I'd like to, before we open the meeting, I'd like to introduce Van Massey right here. Let's give Van Massey a round of applause. His wife, Fran. Van Massey was the Executive Vice President of Brown & Brown and retired in 2000, Van? When did you retire? About 2000. He has been a loyal follower of Brown & Brown since the first time that I met him when he was the Executive Vice President of Crum & Forster Insurance Company living in Orlando, and we were able to get him to come and join the team. He was one of those people, along with Ken Hill, who has unfortunately passed away, who was the bedrock of the growth of this company. Van, it's a pleasure to have you here, and Fran, same to you. Best of luck to you.
Van used to run 18 miles a day, and he's only down to about four miles a day now. Whatever. We'll now open the meeting. I'd like to, first of all, introduce our directors. What I'd like for the directors to do is to stand as I call your name, then let's hold the applause, then we'll give them a round of applause when I introduce all the directors. First, I'm Hyatt Brown, I'm Chairman of the Board. Next is Sam Bell, who is of counsel, the law firm of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. Hugh Brown, who is the Founder and former CEO of BAMSI, an engineering and technical services firm. Powell Brown, who is the President and CEO of Brown & Brown. Bradley Currey, who is former Chairman and CEO of Rock-Tenn Company, a paper manufacturer.
Ted Hoepner, former Vice Chairman, SunTrust Bank Holding Company. Jim Hunt, former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Worldwide. Toni Jennings, Chairman, Jack Jennings & Sons. Unusual name for a company where you have the female being the leader. It's a commercial construction firm, family firm based in Orlando, and also Chairman of Jennings & Jennings. She was a two-time female President of the Senate, the first in the history of the State of Florida. She was also the Lieutenant Governor of Florida under Jeb Bush. Wait, hold your applause. Hold your applause. We have Tim Main, Senior Managing Director of Evercore Inc. Palmer Proctor, who is President, Director of Fidelity Bank of Atlanta.
Wendell Reilly, who's Chairman, Berman Capital Management & Research, Managing Partner, Grapevine Partners LLC, who is a private equity investment firm focused on media and communications and based in Atlanta. Last, but certainly not least, is Chilton Varner, Partner in the law firm of King & Spalding. We love you. Let's give him a hand. Our board, I have had the pleasure of serving on the boards of, I guess about five or six publicly owned companies. You always find very good people on board. I can tell you that this board is the best board that I've ever served with, they are personally committed. They all have a focus on the business. They're all investors in the business.
When we have board meetings, they are very rich and very, very informative, and we listen to them, and they have been a great help to our senior leadership and to me personally. I want to thank you all for all that you do. It's not easy. Thank you very much. Now, let me introduce the officers alphabetically. I'm Hyatt Brown. Powell Brown, that I've already introduced. Rich Freebairn, who's Executive Vice President, internal operations. You wanted to stand up? You wouldn't, and we'll hold our applause. Robert W. Lloyd, Bob Lloyd, Executive Vice President and General Counsel. Scott Penny, who is Executive Vice President and Chief Acquisitions Officer. Tony Strianese, Executive Vice President and Wholesale Brokerage Division President. Chris Walker, Executive Vice President and Programs Division President. He is unable to be here today because being on the road.
Andy Watts, who is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. These are our senior executives, so let's give them a round of applause. I would also like to continue alphabetically to introduce our other officers. Neal Abernathy, who is Senior Vice President. Sam R. Boone Jr., Senior Vice President. Steve Boyd, Senior Vice President. Barrett Brown, Senior Vice President and Regional President, Retail Division. Kathy Colangelo, Senior Vice President. Steve Denton, Senior Vice President and Regional President, Retail Division. Tony Grippa, Senior Vice President and Regional President, Retail Division. Tommy Huval, Senior Vice President and Regional President, Retail Division. Rich Knudson, Senior Vice President and Regional President, Retail Division. David Lotz, Vice President. David, where are you?
Right here.
Charlie Lydecker, who is Executive Vice President and Regional President of the Retail Division. Let's give them a hand also. I would also like to introduce the representatives of Deloitte & Touche. As you know, they're our auditors. First of all, John Gordon, who is the Audit Partner. John, would you like to stand, please? Phil Nix, who is also Audit Partner. Thank you for all the good work that you do for us. Now I would like to introduce three very important people. First of all, my wife, Cici. Where are you, Cici? Right there. Stand up, Cici. Stand up. Next is Sherri Lloyd, who is Bob Lloyd's wife. You can stand up, please. Carrie Strianese, Tony's wife. We're real pleased to have spouses. Without the spouses, life's pretty tough.
We have really committed spouses across our entire company, and we're now over approximately 8,000 strong. That's a lot of people. Every morning when we get up, we realize that the futures of those people depends upon the senior leadership, the board of directors, and all the people throughout the organization. Now let's get down to the business of the meeting. I'm going to ask Bob Lloyd to act as secretary of the meeting and present proof of the calling of the meeting.
Mr. Chairman, I have the mailing affidavit certifying that on the 24th day of March 2016, the proxy statement and all related materials were filed to owners of outstanding capital stock of the company as of the close of business on February 29, 2016, the record date. I have also certified the list of all common shareholders of Brown & Brown, Inc. as of the close of business on the record date, which has been certified as true and correct by American Stock Transfer Company in its capacity as transfer agent for the company.
Do we have a quorum?
Yes, we do. The number of shares of capital stock outstanding and entitled to vote on the record date was 138,610,502 shares. Of this amount, 132,449,164 shares, representing approximately 95.56% of the total number of shares outstanding, are represented at this meeting and a new record for participation in voted shares for the company. This constitutes a quorum.
Thank you. 95.56% of 138 million shares, that's a lot of people voting, so we're real pleased about that. I now declare the meeting is lawfully convened and 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. Without objection, we will dispense with those minutes. I will entertain a motion for the appointment of two individuals to act as inspectors of voting. Their duties will be to decide upon the qualification of voters, to accept the vote, and to count and ascertain the number of shares voting for and against each proposal.
I move that Anthony Robinson and Lisa Nixon be appointed to act as inspectors of vote.
Is there a second?
Second.
I'm glad. That wasn't choreographed. This was. Hate to have that to die for lack of a second. Without objection, show its adoption. Let's see. The inspectors have previously filed their oaths of office with the secretary. We'll now turn to the vote on the nominations for board of directors as set forth in the proxy. Most of you have already submitted proxies by mail or today if you came in. If you have not turned in your proxy, or if you wish to vote your shares in person now, please raise your hand. I'm glad no one raised their hand because I don't know exactly. We never had anybody that's to vote at the meeting, but I'm sure we can figure it out somewhere or other. Since there are no other votes, do we have the results of the voting, Bob?
Yes, I do. I am pleased to report that each of the 12 nominees of the board of directors has received votes sufficient in each case for election. Additionally, the approval of the ratification of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company's independent registered public accountants for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2016, has received 131,957,624 votes, sufficient for approval. The approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of the named executive officers has received 121,115,298 votes, sufficient for approval. The reapproval of the material terms of the performance goals under Brown & Brown Incorporated's 2010 Stock Incentive Plan pursuant to Internal Revenue Code Section 162M has received 120,998,088 votes, sufficient for approval.
The approval of an amendment of Brown & Brown Incorporated's 2010 Stock Incentive Plan to the SIP to increase the number of shares available for issuance under the plan has received 111,213,040 votes, sufficient for approval.
Thank you very much. The voter turnout was exceptional. This is the 23rd annual shareholders meeting since we have been a publicly owned company. That was 1993. We did have, prior to that time, as a privately owned company, shareholders meetings that started with about four shareholders in I think about 1966 or '67. Those were the times when my mother worked in the agency and several other things. We had about 12 or 13 folks. We've come a long way. The interesting thing is there is an old adage that the only constant is change. In fact, that is absolutely true.
We're changing as the world changes around us, and we're changing always that we make sure that what we do, to the best of our ability, is in the best interest of the shareholders and the best interest of the people that pay our salaries, which is our customers and clients. That's one of the reasons that Brown & Brown has been so successful over these years, and we think the future is very bright. I'm going to now adjourn the meeting, and I'm going to call upon Powell Brown, the CEO, to talk about what's happening now. Thanks, Powell.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody.
Good morning.
I thought as we begin, I would sort of set the tone for last year. Before we get into what's on the slides and everything, last year was a very interesting year for Brown & Brown. There were things that were positive that impacted us, and there were things that were negative that you have with business every year. I'm just going to kind of outline a couple. One of the things that you will hear throughout this presentation is property rates, coastal property rates specifically, have been going down dramatically over the last three years, down 15%, 20%, 25%. That impacts our business in three of our divisions, specifically in retail, in programs, and in wholesale. Let me give you an example. In programs, we have three programs that focus on coastal property.
We have one in Southeast Florida called FIU that writes high-rise condominium complexes up and down the ocean in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County. We have an earthquake program in California. We have wholesale programs that are under Tony Strianese's direction, which were impacted. That's very good for our customers, but it puts enormous pressure on how you grow year-over-year. Not a bad thing, it's an observation. Two. Employee benefits. You hear a lot about ACA and the changes in healthcare, but generally speaking, as a statement, employee benefits has become more of a compliance-driven segment of our business. The evolution of employee benefits in 2015 and actually getting to, in early 2016, some things that certain insurers had to comply with was a big step forward in ACA. There were also very few weather-related events.
We've talked about that before. Weather-related events affect businesses in terms of our claims adjusting businesses. We have a Wright Flood business, and we write FEMA flood policies. In that, when there are floods, we adjust claims. Fortunately, there haven't been a lot of floods. Also, we have a business called ICA in North Carolina, which adjusts catastrophic weather-related events. When there's not a lot of weather-related events, the revenues of those businesses are down slightly. We had a very active M&A environment. Although we didn't do as many acquisitions last year as maybe we have historically in the last several years, you'll see who did and I'll talk about why.
The economy is slowly continuing to improve and the P&C marketplace is not only competitive because there's so much capital in the traditional carrier space that you might know by name, but there's also this alternative capital that is participating where it wants, particularly in catastrophic property, which is continuing to drive the rates down. Having said that, let's start by saying we grew the business 5.4% last year, 2.6% organically. When I say organically, I mean year-over-year company, same office sales. When we acquire a business, within the first 12 months of it being acquired, it does not count in our organic growth. Second, all four of our divisions grew organically, so we're positive on that. We added roughly 2,000 teammates and ended the year just around 7,800.
Subsequently, we have added some additional people. We're up, as my father said, around 8,000 teammates today. We acquired 13 businesses with annualized revenues of $56 million. Some of you that were here last year or years prior might say, well, didn't we do over $100 million the year prior and the year prior and the year prior? The answer is we have, and that's a function of, one, finding businesses that fit culturally and made sense financially. In each of the prior three years, 2012, 2013, 2014, we did one large acquisition in each of those three years. I'm going to talk about what's impacting that in a moment. The competitive landscape is changing in terms of who is buying and the interest and what they're willing to pay for agencies.
We are very proud that we increased our dividend for the 22nd year in a row. It went up 11%, and Andy will refer to that a little bit later. When you boil it down, I want to talk briefly about our four divisions. Our biggest division is retail. Retail is roughly 52% of our company, and we grew retail last year 1.4%. Our goal is to grow our entire business, not just retail, in the low to mid-single digits. We would like to grow that and aspire to grow it more than 1.4%, and we've said that sometimes it's up a little higher and sometimes it's down a little bit. We're trying to improve over a long period of time. That business is impacted dramatically as all of our businesses are by the economy.
Our business is a proxy of the middle market economy, exposure units. When a company is growing and they have more trucks on the road or they sell more widgets or they build more buildings, that helps us grow the business as opposed to rates going up dramatically or down dramatically. If they're going down very dramatically, that's a negative, but in the middle of that, it's kind of a neutral. National Programs is 1.8%. I said that it was impacted by the property rates and specifically the three programs that I referred to, being FIU, Sigma, which is also a Florida property writer in our earthquake program. In Wholesale has had the best organic growth the last several years in a row.
Although the rates have been going down dramatically, Tony and the entire Wholesale division has done a spectacular job growing that business organically. He, when he joined in 2000, that has been a great focus of his and his team. I give kudos to Tony, as they add products and they expand capabilities in their distribution system. Services is where we have some of our claims units that I've referred to, and we also have Medicare Set-Aside businesses and Social Security disability advocacy businesses. The theme here is property rates are down, exposure units are improving slightly. This is kind of a quick overview of some of the businesses that we acquired. We acquired a number of retail businesses, $44 million of the $56 million were retail, where we come out to see you, the buyer of insurance. You are the contractor.
You own three nursing homes. You own the transportation company. You own apartment buildings. These are a group of businesses that are all around the country that fit culturally, most importantly, and made sense financially. Whether it was Bellingham Underwriters, which is a program in Bellingham, Washington, that underwrites transportation related risks, and it's a program, it does business through retail agents all over the country, to Strategic Benefits Advisors, which is a large employee benefits firm. They focus on groups over 2,500 lives and more in the Northeastern United States, and they have a specialty in both universities and healthcare, i.e., big hospital systems in and around the Boston area, to MBA Insurance, just as an example. They focus on RV rental insurance.
If any of you were to go and rent an RV for the long weekend coming up at the end of the month, and they said, "Would you like to buy insurance?" 75% of people that are buying insurance on their RV rental are buying it through that agency right there based in Scottsdale, Arizona. That's just a potpourri of those agencies, the first and most important thing we focus on is cultural fit. Somebody might say, "Well, who's buying them? If we're not buying them, and if we have bought a number of them in the past, what's occurring?" What this slide shows, and I'd like to just draw your attention to the top line, is that private equity has become a very active buyer in our space over the last several years.
Specifically, if you go back into 2008, there were only a few private equity firms that were participating. When the economy went through the very difficult time and came out the other side, other private equity firms were watching and saying, "That might be a business that we want to get into." As you can see, 54% of all the transactions announced last year, there were 451 transactions, the most in the history of the tracking of the number of transactions, 54% were done by private equity. If you look at the public brokers, we're at 11%, there are five of us, and banks are at 5%, and then the others would be private brokers, which are up here. Sorry, private brokers up here, and this is other financial institutions. What does that mean?
That means, in my mind, that there are people who sit in tall buildings, who look at screens, that manage money, who don't sell insurance, who are willing to pay a price for an organization that many times doesn't make sense to us. They are not focused on a culture or a commitment, in our opinion, to the people, they're focused on putting something together and then flipping it three to seven years down the road. That is not our strategy. Our strategy is a very long-term, strong culture driven, do the right thing by our customers each and every time, create an opportunity for our teammates to create wealth, which in turn drives the value of the stock over a long period of time, and grow it organically and enhance it by adding acquisitions that fit culturally and make sense financially.
Someone might ask, "What do you think the future holds relative to this slide?" I would tell you that in the near to intermediate term, that's defined as the next 12 to 18 to 24 months, I believe this will continue. It won't continue forever. When change happens, those that are built to last and have the financial means will be presented additional opportunities down the road. We are one of those firms. This is probably one of the most important slides. If you look at not only revenue growth on a compounded basis for one year, three years and 10 years, but most specifically, the EBITDA margins.
At the end of the day, what I talk about with our teammates and I think resonates both with our four kids, we have four kids and a dog that are ages nine to 15, is if you're in business and you sell insurance, and then you pay all of your teammates, and you take care of all of your customers, how much do you have left in the bottom to reinvest in the business? I think of it cash on cash. At the end of the day, you're going to see a slide, Andy will talk about that in a little bit, but you can see EBITDA margins and people talk about earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes, and amortization, and all fancy accounting, GAAP terminology and everything. What I want you to understand is we as a company think about the cash.
How do we invest it? How are we good stewards of the cash for our teammates and our shareholders? What do we do long-term to invest that to have the biggest impact for the company? This is a 15-month chart, and it talks about a return comparison relative to us versus the S&P 500 versus the publicly traded peers. I want to make a couple observations on this slide. If you go to the one-year mark, that's right here, you would see that the S&P 500 is above both Brown & Brown and the peer. Okay. You can look inside a small peer group and say, "Are there any outliers?" Some went up, some went down, whatever the case may be. I would tell you that every year that's the case in our peer group. It's a small peer group. There's only five.
That said, obviously, we've had some performance in this first part of the year that has outpaced others. We're pleased about that. That performance is driven by one, I would tell you, most importantly, us growing our business organically. If you remember I said earlier, it was 2.6% last year. There is a big focus on how we grow our business and specifically our retail business. The retail business was 1.4% last year. I would tell you that this year we've already released earnings and our organic growth in retail was just under 1%. We have room. Like I said, this is a quarter where it's down. We believe it will come back up. That's the most important thing over time.
There is a very significant focus on organic growth in the investment community, almost to a penalty, relative to those that are most efficient in terms of dropping dollars to the bottom line to reinvest in the business. We think about investing the dollars that we earn in three buckets. Number one, we invest them in our teammates. You've heard us say we have roughly 8,000 teammates. We want to hire and develop and train and retain more good teammates. To get us to our intermediate goal of $2 billion in revenue, we're going to have to hire or acquire another 2,000-2,500 teammates over time. That doesn't mean we're going out to hire 2,000 people tomorrow. Somebody in the investment community heard me say that once. They got all nervous. Andy got a lot of telephone calls, our CFO.
The answer is, we will make acquisitions when they make sense. We will hire the right people when we find the right people that can help us grow the company. Number two, we make acquisitions. As we said, we didn't do as many acquisitions last year. Number three, we return it to shareholders, which historically what we've done is we've returned it through dividends. As you heard me say, we've had dividend increases over the last 22 years. What we have done over the last several years, Andy will elaborate more, is we have bought some shares back because we thought the share price was undervalued. You'll see some of that as well. With that, I'd like to now turn it over to our CFO, Andy Watts, to talk about our financials
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Hope everybody can hear me okay. Let's see if this works here. It does. Everybody knows all the forward-looking information, I'll go ahead and move forward. As Powell mentioned, we had a good year financially in 2015. We finished the year just under $1.7 billion in revenue. Here we go. Grew 2.6% organically across all four of our divisions, which we're very proud of. One of the things that's really key to us as an organization is the revenue that we generate each year, is we want to make sure that it's profitable revenue. We continued in 2015 to have our industry-leading margins. We finished the year at almost 33%, which we're very proud of. We also delivered over $400 million of cash last year. We set a record for the organization of $412 million, and I'll talk more about what that means to us.
Powell also highlighted that we had purchased back some of our shares, historically, we've not purchased our shares back in the organization because we had very good uses for that, a lot of it through the acquisition. When we looked at the opportunity to buy Brown & Brown as something that we're very proud of and the value that we see in our organization, as we said, we believe in Brown & Brown, we said we can buy some of our shares, we can buy them at a very good price, deploy our capital, and provide returns back to our shareholders. With that, we shrank our outstanding shares by about 2% last year.
On an as-reported basis, we grew our earnings per share by almost 21%. I'll talk about some of the pieces inside of there, but on an adjusted basis, we grew it by 2.5% in 2015. We've had a really good run over the last 10 years. We've doubled the business almost in the last 10 years, we've also significantly diversified the business from what was predominantly retail back in 2016 to a very, very well-diversified, balanced organization that we have today, we continue to invest in each one of our divisions. Over the last three years, we've grown the top line on a compounded basis 11.5%. Last year, 5.4%. While we continue to grow the top line, one of the things that we want to make sure that we can do is we generate cash.
The easy way we think about this is every dollar of revenue that we generate as an organization, how much goes into our bank account? We average about $0.24-$0.25 of every dollar goes into our bank account. We outpaced the peer group last year by about 120%. Over the last 10 years, about 166%. As we continue to grow the organization, diversify and double the organization, we've proven that we've got a very, very resilient operating model that far outpaces everyone in the industry. What does this mean for cash flow yield? Well, without being really complicated about all the high-tech finances around all of this, is this is a representation of how much cash we generate each year as a percentage of our value. That's a really easy way to think about it. Our market value is a little over $4.5 billion.
We generate a little over $400 million of cash. Each year, we continue to generate a significant amount. Last 10 years, that's about 7.8% of our value. That compares with the S&P 500 at 7% and the peer group at 5.8%. We can really see in the last three years, we're averaging over 8%. That's a lot of money that we generate, then the key thing is, what do we do with it? Well, you can see our trajectory of our cash looks very similar to the top-line growth. As we've grown the revenues, we've continued the margins. We've also generated cash on a compounded basis over the last three years at over 15%, something we're very proud of. Last year, we finished at $412 million, we grew it at 7%. We actually grew our cash faster than what our top line was.
We're always trying to manage our working capital. Question is, what do we do with all this money? Well, in the last three years, we've deployed a lot of our capital. In 2013, we invested $437 million in the business. $855 million in 2014. In 2015, $393 million. A couple of interesting points inside of here. If you look at the purple bars on there, that represents shareholder returns, that's comprised of two items. That's the dividend that we pay out to our shareholders, that's the repurchasing of shares. That's really where there's been a change, over the last three years, as we've been able to utilize our money in order to buy back some of our shares. Last year, we purchased $175 million. Of the $400 million that we generated last year, we deployed every bit of it.
Our goal as an organization is to try to deploy our capital in the best interest of all of our shareholders to try to drive long-term shareholder value. From an earnings per share perspective, we delivered $1.70 last year. On an underlying basis with $1.63, we had a benefit of some one-time adjustments for stock incentive plan last year. In 2014, you'll see that it was $1.41 on an as-reported basis. We sold one of our reinsurance businesses in 2014. We had a loss on that business as well as a couple of other adjustments. Those combined together represented about $0.22. So really it's a $1.63 compared to $1.67, underlying about 2.5% growth. Powell mentioned earlier our dividends. We're now in our 22nd year of consecutive dividend increases. Each year, we continue to try to make sure that we give back to our shareholders.
In the calendar year 2015, the actual increase was almost 10%. That represented about $65 million in dividends that we paid back to all of our shareholders. Something that we're going to continue to strive to do each and every year as we generate more cash in our organization. With that, let me turn it back over to Powell for closing comments.
Thank you, Andy. I'm going to make a couple closing comments and then open it up to any questions that you might have. I'll tell you that our goal each and every year is to grow our business organically and supplement that by making acquisitions that make sense financially, but most importantly, fit culturally. We're trying to grow, as I said earlier, in the low to mid single digits organically, hire and train and develop new teammates to get to the next level and the next level and the next level. We want to continue to maintain our industry-leading margins, which enables us to self-finance a lot of the expansion and investment that we're trying to do in our business, manage our capital deployment to drive shareholder returns.
We're trying to innovate and continue to create additional new solutions for all of our customers, which doesn't mean we're trying to sell more insurance. We're trying to help people manage and mitigate their cost of risk. We are going through and will continue to upgrade our technology. Some of that is internal from a financial perspective. Some of it is from an agency management system. Some of it will enable us to use data to the benefit of our customers and our teammates going forward as we look and grow towards $2 billion and beyond. Finally, we talked about acquisitions and agencies that will come available that fit culturally, that make sense financially.
Those are our prepared remarks. I'd like to open it up to any questions that you might have about our company, specifically this morning on something I've talked about or maybe more importantly, something that I haven't talked about. If somebody would just like to start it. Hearing or seeing none, what I'd like to do is this. First and foremost, I'd like to thank everybody for coming this morning. We really appreciate it, and we appreciate the faith and confidence that you put in us at Brown & Brown, because you have, obviously, choices. We all have choices. As a shareholder, what we try to do is do what's in the best interest of the client and our teammates and our shareholders. Over a very long period of time, we think that works out really well for everybody.
Thank you very much for your support. We look forward to seeing you next year.