of our directors to rise as I introduce you, and we'll have a round of applause for them as we finish introducing. First, I'm chairman. I'm Hyatt Brown, and I'm chairman of Brown & Brown. Sam Bell, who is of counsel to the law firm of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. Hugh Brown, retired founder and former CEO of BAMSI, Inc. Powell Brown, president and CEO of Brown & Brown. Brad Currey, retired former chairman and CEO of Rock-Tenn, now WestRock. Ted Hoepner, retired former vice chairman, SunTrust Banks, Inc. Jim Hunt, former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and his wife. Toni Jennings, chairman, Jack Jennings & Sons, Inc., a commercial construction firm based in Orlando, and Jennings & Jennings architectural millwork firm based in Chicago.
Tim Main, chairman, Global Financial Institutions Group at Barclays Bank. H. Palmer Proctor, president and director of Fidelity Bank of Atlanta. Wendell Reilly, chairman, Furman Capital Advisors, managing partner, Grapevine Partners. They're a private equity investment firm focused on media and communications and based in Atlanta. Last but certainly not least, Chilton Varner, partner in the law firm of King & Spalding. Let's give a nice round of applause. I'd like to now introduce our officers who are subject to Section 16 because they're executives of our company. If we can ask them to rise. Some are on the road, some of them are out selling insurance, some are here today. As I introduce, if your name is on the list, please rise, and then we'll give you all a round of applause. Chairman of the board, Powell Brown. Bob Lloyd, executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary.
Scott Penny, executive vice president and chief acquisition officer. Rich Freeborn, Executive Vice President, Internal Operations and People Officer. Anthony P. Strianese, Tony Strianese, Executive Vice President and President, Wholesale Brokerage Division. Chris Walker, Executive Vice President, National Programs Division. Andy Watts, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Let's give them a round of applause. Now I'd like to introduce the officers who are not subject to Section 16. Neal Aton, senior vice president. John Berner, senior vice president. Sam Boone, if any of these are here, please rise. Senior vice president. Steve Boyd, senior vice president. Barrett Brown, senior vice president, regional president, retail. Kathy Colangelo, senior vice president. Steve Denton, senior vice president, regional president, retail division. John Esposito, senior vice president, regional president, retail division. Tommy Huval, senior vice president, regional president, retail division.
Mike Keeby, Senior Vice President, Regional President, Retail Division. Rich Knudson, Senior Vice President, Regional President, Retail Division. David Lodge, Vice President and Corporate Counsel. Don McGowan Jr., Senior Vice President, Regional President, Retail Division. Vaughn Stoll, Senior Vice President. Anthony Robinson, Assistant General Counsel and Assistant Secretary. Julie K. Ryan, our newest person on board, who is Chief People Officer. Let's give them a round of applause. I'd like to introduce members of Deloitte & Touche, who are our accountants. They are here today, of course, and we'll have an opportunity to ask them any questions. If you have some really technical questions, you'll hold them. Let's welcome questions. First, Richard Helm, Auditing Managing Director. Please rise. John Gordon, Audit Partner and former Lead Client Service Partner for Brown & Brown. Bill Nix, Audit Partner and Lead Client Service Partner for Brown & Brown.
Thank you very much. You all did a great job. We have some other guests in attendance that I would like to recognize. First of all, Tom Michael Levy, a Partner with Holland & Knight, is outside legal counsel. Please remain standing. We'll give everybody a round of applause. We have some really important people. I've already introduced some important people. These are really important. First of all, my wifey. Where are you? Stand up. Where is she? No, stand up and remain standing, please, ma'am. We have Sherry Lloyd, who is Bob Lloyd's spouse. Sherry. We have Carrie Strianese , Tony's spouse. One and three-quarters attendance here, and this is Kelly Robbins. Kelly, would you please? She's going to have a baby on the 10th. Thank you all. Thank you all. Did I miss any other spouses?
If I did, let me know. Okay. Good day. We turn to the business meeting. I ask that Robert Lloyd act as Secretary of the Meeting and present proof of the due calling of the meeting. Mr. Lloyd.
Mr. Chairman, I have the mailing affidavit certifying that on the 22nd day of March 2017, the proxy statement and all related materials were mailed to owners of outstanding capital stock of the company as of the close of business on February 27th, 2017, the record date.
Do we have a quorum?
Yes. The number of shares of the capital outstanding and is entitled to vote on the record date was 140,269,009 shares. Of this amount, 130,987,887 shares, representing approximately 94% of the total number of shares outstanding, are represented at this meeting. This constitutes a quorum.
Actually, you noticed a slight hesitation. Part of his answer was on the second page. He didn't get to the second page until I asked him.
That's all right.
It all works out.
Which certified true and correct by American Stock Transfer Company.
We are ready to transact business. In the interest of saving time, I would like to suggest that we dispense with the reading of the minutes of the last annual meeting of shareholders, which was last March 2016. Is there such a motion? Is there a second? Without objection, so ordered. I will now entertain a motion for the appointment of two individuals to act as supervisors of voting. Their duties will be to decide upon the qualification of voters, accept the vote, count, and ascertain the number of shares voting for and against each proposed. Is there a motion? Is there a second? Is there opposition? Without objection, so ordered. The motion is carried. The inspectors have previously filed their oaths of office with the secretary.
We will now turn to the vote on the nomination of the board of directors set forth in the proxy statement. Most of you have already submitted proxies by mail or today as you came in. If you have not turned in your proxy, or if you wish to change your vote, that's not going to work. You could change the vote if you wanted to. Please raise your hand, and the secretary will see that you're acknowledged that they reflect that in the voting. Now I have a pause. Is there anybody who would oppose who has voted or who has voted but would like to change? Seeing and hearing none, do we have the results of the vote?
I do. Each of the 12 nominees for the board of directors has received at least 110,194,245 votes, sufficient in each case for election. Additionally, the approval of the ratification of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company's registered public accountant for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2017, has received 128,291,427 votes, sufficient for approval. The approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of the named executive officers has received 119,238,103 votes, sufficient for approval. The approval on an advisory basis that the frequency of the advisory vote on executive compensation will be every one year has received 106,326,805 votes, sufficient for approval. The approval of an amendment of Brown & Brown, Inc. 2010 Stock Incentive Plan to the step to increase the number of shares available for issuance under the plan has received 115,631,750 votes, sufficient for approval.
Thank you, Mr. Lloyd. Everything passed with flying colors as far as we can count that. We have a very shareholders spread really all over the world. This concludes this meeting. I call it to order. Now comes the good part. We're going to call on Powell Brown, our CEO, to give a report on what happened last year, what may be happening too. Powell, it's all yours.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. I know everybody's probably already turned their cell phones off, but if you take a moment to do that, we would very much appreciate it. When we start this morning, what I would like to say, and most importantly, is we had a good year last year. We had a good quarter the first quarter of this year. What I'd like to say is last year, we had a good year, and we made a lot of progress. These are customary things that I have to our deck, but from a standpoint of we grew the revenue of our company 6.4% and 3% organically. As you've heard me say before, organic growth is something that the investment community places an inordinate amount of value on.
We actually believe it is organic growth and profitability, and that profitability allows us to reinvest those dollars in our company. We do three things with those dollars that we earn. We hire more teammates, we make acquisition, return it to shareholders. We'll talk about that a little bit later. We continue to invest in technology. You'd say, "Well, what does that mean? That's kind of big, opaque." Party has just started. Thank you. That's like our house, a party starts when somebody breaks something. When we talk about investment in technology, we have done some financial technology, which is really the consolidation of our financial statements and P&Ls. We're talking about an investment in our agency management system in the largest business.
It's retail, which is 53% of our revenue, which we're going through, and some additional data analytics technology that we can use across the entire system. We added 400 teammates to Brown & Brown in the last year to end with 8,300 teammates. Those are full-time equivalents. We have technically 8,600 teammates, and I think it's very important to say that we don't have employees at Brown & Brown. We have never had employees at Brown & Brown. We are a team. We think of ourselves as an athletic team, and when we talk to people about that, sometimes that catches people that are not part of Brown & Brown, a little funny or different. Not in a bad way, but the answer is we are a team. We win as a team, and we lose as a team.
Although individual accomplishments and success are great, team success is the greatest. We acquired eight businesses of $56 million of revenue last year. Interestingly enough, surely by coincidence, in 2015, we acquired $56 million of revenue. Somebody in the audience might ask, "How does that compare to prior years?" I would tell you that it's down slightly, not because we have consciously decided to do fewer acquisitions. It's because we're looking for acquisitions that, one, fit culturally, and two, make sense financially. If you look at the 10 years ending in 2016, including the two years at $56 million of revenue, the average annual acquired revenue is $97 million. We're down a little off of the historical average. That's okay.
On our last earnings call at the end of the first quarter, I was asked about how we view the acquisition landscape, and the acquisition landscape is continuing to be competitive. One of the analysts out there said, "Well, what happens if, in fact, you think that acquisitions continue to be fully valued or you don't find the ones that fit culturally and make sense financially, and you believe that your stock is appropriately valued?
What do you do with the money that you earn?" I said, "If anybody wants to criticize me, they can, but I will tell you, we're going to put the money on the balance sheet until we have the right opportunity to invest it where it makes sense." I said to everyone on that call that morning that we've been around for 77 years, and so you don't make a culture or a company in three to five years, which is what private equity is all about. You compile businesses. You don't have common thought focused on a customer and creating a foundation or a culture that lasts. You can't do it. We're doing this forever, and so that sometimes people may, if they're short-term, more short-term focused, and be critical of me, and that's okay. They can go ahead and criticize me.
That's what we're going to do. Having said that, we grew our earnings per share 7.1%, and we increased our dividend for the 23rd year in a row by 10%. Andy is going to talk a little bit about that. As you know, we pay out a relatively low dividend yield, about 1.3%. Why do we do that? Historically, and this is not written anywhere, we have tried to pay out less than 25% of our earnings because we want to take the 75% of the earnings and reinvest it in those three things that I just talked about, hiring new people to get to our next goal, making acquisitions, and returning to shareholders through either dividends or share repurchases. This is our performance by division, and if you look at this, what you find is retail grew 1.9%. We're working on that, so moving up. National Programs, 4.2.
Wholesale Brokerage at 4.3, services at 3.8. Those are organic in the first line. The back line, the difference between the back square or box and the front box would be acquired revenue versus organic revenue. Interestingly enough, on this particular slide, if you look at Wholesale, really, 4.3 is the highest organic growth of any of the businesses last year. Carrie Strianese stood up, Tony Strianese works for Carrie. He's over here. I want to recognize both Carrie and Tony because I believe that it is six years running that our wholesale business has led the organic growth in our company. I will tell you, with the competitive environment in the catastrophic property arena, that is Herculean. They have got a lot of good stuff going.
We do in all of our divisions, I'm just going to say, I want to take a special shout-out and say thank you, Tony and Carrie, for everything you do, and I'm glad that you work for Carrie. We're happy for you. We've talked about what we're all about, you hear this, we have teammates, we don't have employees, we're very focused. This is a summary of keywords that sum us up. Lean, highly competitive, decentralized, profit-oriented, common goals, high quality, high integrity, prideful relationships, we are sales and service focused. Our client, we talk about do the right thing for the client each and every time. It'll always work out for Brown & Brown long term. We find where other agents don't do that, we exploit that's how we earn new business. What is it that defines us?
We have, one, a performance-based common culture. That is really important. If you're a salesperson in our organization, you know how you rank against every other salesperson in the organization every month. If you run a business, whether you're in Tacoma, Washington, or Syracuse, New York, or in Sarasota, Florida, you are ranked against every other office of that same type in that division quarterly. Once again, no one in this room thinks of yourself as average. At the end of the day, there are people that are ranked average and below. We are driving a performance-based culture. We have highly talented leaders and teammates, a decentralized sales and service model, an entrepreneurial meritocracy. What that really means is the leadership in each office has the opportunity to chart the future growth in that business.
For example, we were in Phoenix, Arizona, and we decided to solicit 3 types of business would be our key focuses, construction, healthcare, and habitational. As long as they could grow and meet their budget and continue to grow, we will support that. Having said that, an office in Las Vegas might be involved in gaming and not do healthcare, habitational, and do manufacturing and employee benefits, as an example. We have a significant teammate ownership. We believe we are a different public company than most. For the size of our market cap, roughly $6 billion, we have roughly 30% insider ownership. That is a big number. We act as owners because we are 30% of the company.
Therefore, the senior leadership team, myself, and the rest of my partners in the senior leadership team feel an awesome responsibility to invest that money appropriately on behalf of not only you, our shareholders, but all of our teammates who are also shareholders. It has a very good alignment. We're acquisitive, growth and margin focused. We have a strong balance sheet. We believe that our balance sheet is the strongest today than it's ever been. We're excited about what that provides us the flexibility in the future. You've heard me say this before, but we strive to be the leading insurance broker in the middle market and upper middle market. We write accounts that are startups. We write Fortune 100 accounts, several of them. Really, it's middle and upper middle market.
Somebody might say, "Well, what is that?" I would say that that defines things from 25 employees to, let's say, 5,000 employees. Revenues could be several million dollars, $10 million to several billion. We don't put those parameters on it. I'm just trying to give you an idea of what that looks like. The most important thing is we're in the people recruiting and enhancing business. That is what defines us. Because we can't do anything else unless we do that and do it well. In order for us to get to our next intermediate goal of $2 billion in revenue, we're going to have to hire or acquire or some combination of the two, another, let's say, 1,800 people.
If you think about it, that sounds like a lot of people to me, but in essence, we're going to grow several hundred million dollars with that. We'll do that. We're in the money-making business, which enables us to reinvest the money back into the company in the 3 areas that I've talked about. We do that through selling and servicing of insurance. We're in the make no big mistakes business. If, in fact, you had been at a shareholder meeting in 1993 or 1994 when my father was running the meeting and giving this presentation, you would have heard this: We are consistent. A big mistake would be getting in the risk-bearing business, insurance company. We don't want to be an insurance company. A big mistake would be a large error or omission, which you have insurance for, but it would exceed that amount.
We have very good internal controls to help us prevent that. Having said that, this is kind of the foundation of our company. That's what drives this. I would say that if you look over this period, I had the good fortune to get involved in the senior leadership role in 2009. Some might say that was the best of times or the worst of times because the economy was going down. Our business is tied dramatically to exposure units, and construction is a part of that. Our business started shrinking. Organically for the first time in the history of our company, actually in 2007.
If you go back to 2011 and before, retail was a very high percentage of our. If you had asked me in 2011, 2009, what do you think your business will look like in 2017? I would say 60%-70% retail. That's where we come to see you, and you're the business owner, the manufacturer of widgets. You own 3,000 apartments, or you own 12 nursing homes. What has occurred, not by design, but because we've met people that fit culturally and make sense financially, is we've diversified the business dramatically. If you fast-forward from 2009 and 2011 to 2016, you see that there's more of a balance. We have 53% here and 25% programs, and up here is wholesale, Tony's business, and then services. We have a more diversified business.
Many people out there think of us solely as a retail insurance broker, which is the engine of the business. That is 53%. Over time, I believe that that will grow because we'll have more acquisition opportunities there. We are very diversified now, even more so than we were back then. If you think about, this is a question around what have you spent your money on? We talk about capital allocation, and in a 10-year period, if you look at this up on the top right, we've generated about $3.1 billion, and we've deployed $3.7 billion. From a net basis, we've taken on, let's say, $600 million of debt. We have about $1 billion debt on the balance sheet today, but that's over this period of time. The most of the money that we've spent, $2.7 million, has been on acquisitions.
You say, what else do you do with it? We've paid $506 million to you shareholders. We have bought back $258 million of stock. We made capital expenditures of $182 million. When you look at that and you say, stock buybacks at $258 million, what do you think about and why, some people ask, why don't you buy back more stock? The answer is because we look at all of the investment opportunities available to us at the time. We look at the intrinsic value of our stock and see if there is a discrepancy between the intrinsic value and what it's currently trading at. Simply stated, if in fact we think the stock is fully priced, we don't buy it. If we think there's a difference between the fully priced amount and where it currently trades, we buy some of it.
The investment world and that stated policy they want is to buy a stated amount every quarter. Once again, if somebody wants to criticize us and they can criticize me, we have said, Andy and I, that we don't have a stated policy because we're going to look at it and talk with our board every quarter, and we're going to figure out if it makes sense or not, as opposed to saying we're buying $25 million or $50 million a quarter. We're not doing what the investment community do, by the way, the analysts want that to happen. I think the final thing. Is that for me? Oh, sorry. Hello? Hello? I'm back on. Sorry. The final thing, or one of the final things is you might say, well, what is it or how are you thinking about business today maybe versus several years ago?
I would want to start on this slide, and I'll talk about each of these circles briefly. I want to start in the upper left-hand quadrant, which is technology. You're going to hear and continue to hear a lot about technology in the insurance space, and it's called in our world Insurtech. I would tell you, two years ago there were, I think, 70 plus businesses that were funded, private startup companies in the Insurtech space. Last year, that number was like 170. Not all of those will succeed. Quite honestly, very few of them will succeed, but it will continue to have the disruptive component to it. That is something that we continue to watch.
Not that we want to be a technology company, but we want to partner with companies that have that technology or buy technology that will enable us to service our customers better in the future. If you follow any other insurance companies or brokers, you're going to hear more and more about Insurtech in the future. Additional capital, some people call that alternative capital. I don't think it's alternative because I think it's here to stay, depending on what size and how going forward, when interest rates go up and when other investment opportunities yields on those go up, some of that money may go into other areas.
What that really means is when you have 10 people in London or Hong Kong or New York that have an inordinate amount of money under management and they want to deploy that, some of them think we should get into the insurance business. You say, "Well, how do you do that?" Because it's a regulated industry in some aspects. They go to companies or reinsurance companies and use the paper, the insurance company paper, and put their capital behind it, and then we, as a distributor, can sell it. This is an area that we are watching very closely. This is in direct competition with traditional insurance companies that you might think of, The Hartford, Travelers, CNA, AIG, Fireman's Fund or Allianz, whoever the case may be.
What that does is it puts pressure on the standard carriers, those that I just named and all the other ones around the country that we do business with, because many of them have high fixed costs. We believe that there's going to be continued pressure on those firms to do what we call fewer and deeper. That means they're going to have fewer relationships with agents, and they're going to be bigger relationships. That bodes well in our mind for us because we already usually have a large relationship with many of those companies, and they're growing. The private equity impact, you heard me mention that earlier. Private equity actually has been in our space for maybe the last 10 years or so in a really robust fashion.
Private equity, as I've said, is typically a three- to seven-year time horizon, and they want to flip it. They value businesses typically differently than we do. Private equity is short-termism, and we are a long-term company. There is an interesting dynamic relative to the short-termism in thinking versus the long-termism at Brown & Brown because we're forever. They might buy something that would not be something that they would want to hold for long term because they anticipate flipping it in a couple of years, whereas we don't want to buy something that we don't want in a couple of years. We buy things that we want to be in forever. That will continue to have an interesting dynamic on the environment.
We, by the way, think they're going to continue to be involved in the insurance company space. What's really interesting is where you see private equity firms sell their businesses to other private equity firms. That's when we think it's really frothy. We also look closely and follow the legal and regulatory environment. Somebody might say, "Well, give us an example or two of what that is in your business in Brown & Brown." I'll give you two good examples. One, healthcare. We have about a $270-plus million employee benefits business in our retail organization, and changes in Obamacare or ACA have an impact on that. We believe that change creates confusion, which creates an opportunity for us to serve our clients and help them navigate through a confusing time. We don't know what it's going to look like.
We watch very closely every day. As those changes occur, we'll help our clients work through that. The other one from a regulatory standpoint is we have a business that we acquired 18 months or two years ago called Wright. In there's a Write Your Own Flood Administrator. In September of this year, Congress is going to reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program, and it's currently on a five-year renewal. They're looking at a five-year or 10-year renewal, and we don't know what will happen on that. How that goes going forward, we watch with great interest. As I said earlier, nothing happens at Brown & Brown without high-quality teammates. We want to keep our teammates that are on our team. We want to reward them, we want to develop them. We want to help them grow personally and professionally and financially.
We want to get more people on the team. Julie Ryan, who was introduced earlier, is moving her family down from Chicago to help us focus on that as our chief people officer. She's working with Rich Freeborn, who has only been recruiting teammates here for 34 years. He's only recruited, Rich personally, maybe 150 people into the company that are here today. I know most of them are thriving phenomenally. Thank you, Rich. Final thing is big data and analytics. You're going to hear all about this, and you've read about it, and it's going to continue to be out there. What we're thinking about is how do we look at the data inside of our system and use it to the benefit of our clients and our teammates. That's how we think about it.
We don't want analysis or paralysis by analysis. We want to use big data to help us make good decisions going forward. We talk about shareholders and a long-term view. I asked Andy to put together this slide. There are no numbers on here. I understand that. Basically, and this is public information, this would be our top 10 shareholders. When you look in there, Brown & Brown teammates are at the top, as I said. When you look at all the other ones, many of those ones in the first two or three underneath, they have an index component. They're buying us an index fund. It's not actively managed. Some of them are. My father made a comment about we have shareholders around the world. Finley Partners is in London. They've been a longstanding shareholder of Brown & Brown.
The reason I wanted you to see this is, as a general statement, all of those have an intermediate to long-term bend, and our teammates have, obviously, the longest holding idea. This is actually something that you all want to talk about, and we do too, and we're proud of. Last year was an interesting year. I like to talk about it in two parts, pre-election and post-election. Pre-election, we were up just under 20% for the year. We were very pleased with how the company was performing, and overall, we were executing well. If you asked me the day after the election what you thought the market was going to do, I would've told you I thought the market was going down. I thought the entire market was going down, and I thought Brown & Brown was going down. Boy, was I wrong.
That's a good thing. I'd rather be wrong on that side than the other side. We went up another 20-plus % after that, so our total return at the end of the year, if it was only a one-year snapshot, was just under 45%. Now, that has come back down slightly. We've continued to execute and had a good first quarter. What you've got is a lot of speculation, we believe, around changes in taxes, and we are a big U.S. taxpayer, as you know. If, in fact, you actually cut corporate taxes by 5% or 10% or 15%, that has a material impact on our earnings. That's what we believe is pricing part of that appreciation post-election. With that, I'm going to turn it over now, Andy, to our financial.
Good morning. Thank you, Powell. Morning, everyone. I'm going to run through how we did last year. As Powell mentioned, we had a really, really good year, both operationally as well as financially. We grew our top line by 3% to $1,777,000,000. Really good year. We think that is an outstanding barometer for our organization. There's a few others that are most important to us. Industry-leading margins, we did it again. We maintained our industry-leading margin, which we think differentiates us from everybody out there. Lastly, and most importantly, is cash. That's how much cash did we put in our bank based upon every dollar of revenue out there. We can grow the top line, or any organization can grow their top line, but if you can't put cash in the bank, it doesn't really matter. We continued to do it again in 2016.
We delivered $375 million of operating cash flow. We try to deploy that as much as we can. Also, we continue to increase the strength of our balance sheet. One of the things that we pride ourselves here at Brown & Brown is we like to have options. That means that we always want to have flexibility to be able to deploy our capital the way that we can. I'm going to get into that in just a little bit more detail, but we did a great job. We grew our diluted earnings per share by 7.1% last year. On an adjusted basis, 8.8%. Well, you would say, "Well, what's that adjusted all about?" Our adjusted is when we isolate for the change in our acquisition earn-out. Each year, we need to adjust those up and down based upon how our acquisitions are performing.
8.8% on an underlying basis. We're very proud of that. Outpaces what we did on the top line. I talked about revenue growth. Last year, we grew the top line by 6%. Our public peer group, 2%, and the S&P 500, 3%. We did it on the five-year average, we've done it on the 10-year average. We continue each year to grow our business really well on the top line through acquisitions as well as organically. How's that play out in our EBITDA margin? This is a good proxy for how much cash we generate. We look across all of this industry average. Last year was just a little over 20%. We were 32%. It was almost 60% better than the average. The five and 10-year average is about 18%. We run around 33%, so we outpace it somewhere around 70%-80%.
It is a significant amount of leverage that we have as an organization on the amount of revenue that we generate each and every day. What does that mean to us? We talked a little bit in the past about cash flow yield. The way to think about cash flow yield is how much cash do we generate as a percent of our equity? A real big complicated calculation behind it. That's a simple way to think about it. Powell mentioned earlier, we were about a $7 billion, or excuse me, $6 billion market cap. How much cash do we generate? Well, over the 10-year average, almost 8%. The S&P 500, 7%. Our other peer group that's out there, 5.8%.
We continue to be really, really proud of what we can do as an organization to make sure that we're delivering as much cash, because that ultimately drives our share price. Outstanding debt. Back in 2014, we acquired a couple businesses. One of them was The Wright Insurance Group, as well as Pacific Resources. As you can see, we took on a material amount of debt during that time period. The way we like to think about this is it's kind of like your home. Everybody does that expansion on your home, you build out that extra wing. Well, we expanded our organization during that time, so we had to take on a little bit more debt, kind of like that home equity loan. But we've taken that on, and over the last two years, we've continued to pay that down. 2015, we paid down about $40 million.
Last year, we paid down a little over $70 million of our debt. We have a really strong balance sheet, we've got a little over $1 billion of debt outstanding, but we're in a really good position. We'll continue to pay that down as it comes up over time. We never, as an organization, want to be overly leveraged. We never want to have too much debt as a company. If the economy ever happens to go a little bit sideways, we'd never want to have really high interest rates. That would prevent us from being able to invest in our business the way that we want to over the long term. We're really proud of what we've been able to do on the debt side. Our earnings per share growth.
Well, over the last five years, we've been able to grow it on a compounded basis, 10%. That matches up almost with what we've done on our revenue side. We've continued, last year, 7.1%, as I mentioned. Back in 2014, you'll see that we actually went backwards on our earnings per share by 4.7%. As a reminder, that's when we sold a business, we ended up taking about a $47 million loss inside of there. Otherwise, each year, we've continued to grow our earnings per share and something we're very focused on as an organization. Lastly, our dividend increases. Powell mentioned we're now in our 23rd year of dividend increases. Last year, we increased it a little over 10%. We paid out $0.50 per share, and we paid out over $70 million to all of our shareholders.
That's everyone in this room, our other 8,300 teammates who we have, plus all of our shareholders we have throughout the country as well as internationally. We're really proud of what we're able to do with our dividends to back our shareholders. With that, I'm going to pass it back over to Powell for closing comments. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Andy. Before I open up the questions, I just want to make a couple concluding remarks. The things that we have done not only last year, but in years prior, we believe has positioned us really well for additional growth and expansion, not only in margin, but through acquisition. We plan on adding a lot more teammates in the future. We're excited about that across the country. We're going to do further investment in technology, some of which I've articulated already. We are always looking for firms that fit culturally and make sense financially. That's a real big important both. Can't do one or the other, it's both. We want to continue to deepen our carrier relationships. As we continue to grow, that's fewer and deeper, specifically as they think about distributing with us. We do business with hundreds of insurance companies, and we'll continue to do so.
Really leveraging the power of we across our platform. That's where we take the collective knowledge of 8,300 teammates, and we use that to the benefit of our customers. Those are my prepared remarks, and I'd like to pause for a moment and ask if anybody has any questions about our company that I can answer for you about anything that's been said, or more importantly, something that hasn't been said. Yes, sir. Hurricane Matthew and other subsequent events that have either been floods that have affected the Southeastern U.S. It was a big deal in terms of one-time revenue in some of our facilities. Yes, it was. In our flood businesses, and some of those there are adjusting revenues, but we're going out and helping our clients work through a difficult loss.
When we think about a comparable of last year to this year
When you look in that programs business, the programs business grew 4.3%. They have a more difficult year-over-year comparison this year because there's, I think about, Andy, it's about $9 million of non-recurring revenue that we talked about because of the storm. If we don't have another storm or floods or things like that, yes, it was a big Yeah. Thank you for your questions. I will tell you that we are active in politics, but the vast majority of the money that we give is personal. We are very careful in terms of how we give and can we give corporate money in political That's a private business. That's a private business.
I think.
Yeah. Canoeing safari on the Zambezi River, were accosted by a huge hippo. What you don't recognize is the most virulent animal and the most violent animal in Africa are hippos, that's the animal that kills people. We had a lot of fun. My wife decided we were going to have a small investment company, she wanted to have it named Zambezi, that's the reason. Other questions? Thank you. All right. Hearing or seeing none, I want to just wrap up by saying a couple things. Number one, as a shareholder and someone that's interested in the success of our company, we believe that we're in the best place, not only financially but operationally, that we've ever been. That is something to say, and we're proud of saying it.
We, the senior leadership team, myself, and all the other people here and that are on the road today, feel an awesome responsibility to invest the money that we earn in the best way possible for our shareholders and our teammates. Finally, we don't get to the next level without good people, we got 8,300 great people on the team right now. One of the things that I'll leave you with is we, and Julie and I specifically, but the other senior leaders, are thinking about how we maintain a culture that is so strong, performance-oriented, meritocracy at not only 8,300 teammates, but when we get to 15,000 and 20,000 and 25,000 teammates. We want to operate and act as a smaller organization, but under this umbrella called Brown & Brown, where we bring all of our capabilities to the benefit of our customers.
If, in fact, you know somebody out there that you think could be part of our team, we are interested. Equally important, if you know of a business or a person that could benefit from the services of Brown & Brown, we would love to have the introduction to try to get their insurance. Thank you all very much. See you next year.