On. Why don't we just do it? Let's switch.
All right.
You want me to just introduce the people?
Yeah, we can do that.
All right. Sorry.
So roll.
All right.
What's going on here?
So I just wanna make sure that everybody knew kind of what we're gonna do this morning. We're gonna have presentations by our operating leaders, and at the end of each one of those that run divisions, there will be time for Q&A, and there'll be Q&A time at the end as well. Having said that, I also wanted to introduce a couple people that are in the room, that you may or may not have had a chance to meet. We have three board members here at this table here in the front. On the right is Mr. Jim Hunt. He's our chairman of the audit committee and has been on the journey with us for a long time and has provided great insights to us.
He came from a background working with a small mouse called Disney, so we're very pleased about that. Our second board member and independent lead independent director is Palmer Proctor at the far table over here. Palmer Proctor lives in Atlanta and is a banker, and he has been on the team for a long time as well and provides incredible insight and is part of a group of individuals that we... a number of people that are in Atlanta that are members, and we appreciate everything that he's done and will do for the organization. And our newest, one of our newest board members, is sitting over here to the right, and his name is Paul Krump.
Paul Krump is from North Dakota, and he went to work for a small company called Chubb 42 years ago and just recently retired, and has been a friend and a partner for a long time and just joined us in July as a board member, and we're so excited that he could be here. So thank you, Paul, for that. The only other thing that I'd like to say before we begin is there is somebody that I would like to acknowledge, that I would be remiss if I didn't. This person has been a partner and a value creator in this firm from the very beginning. So if we could just take a moment, and if we could have Cece Brown, our mother, stand up, please, and let's give her a round of applause.
So I like to say, and I know Hyatt likes to say, and Kellam, our brother, and Barrett behind me, that we probably wouldn't be here the way we are today without her. So thank you very much, Mom, for that, and it's been a great ride and lots more to come. Having said that, there's lots to talk about today, and we're excited that you're here. I wanna talk a little bit about some of the things that you already know, but I'd like to expand on a couple of things maybe you don't. And so we, as an organization, want to be the leading global provider of insurance solutions for our customers. So if you think about it, most organizations say it's all about the customer, and we agree it's all about the customer, but it really starts with teammates.
And if you don't have the right teammates, you can't keep the customers. And so fundamentally, we are a culture that has teammates at the center of the organization. Having said that, we, as you know, have experienced and enjoyed a long-term track record of successfully, organically, and acquiring businesses to grow our business, so organic and inorganic growth. We are very blessed to have a very experienced team, of which you're gonna meet some newer people that maybe you haven't seen before but that are integral parts to our success, some that are already up here and some that'll be up here later today. The other thing that I find very interesting is we are a diversified firm, and a lot of people in the investment community, I believe, think of Brown & Brown solely as a retail broker.
We are 60% or 58% of our business is retail brokerage, but we still have 42% that is not retail brokerage. Many other firms, actually, we don't do this, but many other firms actually combine their wholesale business and their program business. So you don't see the difference between the growth. Actually, I might go one step further, and as an investor, if you didn't see where the actual divisions performed and you saw the performance of our business over the last one, three, five years or more, then my question to you is: would you look at it differently? I don't want you to not look at us as a retail broker because that's the engine of our business, but what I want you to think about is, are you not valuing properly some of the other businesses?
And I would actually say there might be some things that you would learn today, particularly about our wholesale... our, not only our wholesale business, but our National Programs business, that would actually surprise you. Fundamentally, also, before I talk about this slide, as you know, we are conservative financially. What does that mean? That means that we invest in our business, and then we pay down the debt. So I think of it like a credit card. We borrowed a lot of money last year. We're aggressively paying it down. When the right opportunity comes again, we're going to actually do that. What is the right opportunity? And Scott Penny will talk about how we think about acquisitions later, but we talk about what's a cultural fit that makes sense financially. And we ask a lot of questions up front to determine-...
Are those people the right people to join with us? If they're not, they can still have a good business, and we can just say, "No," or they can say no to us. Usually, when we're involved in a transaction, and we meet with people, they're either attracted to us, and we're attracted to them, or we drift apart. That's usually the case because there's differences between strategic buyers, there's differences between private equity buyers. There are all these things, but that's an important distinction. You think about what we've done over 84 years at Brown & Brown, and I believe that, well, not only do I believe, but we are very proud of what we have built. But what we have done is expand the capabilities and services that we can provide to our customer base.
So there are people in the room that have owned Brown & Brown stock and out in web land for a long time. So in our mind, long holders of our stock are not three years. Long holders of stock are 10, 15, 20+ years, and if you think about it, in that period of time, the transition from a small and middle-sized broker to a firm that can provide capabilities to every size firm, both domestically and internationally, and that's where we are. We pick our spots, as you know. We are predominantly a commission-driven firm. What is good about commission-driven firms? Commission-driven firms, typically, as opposed to fee-driven firms, you can have a better margin profile, right? And so in this, and I said this about our divisions, but 58% retail, 24% national programs, 13% wholesale, and 5% services.
We're gonna talk some more in a moment about the ownership structure and why we're different. But ultimately, when you think about Brown & Brown, everybody says that they have a different culture, and they do. But do they live it? Do they breathe it? Does it just emanate out of the organization, and does it attract people to them? We believe that is the case at Brown & Brown. So when somebody says, "Why are you different?" What we usually say, so everybody understands, is big companies actually are heartless and soulless because they really don't care. And unfortunately, the reason many big companies, which we don't believe we're a big company, is get that way, is because the leadership of those firms loses their way.
Then, the board fires the leadership, and they bring in an outside leader, particularly someone from a consulting firm, who may not know the actual business, and then that individual starts to implement radical change. Radical change would be things like synergies, which is a nice way of saying they're gonna lay a lot of people off. And by doing that, they actually are viewed by the contingency of people that work there as heartless and soulless. That is not Brown & Brown. So why are we different? We have teammates. We don't have employees. What's the difference? There's a big difference at Brown & Brown. Personally, I don't get caught up in titles. We are teammates. That means we win together, and we lose together.
When everybody walked in today, and there was Tessa and Arley were standing there and maybe helping you with your name tag, at the reception desk, there's a lady that works there. You may have seen her with short black hair. Her name is Wanda Hucks. Wanda Hucks has worked at Brown & Brown for 40 years as the Director of First Impressions. She's pumped on life to come in every day and say hello to you. The Teammate of the Year award in this building is called the Wanda Hucks Award. All right? So that kinda goes to show you, we have teammates, we don't have employees. We are all about athletic teams. We think we are these very competitive, you know, individual teams under this umbrella called Brown & Brown.
So, as I like to say, I have a couple of kids that play competitive soccer or football if you're from over the pond, and the answer is: if we already have two good center backs and a center back shows up, we'll put the center back somewhere else. They can play wing, they can play midfield, we put them in attack. We don't care. We want the best athletes on the field. Second, we have leaders, we don't have managers. What's the definition of a manager? I'd like for you to envision a large ostrich egg, and I want you to envision a man sitting on that egg. That man is warming the egg. That's a manager. They're waiting for something to happen. Leaders are the point of the spear.
That's a woman or a man who is driving the business forward, who's prepared to take calculated risks and investments in the business, and when it doesn't work, they put their hand up and say, "It didn't work," and they make the right changes, and they go forward. Finally, in my opinion, the most important distinguishing characteristic is internal ownership. So not only are we unlike most of all the investments that you have invested in because we have 21% insider ownership-... but number two, over 63% of all our teammates in the US own at least a share of stock through an Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and that's a filed term of the SEC that I wanted to change to have it say, "teammates," in, stock purchase plan. So as you know, we have a way all teammates can participate, all 16,000.
It's the lower of two strike dates. It's actually August first of last year and July first of July thirty-first of this year. You take 15% off that number. If you were a teammate and you participated this year, which meaning this, this last year, it just came through, and you put $1 in, or maximum that you can put in is $21,250, and you had sold the stock on day one, which we're not encouraging, you can do whatever you want as a teammate, 41% return.
31.
Sorry, 31. I get excited about it. 31. Last year was better, right? Okay, so what does that mean? When I walk into an office, whether it's in London, and it can be the senior people on Mike's team, Mike Bruce, or his assistant, or in Seattle or whatever, the director of first impressions when I walk in, this is usually how it works: "Hey, pal, how you doing?" And I always say hello, and many times I've met the lady or the man. They'll say, "What's up with the stock?" I know that he or she owns shares of stock, so we have an ownership culture. So I would encourage each of you, because you've probably already done this, when you go back to your office, I'd like you to put a screen on a sort, and this is the sort I'd like you to look at.
I'd like you to look at businesses that have more than $3 billion of revenue. They have more than a $15 billion market cap, and they have more than a $15 billion market cap and more than 15% insider ownership. You're gonna get a number that's less than 26. So I don't know exactly what that's gonna turn out today, but it's gonna be less than 26. We're one of them. And what you're gonna find, I believe, is you're gonna find long-term thinking. So we don't manage the business quarter to quarter. Now, the analysts wanna know quarter to quarter, and some of you, not many of you, but some of you out there as investors do get excited about the quarterly changes.
Oh, the margin's down here, the margin's up, the growth rate here," that. We don't think of it that way. All right? We report every 13 weeks. We have a scorecard. We understand, but we think about it a year, three years, five years, 10 years, 15 years. So what I want each of you to think about, particularly if you're probably under the age of 55, for just a moment, is: can you follow Brown & Brown for the next 15 years? And the answer is, a lot of people don't think that way. And we do, because we're gonna be doing the same thing 15 years from now. We're just gonna be a lot bigger, and we're gonna be a lot better. And so we don't think quarter to quarter, and so that's our definition of... Remember, we don't define long-term hold as three years.
I know some of you do, and that's okay. It's a matter of perspective. That's your reality. It's our reality, too. But the answer is, that's not how long for us. You know, there are people in the room that have had the stock since 1993, that are not at Brown & Brown, meaning investors. So the final thing is this: we think about profitable growth, and it's interesting because, as you know in your industry, you're very sensitive sometimes to these models and the valuation and the margin and what's gonna happen next quarter and all this other stuff. And the important thing that I want you to understand is the number of growth opportunities for us to invest in the, in this business are enormous.
And there will be times where we buy businesses that might have a slightly lower margin profile than ours, and some that'll be a slightly higher margin profile than ours. But at the end of the day, we believe that they fit culturally, make sense financially, and they can improve, and they add value to our business. One and one does not make two. It makes three or four or five. We also believe there's gonna be enormous consolidation continuing in the business over the next three-seven years, and you say, "Why'd you pick that?" And I say, "I think that's an intermediate time horizon." That's all. So what differentiates us? And I could go through all of these things, but what I want you to know is this: we're a decentralized sales and service business.
That does not mean that behind the scenes, that we don't standardize certain deliverables, you know, IT, finance, internal audit, things like that. That's, that's different. But the individual offices dictate what they go after, the people they hire, the services they provide. We have a suite of services, and sometimes those services are not provided from an office, the individual office that is going after the business. So we're leveraging the capabilities across the business today better than we ever have. And so that goes back to a performance-based culture. Remember the team concept. If you don't like to be charted, if you don't like to see how you do against others, you probably wouldn't like to work at Brown & Brown because we're a meritocracy. Sometimes people don't know what that means. A meritocracy is simply defined as someone rises based on her or his merits.
So if you have actually all the people in the room here today, and everybody out in web land... and you chart everybody's performance last year against everybody else's performance, you're gonna have some top performers, and inevitably, you're gonna have some lower performers, and no one in this room believes they're average. And so that usually stimulates thought and excitement and hopefully, a performance culture. So we believe it's all about talented teammates. We are a meritocracy. We are accountable and disciplined. A lot of people have always said, "Well, why are your margins higher than everybody else's?" And the answer is: because we're disciplined. And people say, "Well, that's easy to say." And the answer is: no, it's actually true.
We actually do the little things, the things that are really boring, that don't sound like a big deal, we do them really well, maybe better than most, and it translates into high performance. The other thing that I find, you know, remarkable is this. As if I'm on your side, I think about cash flow. I think about what, how much of every dollar converts into cash. I'm not talking about EPS, and as we all know, GAAP earnings, as they continue to modify how GAAP is, it's further and further from the actual real cash earnings. So if that's the case, what do you have to invest at the end of the day? And so, interestingly enough, I know, I know you know this, but if you look at the standard...
The publicly traded peer group, our cash conversion rate is about double the peer group. So depending on the way you look at it, you could either say, "We're actually operating like an $8 billion company," or maybe the others are actually operating as a company that's half their size. Doesn't matter in perspective. All I know is if we're converting $0.24-0.25 and they're converting $0.12, I like our odds on that. So we really have four core philosophies, operating philosophies. We're in a people recruiting and enhancing business. I cannot stress that enough. We are always recruiting. We are always recruiting. We're in the selling and servicing insurance business, which is usually the third one. We're in the money-making business, number two. We're not a nonprofit. We write insurance for a lot of nonprofits. We actually support our nonprofits in the communities.
We're very community-minded. Over 90% of our offices are involved and support nonprofits in their local communities, but the answer is, we don't. If we can't make an appropriate margin, we're not gonna do it. And then finally, we're in the delivering of innovative solutions with the kind of a wrapper around that, that we don't wanna make a big mistake. And a big mistake would be a large failed acquisition or something like that. So Andy and his team and others, Gray, Rob Mathis, others, have put in controls in place that allow us to operate this dynamic organization in a way that we feel is, one, protected, but two, fosters an entrepreneurial spirit. Now, I'm just gonna touch on this, because I talked a little bit about decentralized sales and service model. You can look at this.
I'm not going through this, but what I want you to know is, in a local office, wherever it is, in upstate New York or in San Antonio, Texas, that local office is hiring the people. They're picking the kinds of business they go after. It could be school boards, it could be contractors, it could be housing authorities, public entities, whatever, and then they invest in that business. We actually invest behind winners. If you show you can grow your business organically and through acquisition, we put our chips behind those people. So we really operate, as you know, in three segments, you know, the SME space, the middle market, and large accounts. I said earlier, that it's primarily a commission-driven business. We have now capabilities to compete at all levels against any firm that you can name in the space. How did that happen?
Let's take the sizes of the acquisitions away, and I just wanna let everybody look at this for a moment and think about the capabilities and what this did for our organization starting in 2001. We acquired a business in upstate New York called Riedman. Okay, that got us into 13 other states other than Brown & Brown. Middle market, retail business, great business, based in Rochester, New York. Well, we really got into the binding authority business in our wholesale business then. We acquired Arrowhead, and Arrowhead was $110 million in revenue. We had $180 million of revenue in programs. They did programs better than we did, okay? It's interesting that you see-
That was a big day.
That was a big day.
Big day.
And it's interesting, you notice there's two people here—that are from Arrowhead running big businesses, you know, 12, 11 years later. Acquired Beecher Carlson. We got into the big account space in property and casualty. Wright, we got into the flood business and some additional public entity business. We acquired Hays, upper middle market, P&C, and unbelievable benefits capabilities. We acquired a couple businesses that aren't on here, which were like, at the time, things called SBA and Pacific Resources, where they're going after 2,500 life groups and up in the medical space and the non-medical space. We acquired Special Risk. We got into Canada in 2020. We acquired O'Leary in 2021, in, in Ireland. We acquired GRP, Orchid, and BDB in 2022. The point is, there are capabilities that we have today that you might not actually recognize we have.
You probably, all of you probably know that, but there's somebody out there that doesn't. And so we've been kind of quietly, kind of plodding along, increasing the capabilities of Brown & Brown, and we invest that money, that $0.24 for each $1, in really three ways. We do acquisitions, we do internal investments, and we return it to shareholders. And so we're really proud that we've increased our dividends for 29 years, but we don't have a very high dividend yield because we think we can invest the money more in a better way and drive more value than actually paying it out in dividends. We'll buy stock back sometimes if the stock's not appropriately valued. Internal investments, and that's basically saying we're investing, we're gonna be proactive and opportunistic and get good people who fit culturally and/or acquisitions.
So you already know about the performance of the company, and something that we're proud of, but I look forward now for you to think and hear more about the capabilities of each of our individual divisions. So now I'd like to turn it over to Barrett Brown, who runs our retail business.
Thank you very much. Good morning, and welcome to Daytona Beach on a sunny day. It's nice to see some familiar faces in the room. We'll start with retail. We've been on a journey, and you've heard of elements from Powell. I wanna talk a little bit about my personal journey and how it relates, 'cause the simple thing about leadership is we all know what we know based off what we've seen and done up to today. Our leadership team is built with operators, and everyone has sat in multiple seats and grown through those seats and contributed to the change that equals what we are today. I started my insurance journey 28 years ago as a commercial property and casualty underwriter with the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.
Had the opportunity to work in New York and Texas and in California, and then transitioned to the agency broker side with Brown & Brown. Most people thought I started here in Daytona. I did not. I started in Phoenix, Arizona, at a time when our entire organization had less than $200 million in revenue, all segments, and we had about 50 teammates in retail in the entire West Coast. So I've had the opportunity to sit in seats, see a lot of change, see the opportunities where we need to grow to be able to deliver for our customers, and hopefully contribute to that change and help us get where we are today. And that's everyone rowing in the same direction. Change is good. Change can be very exciting.
It's all about how you insert change and how you stack Legos and how you communicate with your team and how you enable. We are all about localized leadership in retail in our organization. So some of the things you're gonna hear me say are gonna sound a little redundant from Powell because we bleed it. Something about our retail organization as we talk to potential new teammates, because recruiting is the lifeblood, continued enhancement is all about our culture. It's either magnetic attraction or it doesn't seem like the right fit, and that's okay. Nothing wrong with that. Something that's really important around change is that cadence at which we insert it, how we communicate it, and understand what we've done to get here.
We touch every single customer profile and industry segment and line of coverage that you can think of in the insurance business, and we do it at a very high level now. Now, it's not by mistake. If you look at retail 15-20 years ago, we were a fairly well-known, small middle market insurance agent or broker, and in many segments in the communities that we serve, we would fight above our weight. We do that at a really high level today. Maybe 15-20 years ago, some of our advancements had a little luck attached to them because we invested in a teammate or made an acquisition that had a lot of talent or some capabilities that we could enhance. But as we continued to see those, it became very strategic.
Our build, as you heard from Powell, around our vision, where we want to be and how we want to support our customers, we've executed on that inside of retail. It has been deliberate. It will continue to be deliberate, and that gets us here. We recognize today that growth has no finish line. What we have to be able to, we must be able to do, to sit in a room and relate to a customer and a prospect and meet them exactly where they are, and we have to do it with immediacy. We have to make it come alive. We have to show the difference. That's data, that's communication, that's modeling, that's examples. We can make this sound as fancy as you want.
We have to show decision makers that, quite honestly, we are more efficient, more effective, can help them think, and many times push them to think, 'cause they ask for it, believe it or not. And it starts with showing them how they've outgrown an existing relationship, 'cause the same old, same old that got them where they are. If they're planning on growing as an organization, and most have that plan, then they've got to change, too, and we can help them be that agent of change. And then, through education and business partnership, we're not just an insurance agent or insurance broker, we are business partners. That's the way we think about it. That's the way we train. That's the way we enhance.... We have to show that they can't outgrow us.
Not the defensive mindset, really. If you get offensive, we have to show them that we can be that business partner to support them in their growth. We have to be able to show them, if you're predominantly middle market, or if you're an individual that's buying coverage for a Vespa, a scooter, or if you're the retail donut shop down the street, or if you're a manufacturing company that operates in two states, and you're looking to break into another two states, or if you're a very complex multinational, we touch all those at a really high level every day. And it's development of having the team, the capabilities, the resources, and the ability to deploy them inside our teams, across our platform, across retail, and the ability to enable that team to articulate that with impact to deliver the outcomes for the customer, period.
We can't do that, we get replaced. Simple as that. So we empower localized teams in order to execute around that, and we love the accountability. So let's talk a little bit about our growth pattern. So as we look at the numbers, we continue to be very pleased with our double-digit revenue growth, our strong organic growth, as well as our profitable flow-through. We get excited about profitable growth. Why? Because it gives us more dollars and more flexibility to do the following: invest in the business. Investing in our organization is what it's all about. We want to be able to earn more, to put more gas in the truck. That's the plan, period. End of story. And we have a long history of doing that.
If you look at the business mix, I'd ask you to think back with me for a second and all of us to 2012. Retail was $644 million. A lot of water under the bridge. Those percentages of our mix between commercial employee benefits and personal lines and specialty have wobbled, right? Depending on the year. That's exciting as we've grown. We've crossed the $2 billion mark, but the story is inside the numbers. The story is really around not the $2 billion, it's around what we've executed on to keep and achieve those percentages around commercial benefits, personal line, specialty. It's that tremendous focus and discipline that Powell alluded to around creating the teams that can execute and deliver across all customer segments inside each of them. It's not just one.
We've made fantastic advancements in certain portions of our employee benefits, but I would say the same about personal lines, and I could say the exact same thing about commercial. And once again, it's the D word, deliberate. Where do we need, and where do we want to grow and enable ourselves to be more effective to deliver for our customers? That's the discipline Powell has been talking about. So as we think about differentiators, when we sit in a room, once again, go back to the entire leadership team of retail. Everyone is an operator. Everyone still sits in the room. Everyone sits with customers. It's still my favorite thing to do. It is fun, and it is valuable. And as a leader, if I personally don't have the ability to get in the trench with a teammate and deliver, then what am I?
I sit on the edge. We don't do that. So we have to do it. It's a must. But that's not force-fed. Everyone gets excited about that. That's our culture. We have teammates. It's a different day when you sit in the room with a prospect, and all of a sudden, the president of the organization, who's been sitting in the back, maybe like this, leans in a little bit and asks who he or she thinks might be the least senior person in the room. Why is Brown & Brown different? And one of the first two things that that individual might say is, "Well, one of the things different is that I own it.
I'm an owner, and I have a say in this, too." You would be amazed at the impact that that has and the feedback and the doors that opens from a discussion standpoint in a room. Well, we still got to be good at what we do. That's table stakes. We get feedback frequently. Once again, our customers, it's like your friends. Over time, you kinda are similar. There's, there's some shared ideas here, right? We become very attractive. And feedback is not only are you helping us think differently, you're just different. Okay, we like that. Not everybody likes that. That's okay. Second would be in that same room, come join us, sit on the team for a second. We have that ownership mentality. We have the ownership mentality, and it oozes out of us.
When we have a team in the room and we enable capabilities where teammates that don't sit in the same four walls in Houston, Texas, and they're using resources from a different part of Brown & Brown, meaning location-wise... The number one way you lose if you try to use a teammate, a team from an interesting footprint, is when you show up in the room, you can't articulate clean, in a clean way, and it becomes very obvious that those folks don't work together very often. You will be found out. That's not how we're built. And I will tell you, we've taken some bumps and bruises over the last 15, 20 years, figuring that out. But I'm very pleased to tell you that we've gotten significantly better at it because we're users of the shovels together....
Just like anything in life, the more practice you have, the more execution, the better you get. We've gotten really good at it, and we're gonna continue to get better. Last thing, from a broad standpoint is, and Kyle mentioned this, we think long term for and with our customers. I cannot stress how important that is. Most of our peers talk to them about a twelve-month run only. They may give them long-term modeling on something, and it's, but their focus is the next twelve and how to jam it in a budget. Now, there's value to that.
I'm not suggesting that's wrong, but as a business owner, as a business leader, if we're not giving them that one, three, five, 10 years, meeting them where they are to understand the outcomes that they can achieve, then we're missing a key part of our opportunity to partner with them. We drive a culture of accountability, innovation. This entrepreneurial thinking is just part of the way we are. We endeavor to become a true business partner, not only focused around insurance. The primary deliverables are around insurance. Determine, helping a customer determine and develop their risk profile. How do you want to buy it? So I challenge everybody in this room. You buy your personal lines a certain way, and every once in a while, you think about your deductible on whatever line of coverage you want to think about. Okay, you think about your personal balance sheet.
What type of loss are you willing to take? What's your loss history? And I'm willing to bet 98% of you have not had a loss. Okay, so why do you buy a really low deductible? Is that really the right utilization of your cash flow? If you'd like to have a conversation about that and have a little help, and maybe go to the next level, we know some people. It's just like that. So broad range of capabilities. We have a great toolbox, and we're executing on it on a daily basis. We have to be able to leverage those collective capabilities, deploy them wherever we are. Retail is one business. It's one entity, developing localized leadership and supporting each other across. We're gonna talk a little bit more about international, and it's an exciting part of our business.
But let's be really clear: we have always had international capabilities. I shouldn't say always. For a very long time, we've been excelling there. Just not something that we waved the banner on. Specialized products, capabilities, the ability to read. I'll give you an example. We were working on a business, it happens to be a tree farm, recently. This is a pretty sizable account. They had a long-term relationship. They didn't really wanna work with us, some members of the team. We did a deep dive on their coverage, and we found an interesting thing about that tree farm. They had an exclusion, and in that exclusion, it had to do with the timing and the way that they planted trees and maintained them, and the way, ultimately, that they delivered them. And there's a difference between a residential environment and a commercial environment.
That's code for one of those was excluded. One of those that was excluded happened to be about 48% of their revenue. So 48% of their revenue wasn't covered for very typical losses. That's a problem. These are the things that we execute on. So lasering out coverage, manuscripting coverage on a daily basis, all the way to creating specialized product, even proprietary product around an industry segment, could be a small business like cyber, or could be very, very complex, could be around things like product recall and all points in between. All this has to be in a tailored, personal delivery model. It has to match with the team. Every single team that we work with, meaning the customer or the prospect, you cannot deliver it the same way. This isn't a lever pull. Is that how you want it?
Probably not. We have to be good listeners, and we have to be able to mold into a team that can work together. That's that business partner mentality. So let's talk a little bit about capabilities. Breadth and depth, depth of capabilities does what? It gives us stability and ability to grow more. Let's unpack that. If you think about teammates, and you think about stability and retention of teammates and the ability to attract teammates, how do you do that? Well, one element is just recruit all the time, and we do that. However, what's the middle of the Twinkie, right? What's the creamy filling? That's creating an environment where teammates can excel. They have mentors. They can see a path to grow in the organization. They also see how we deliver as a team and enable to deliver. That can be infectious.
So having capabilities and deploying them creates what? Higher retention of customers. Higher retention of customers, believe it or not, over time, leads to a more successful team environment. That leads to higher retention of teammates. It's also really attractive when you're recruiting. Here's how we're winning. Here's how you fit on our team. Here's how we enable that team, and here's why that's important. That's pretty exciting. Customer retention. If we keep customers longer, and we can onboard new customers, that also allows us to have the opportunity, based off execution, to continue to grow. Specialization... Once again, 15-20 years ago, I'm not suggesting we didn't specialize. We just specialized in certain customer segments more, in a more focused way. Now we've applied that focus across... basically every customer segment, and we're sharing it.
So I'm gonna say some things that aren't secret sauce, but it's some things that we execute on that help us because it is a differentiator. Bringing large account philosophy and thought process down into upper middle market and to middle market, however you want to define that, in an efficient, accessible way, is very impactful. So let's take an example, and we're gonna use employee benefits for a second. The leader—the HR leader or total rewards leader of a 200-life group company. Normally, some folks would say, "Well, it needs to look like this." That's a trap. You have to understand where that person came from, and typically, that person was the number 3 person at an 18,000-life group, and then they got the opportunity to be the number 1 person at a 200-life group.
So what do you have? You have a different risk tolerance, a different idea, and a different expectation that they want to apply, either immediately or in time. At baseline, they want to see that you have the ability to think and go back to what they're used to. It may not, it may not apply today. We have to execute on that. We learned that the hard way 15-20 years ago, quite honestly, but we've migrated, and that changed that dialogue and then changed the execution. That's an exciting opportunity. We want to grow in the room and show where we can meet today, and then how you're not gonna continue—you cannot outgrow us, and how we can continue to support you. Many, many customers, as they buy lines of coverage...
So if you think of this snapshot on this page around industry segments, whether it's in construction or public entity or anything you want to name, they'll buy one line of coverage like a small account, two lines of coverage like a large account, and the balance like a middle market account. It's varied. It does not apply to every line of coverage. You must be nimble, and you must be able to execute on that. We enable localized leadership to deliver to the communities that they serve. So valuable and important about our culture. The way insurance is distributed, serviced, and handled in Portland, Oregon, is just a little bit different than Miami, Florida, or Paducah, Kentucky, or Houston, Texas. We love that difference. We relish it, and we allow that to be at the forefront.
Driving everything the same from a different location or a common location doesn't always land in environment. We want to enable that team to work through this. So we have a very diversified portfolio of capabilities and relationships. So from a market cycle, we deliver deep, diversified relationships. Darn near every line of coverage you can think of across 1,000 carrier partners. That's good. Super valuable. Segmentation, we've talked about. This is an overlay of capabilities over customer segments, industry segments, and lines of business, and the ability to be nimble and agile, to have that overlay and apply and meet that customer where they are. International, we'll go a little deeper in, but how do we focus on that today? It's not terribly different than how we focused on it last year or the year before.
Where we have teammates within retail to deliver in those jurisdictions, we utilize them. Where we need help globally, we utilize our partner in the World Broker Network in order to deliver it at, in whatever those locations are. That will continue. So we'll finish off with our our retail operating vision. We've talked a bit about collaboration and execution. This is what we call the scaling of the power of we. Building the better toolbox, organizing in a way where our teammates can see where the capabilities are and how we can use them in a fair way to deliver what? The best outcomes we can deliver for our customers each and every year. That is the plan, in addition to enabling the localized leadership. So some of our competitors, their enablement model, it's different. I'm not saying it's wrong, it's just not our model.
Their enablement model is, well, in that office, you don't have all the capabilities, so we're gonna lift it out and take it, and then we'll execute it with a different team. What we have found and what we see is that, I'm not suggesting that can't work, but that team that they take it out and give it to, they don't have the local relationship or the regional relationship, and if they built that relationship, they want them involved at some level, and they sever that. That's a conflict line. What we want to do is enable a localized team, capitalize on relationships, continue to build them, and connect those. So we have young kids at home. We still have Legos. There's the analogy and the vision. It's like clicking Legos together.
We want continued strong organic growth in varied market cycles by product line, industry segment, EB commercial and personal lines, so we can continue to fuel the engine. You've heard about our continued strategies and specialization around products and how we're delivering capabilities to our team, and we will continue to recruit and advance our teammates. It's the lifeblood of our company. You've heard us talk about Brown & Brown University, which has been going strong for 22+ years. It is a forever education environment that we're continuing to invest in and build in. So historically, it's been around developing identified talent that's newer to the insurance business....
That could be a student coming from graduating with a risk management degree from a University, or it could be someone that's coming from consultative sales in a different industry segment that we've identified that wants to transition here, and we're really darn good at it. Property and casualty, employee benefits, and personal lines. But we've been on an extension of that journey to make it a forever education piece. If you're very seasoned with an organization, what can we educate and give, and what can you give back? How can we be more collaborative to float all boats? And we're excited about what that's gonna look like in the future. Our acquisition model hasn't changed.
How do we fit culturally, make sense financially, and how do we make investments in technology, data, and analytics, so we can not only have a better user experience for our customers, but for our teammates? Operators, strategic vision, understanding where we've been, trying not to make the same mistakes twice, and listening in the environment to teammates and to prospects and customers about what they want, and put that in the stew, and recognized, and creating a plan on where we're moving forward. So with that, I'd open it to Q&A.
Maybe if I can cover a couple of things, just administratively. So we're gonna have microphones around. They'll run over... If you can just mention your name and the firm you're with, because we've got a bunch of folks that are online with everything, and we'll move through. We've got questions at the end of each of these, but we've also saved time at the end. We've got a question over here for Greg to get started.
Okay.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Greg Peters. I'm with Raymond James. Good to see you all. Thank you for hosting this event. I guess I have one question in two parts. You emphasized the long-term nature of your strategy and your vision. There are some businesses that you're not in today that are occupied by some of your competitors. Can you talk about what your strategic vision is? And I'm thinking, like, reinsurance, for example. And then the second piece of the puzzle is you talked about culture, you talked about the margins and cash flow. Many of your peers have a tendency to do offshore centers of excellence.
Mm-hmm.
Put workers offshore to harmonize and extract efficiencies and improve their margins. So can you talk about your attitudes toward that?
Sure. First one, around areas where we aren't. We don't wave the flag around some of these things, but reinsurance, we actually place a lot of reinsurance. Do we have a reinsurance division at the moment in retail? We do not. But we place a lot of it because we need to be able to carve... That's more of a large accounts thing. So we certainly have that skill set and touch that daily, weekly. We like to focus on what's core to our business, and we like to focus on not only what is core, but what we can control to deliver the outcome. Really, really important. That leads to that profitable growth model, so we can continue to reinvest. We're always looking at spots where we can get better or haven't been over a 15-20-year window so that we...
And look at it as, is this a long-term plan? So we are looking at all of those things, and then all of a sudden, do you—how do you, how do you get into something brand new? You just turn on the light switch? There's a ramp, and it may happen around an acquisition, assuming it fits into the strategy, where we can continue to enable that. So we are looking, and we'll continue to look and make those investments, whether it's around an individual or business, where we see fit around the strategy. Paul?
Yeah, Greg, if I could just elaborate on that, too. We don't like to use the term never or always, but in certain businesses, the one that you referenced, as an example, we think you got to be in it to win it, meaning you have to have scale. And so, you don't, like, wade cautiously into the, you know, shallow end of the pool. You got to get in big, with the services and capabilities as you think about it, the way you think about it, in my opinion, and the rest of us do. So we like to say that, we are looking to, one, enhance the existing capabilities that we have, and we're constantly and consistently evaluating new opportunities where we can add value. That's the important distinction.
Is that business a business that we think has a long time horizon and can add value over a long period of time? I'm not. Don't insinuate that I'm not saying that business doesn't. That's not what I'm trying to say, but I'm saying that's how we sort of think about those businesses. So I just wanted to clarify that.
Yeah, could I, Greg, just to add to this. Remember, we used to own a reinsurance business. We sold it back in 2014, and we did it for the strategic reason that without the scale inside of that business, and we were looking at the horizons and the cycles in that business, we didn't think that was the best deployment of our capital at that stage to make a massive investment in reinsurance versus we could take it other places across the organization.
Second part of the second question around offshore utilization, we currently do that. So we have a combination of looking at different ways of delivering service, team partnership, both onshore and offshore. Those offshore partners, as it relates to retail, all happen to be third-party partners in different countries, but we have onshore and offshore. So just like the first question, it's really around long term. There's an interesting thing that's happening in a lot of those countries that many of our peers use. The price of poker's gone up considerably in the last five years and continues to rise. That's not a reason not to do it, but the value of the business plan has inverted considerably, and that trend is probably not going to slow down.
So we want to be nimble enough to make those decisions that we think have that long-term lack of variable. Thank you.
I do have a question here.
Morning, Mark Hughes with Truist Securities. Barrett, you showed, your growth from M&A has been roughly 10 points over the periods you had on your chart. Is that still doable in the retail segment? I know it's doable, but is there anything structurally that's changed that makes it harder to do the tuck-ins, or you're just at such a scale, it may be a little more difficult to maintain that 10 points? Is it going to be chunkier?
Understand. So a couple quick things. Our growth has two segments. Organic growth that we can control, right? Same-store sales, our team going out and deploying, keeping more customers, and then bringing on new ones. So it's a combination of the two, and acquisitions, right? So the acquisition market is good. We know the price of poker is high. You know, we have a long-term discipline. We're not walking away from that discipline. We like tuck-ins, but it all starts with a cultural match and what makes sense financially. So where we find those, we are pretty darn good at executing. Go back to the culture. It's either a fairly magnetic transaction, and it brings down a barrier very quickly, and conversations take off, and it becomes sort of like we're finishing each other's sentences pretty quickly, or it doesn't. And that's okay, too.
So we're looking. There's that birds of a feather, you know, idea. We wanna capitalize on that and never turn down your gut. There are great opportunities in this marketplace. When those happen, organic growth is controllable, more controllable, because there's a, there's an impending due date, meaning 12 months, there's a renewal cycle. It's gonna happen then. They're gonna choose somebody, whether it's us or not, that's up to us to make that difference. Acquisition model is around an emotional turning a corner. Do I wanna move from. Well, someone wants to move from being an owner or an ownership group to joining a bigger team. They get to decide when that time frame is.
Mark, I would also say, as you get to be a bigger base, it becomes a little lumpier, as you know. And so what we don't think about is we don't think we must acquire said amount, let's just say, in retail, to keep that up or whatever the case may be. We don't think about it that way. Actually, in a long-term thinking process, we actually say some years, it might be less than others, right? So this year, so far, it's been less than last year in retail, and that's okay because last year in retail was a big year, as an example. And so I look at it: Are there opportunities for us to grow inorganically? The answer is yes. Those exist right here in America, in Canada, in Ireland, in England, and maybe other places.
But specifically in those areas that we're in, we feel really good about those. And when someone sells and why is up to them. But as the base gets bigger, I think the bigger number, I mean, in terms of revenue, becomes a little lumpier. And that's okay. We're, like I said, playing the long game.
So we'll have, as Andy mentioned, plenty of time for more Q&A at the end. I wanna keep this rolling, so I'd like to introduce Chris Walker with National Programs.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Can I have that book? I thought I'd be able to read this, but my eyes aren't as strong as they used to be, Julie. Good morning. I'm Chris Walker, and I'm responsible for National Programs. I spent the first... I started the business in 1980, and I spent the first 23 years of my career in insurance and reinsurance, so that was a very opportune question. Good lead in. Thank you for that. And I'm from-- you know, I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. We bought Hayes, which is Minneapolis-based, and now we have Paul Krump from North Dakota. So there's a trend here.
I was gonna say this is a Midwestern takeover, but takeover at an investor day isn't the best word, so we'll just call it a Midwestern influence seeping within the organization. So after 23 years in reinsurance, and I loved reinsurance because what I loved about reinsurance was you, you're dealing with decision-makers, and it's such an important part of their financial planning, that it's you really get the attention of people. I thought, It can't be a better business. Well, 20 years ago, I got in programs, and so I've been in programs 20 years now, and I love programs. Programs is a very similar feel to it, so it's been a great career progression for me, and I absolutely love it. And I've been able to move around the country and work in different cities and things like that.
And then there was that monumental day in January of 2012, where we were out in-- Steve and I are in San Diego now after being around the country a bit, and Brown & Brown bought us. We were owned by private equity before that, and we had a pretty good experience with the private equity guys. They were-- they gave us really good discipline around the financials, but obviously, we know we're not gonna be there forever, and so we went through a process, and we landed at Brown & Brown. It could, it couldn't have been a better landing for us. It's been a fantastic. Over 10 years now, we've been with Brown & Brown. It's been a fantastic 10 years for us. We've had great growth, we've had excitement, we've had great support.
And I will say, you know, anybody that is thinking about doing a transaction with Brown & Brown, they really, what they say, they delivered on. Now we're 2,500 miles away in San Diego, which being 2,500 miles and three time zones away from home office, isn't the worst thing in the world, right? It's a pretty good thing. But no, but they've been great to us. We love it, and they've really delivered on that. As we go through the national programs segment, there's a few key takeaways that I'd like to have in your mind about what we're doing and how we're getting to where we are. One is, the first keywords are, you know, we're really specialty niche-oriented.
You know, we're not slugging it out with Travelers or Hartford or Chubb, you know, in middle market, in Main Street, writing BOPS. We're very specialty niche-focused. That's, that's where we make our, our mark, that's where we can make a difference, so that's where we, we focus. Secondly, we're an underwriting organization. You know, we hire underwriters. We want people from Chubb, we want people trained at Travelers or Hartford or in the old days, Scottsdale, which is now Nationwide. We want those kind of people that are trained as underwriters, that really get deep in their business. You know, we don't want generalists. We want very specialty-focused underwriters. We have to have the underwriting talent because remember, our model is all about, you know, an insurance company gives us their balance sheet, basically.
They hand us the keys and say, you know, "Write this specially for us, and you better produce, or we're not gonna stick around." So we got to be really diligent about that. So we have to have underwriters. Third point is, we've got a very large, diversified book. We all know we're gonna have ebbs and flows in the insurance industry. There's gonna be high marks, there's gonna be low marks. But because of our size, and we'll get into that in a bit, but because of our size, we're able to, for the most part, absorb these changes in the market dynamics. So, you know, we, we can ride things out.
A lot of people are trying to jump into the program space right now, but if you're a one-trick pony and you're in the market, maybe it's really great right now, but we know that could change. You know, what are you gonna do? You're gonna either have to try to all of a sudden expand, or you have to lay off all your people and wait it out some more. We don't have that issue. We've got so many businesses, and we're so diverse and so large, we can absorb that. The fourth thing, we have a lot of data. We just have. We've been doing this for a long time. We keep our own data, we do our own modeling, we have actuaries, we have a modeling department, things like that. We have the data, and that is critical in this market.
You gotta have the data to get those insurance companies to support you, the reinsurance community support you, you gotta have it, and we have the data, and we're very protective of our data. We don't give that out. That's our data, so we, we control that. Fifth thing, we have really strong, deep partnerships with the distribution, certainly, but on the carrier side. So we have really strong relationships with those insurance companies that are trusting us with their capital. And then finally, we just - we've had good results. So, that whole flight to quality that everybody talks about, we've been the beneficiary of that flight to quality, so we're really, we're really pleased with that. Okay, so, those are just some quick introductory comments. So let's talk about this.
We know we provide, as I mentioned, insurance carriers with the complete infrastructure and a distribution network to launch and manage a broad array of those specialty niche programs. We underwrite in place more than $5.5 billion in premium. We believe we're the largest program writer. Paul alluded to it earlier. You know, Steve Boyd and I worked together at Arrowhead for a long time. We're good friends, good colleagues, you know, really trust each other. You know, a lot of the other carriers, a lot of players, the RTs of the world, and some of those people will combine their wholesale with their program. You know, we have a sharp division between church and state in that sense.
You know, we're a program writer, and we'll get into how we define that as we get a little closer. And we're, you know, we've categorized our business in terms of personal lines, commercial lines, commercial specialty, professional liability, and public entities. So that's kinda how we're split up. Proud of our results. You know, look at key metrics. We've had really strong revenue growth. We're proud of our organic part, a big part of that. Our margins are... I thought reinsurance broker, I was a reinsurance broker, I thought we had great margins. We have great margins here. We're really, really, really proud of the margins that we've produced here. You know, as I mentioned, we believe we're the largest in the industry.
Those partnerships we have, and I'll show some of the carrier partners that we, that we do business with. You probably, you know, they're all household names, you probably know them. The underwriting, couldn't emphasize that more, the distribution capabilities that we have. Policy administration, we handle claims when appropriate, not in every situation, but we handle claims on behalf of our carriers. We have over 60 programs that we do in the marketplace. So again, the diversity, the data we have, the strength of that is really important, especially in this market, because we've got... With a lot of our carrier partners, we have more than one program, so they might be writing our commercial earthquake, but also doing some of our professional liability.... or they might be doing a little bit of personal lines, a little bit of commercial lines.
So again, the diversity for us, from us, gives that carrier options as well. So one carrier might have three or four or five programs with us. So again, it gets back to that expertise, the depth we have, the strength of the relationships that we have. They really put trust in us. When we want to roll out a new program, there's no vetting of Brown & Brown National Programs or Brown & Brown. The vetting is with respect to the specific program. You know, how can we both make money? How quickly can we get in the market? And if the market goes the wrong way, how quickly can we get out? Now, we don't like to get out of stuff because we hire the people, but, you know, it happens.
Sometimes you can't—the opportunity is there, you jump on it, and maybe four years later, it's gotten so crowded, you have to get out. And I'll give you an example of that. We were at Arrowhead, this is before we sold to Brown & Brown. Steve and I had a program for architects and engineers, and we hired some people from an old company called Design Professionals Insurance Company, very quality underwriters, very strong group. We had good carrier partners. And when we were in that marketplace, there were maybe eight to 12 competitors in that market at the time. This goes back a few years. About six years later, it suddenly got to be 30 people, and then it was 40, and then it was 50. And it turned into a situation where it...
I'm not going to say it was a commodity, but it was really hard to price the business properly to make the margins we need to make. We could have stayed in and, you know, lived it out, et cetera, but we had a very frank discussion with our carrier partner and basically said, "Hey, you know, we need to make our share, your share. You need to make your share. This isn't going to work the way the expenses are and the way the competition's come," because the prices went down. So we got out. You know, it's tough. It's unfortunate. You have to close an office, you have to lay people off. We never want to do that. We hate that, but sometimes the reality hits you, and you gotta move. So that's the kind of thing we can do.
Now, if all we had at the time was professional liability, and architect engineers was a big part of that, it'd be tough to make that decision. But again, with the size of our base and the strength of our company, we can do those kind of things. As difficult as they are, we can do those. So, we've got that. We've got a wide breadth of offerings. You know, we do a lot of earthquake insurance, both residential and commercial. We're very big in that. A lot of carriers, partners support us. Big flood writer. We've got a lot of flood. We're probably the largest write-your-own in the country that deals with the National Flood Insurance Program, the NFIP. And we got a private flood operation as well.
We're in homeowners, you know, a lot of, lot of different businesses that we have and a wide network of, of producers, distribution networks. So we've got retailers, wholesalers, aggregators, direct to consumer. We're a bit agnostic about how we get the business, although admittedly, most of it comes from, obviously, retailer wholesalers. And the other point I want to make is that we're doing much more in together. You know, Barrett, Steve, and I, we talk a lot together. We work together a lot. We like each other, believe it or not. We really like each other. It's, it's really nice. I want to give you a hug right now. It's really great. But we really like each other, so we work well together, and that's important.
You know, we, there's a lot of trust there, and there's no forcing a business, you know, one way or the other. But if the opportunity is, arises where we can work together, we wanna do that, so that's really important to us. So this is a, this is. You know, sometimes people get confused because we use these terms in our business, program administrator, MGU, MGA, binding authority. So we put together this very complex slide to try to explain that a bit. But if you kind of go from left to right, so, you know, the retailer dealing with the consumer has an appointment from an insurance company. You know, we, I think we know what retail is, but then you get into this area of binding authorities, program administrator.
Steve in our wholesale, he'll talk later, Steve's got binding authorities, he's got, he's got some GA business, as we call it, but, you know, you can see there that we've got the ability to bind coverage, and you might be able to do some pricing and et cetera. As you move over and you get into program administrators and MGAs, MGUs, that's where we're getting more and more authority. You know, we're getting the authority to distribute, find the business on behalf of the carrier partner. We're having the ability to bring that in, and we're, we're underwriting it for them. We're pricing it. You know, we're doing the underwriting. We're getting our actuaries involved. We're getting our modeling people involved. You know, we're actually getting to a point where we can actually price that business.
Now, we're doing that within the parameters of what that insurance company told us to do. You know, Zurich will tell us, "Here's kind of the box, or here's the parameters, here's the expectation we need on PMLs or average annual losses," or whatever box they've built, but then it's up to us to get it priced within that box. We're not. If a risk comes in, we're not calling Zurich or Munich Re or QBE, our big partners, and saying, "Hey, we got this risk. You know, we think the price is supposed to be X. Is that okay with you?" We're not doing that. There might be exceptions if it's really a big deal or something, we might call them. But for the most part, we're doing that in our offices across the country, depending on the line of business.
So we're pricing it, and then we're sending that, that quote, that price to the, the distribution partner, wholesaler, retailer, et cetera. They can accept or not accept. If they accept, then we issue a binder, we issue a policy, we'll send out the billing, we'll collect the funds, we'll distribute the funds as appropriate, keep our commission, obviously, and then in a lot of cases, again, we handle the claims. So we are really doing everything the insurance company would do, short of one key thing: We're not taking the risk, right? They've still got the risk. They've got the balance sheet risk on their paper, but we are doing all of that. And for that, we get paid a nice commission. So, it's a beautiful world. We love that. We love that very much. So-...
That's kind of the spectrum there. And again, there's a little crossover between what Steve and I do in our areas, but we've got it pretty well figured out within Brown & Brown, how that all works. We've got, you know, that $5.5 billion of premium, we've got over 60 programs. We've got various brands in the industry. A lot of people don't know some of our brands. You know, I mentioned Wright. We own Wright, Wright Flood, Wright Specialty, Wright Insurance Group. So in that group, we're doing schools, municipalities, we're doing, in Wright Flood, obviously, flood. We've got Proctor Loan Protector. We're doing lender-placed business. Big headquarters down here. We've got over 500 people in Daytona Beach down the road, and they're also in Troy, Michigan. Orchid, Paul mentioned them.
We recently purchased that, a really strong, non-admitted homeowners writer. Bellingham Underwriters up in Washington State, they write commercial auto, trucking, but again, very specialized. They're very, you know, they're picking their spots. They're not using ISO forms all the time. They're very, very specialized in that sense. Cal-S urance, professional liability business, insurance agency knows what they write. They're up in Orange. FIU, we've got three wind facilities within our book, that are basically writing wind in the Southeast. Different classes, they don't compete, but they're different risks that they, they evaluate, but that's FIU, Sigma, and Arrowhead all risk. Nexus will be a new addition when we close the Kentro Nexus acquisition. We're real excited about that because they're bringing some lines of business that we don't write right now.
So they're, again, it's a perfect match for us, and they've got, one or two insurance companies they deal with that we don't. So again, we think there's synergies there, where we'll be able to potentially tap into some of their relationships, and they might be able to use some of ours. So, you know, that's all good. Arrowhead is a big brand, and within Arrowhead, you know, we've got our residential earthquake, commercial earthquake, aftermarket program. There's a lot of different, offices there. But we've got all those brands across the country. And again, they're very specialized, very nichey. One of those American Specialty, we write sports and leisure, so we're doing, youth sports, events, you know, we used to do carnivals, things like that. So it's kind of that kind of business.
But again, very nichey, very specialized, with people who have been in that a long time. Again, broad, diverse capabilities. I've mentioned a lot of these already. I didn't mention Work Comp. That's another line we write out of San Diego. Sovereign nations, so we've got some tribal business that we do. Complex stuff, you know, you've got to do law enforcement, you've got to do the property, there's casualty. So again, you have to have people that really understand that business. You can't just walk in, which is why it's so great for us. You know, somebody can't just decide, "Hey, I'm going to write tribal business," you know? First of all, you have to find a carrier willing to do all that. You have to understand how that all works. There's a lot to it, and we've got that expertise already.
So again, our, you know, Paul asks us a lot of times, you know, "Have you built a moat? How do you build a moat around your business?" We got a lot of moats around our businesses because they are so specialized. You can't just put up a sign and say, I'm going to get into tribal business, or I'm going to get into commercial earthquake. There's a lot to learn and know about those types of business, so we've got moats built around that. Professional liability, we're, we've got, you know, long-standing, this is predates before they Arrowhead came on. Brown & Brown has had a dental program for a long time, very successful nationwide, dental program. Again, another really nice specialty.
We're providing the dentist basically a, a package policy that says, you know, we'll write your equipment, we'll write your building, if you own the building, we'll provide the professional liability coverage. If you have an automobile, we might be able to put that on the policy. So it's an all-encompassing program for that dental operation. So we tend to focus more on smaller groups, we're trying to branch off in larger ones. So again, there's, there's moats, there's specialties around all this that we've got. And, it's run by an ex-Chubb person, you know, right? We have these Chubb people that we hire, so we've got Chubb sprinkled throughout the organization as well, in our group. I mentioned our carrier partners, a really important part of it.
You know, one of the things we say is, we can have all this expertise, we can have great underwriters, great distribution, we can have all that, but if we don't have a carrier partner, we don't have anything to sell. We don't have a product, we don't have a balance sheet. So we got to have the carrier partners. So we spend a lot of time working with the carrier partners, first of all, to make sure there's transparency, they know exactly what we're doing. We both agree, we all, all agree on what the loss ratio is, what the trends are. We don't want any surprises, 'cause it's so important for us to have that group, and we're really proud of that group. We spend a lot of time with these people.
And again, a lot of these carriers have more than one program with our Brown & Brown National Programs group, so we've got a lot of depth. We've got a lot of reasons to get together. One of the things that these people do, obviously, we get a lot of audits. They're in there auditing us a lot, and we like that. Funny thing, we get a lot of audits in San Diego in, you know, January, February, March, but that's an aside. But we get a lot of audits in our office, and we like that because things come out of that, and a lot of times what comes out of it is new opportunity.
Because when they come out and they look at our portfolio, they're looking at their specific program, but many times we'll then give them an overview, and we're very transparent about this. You know, here's all the things we're doing. Here's some of the things we're thinking about. An example of that is, you know, we rolled out a new E&S facility about two or three years ago, recognizing that there were some changes coming in the market. So again, we're able to have that dialogue, and it's not a, again, as I said earlier, they don't have to vet us, they just have to vet our idea. You know, what are we thinking about? Why do we think we can make money? Why can we make a difference in the market? That's what they're focusing on. So it makes for a quick conversation.
We, we love yeses, quick yeses, but at the same time, if it's not going to work, we'd like a quick no, so we don't waste our time. We get that with that carrier partner group, so we're really, really delighted with that. But we're always trying to expand that group. You know, we're always looking to add new carrier partners, because we're trying to grow. You know, our mantra, we wanna continue to grow in these markets, so we're working on that. So our strategies for success, you know, we wanna be recognized for delivering superior underwriting results. We want our carrier partners have to make money. We want them to make money. Now we want our share, we want our money, and we've been pretty good at that, but we want the carrier to make money over time.
You know, we know there's gonna be ebbs and flows of time, but, you know, over a long time period, we expect them to make money, and they will, and they have been. So that's why we can keep that list strong. We wanna continue to build our distribution relationships. That's really important, too. We've gotta get the business in the front door. Most distribution partners, in the specialty niches, they know us. They know about us. They know who we are. We get looks at a lot of business. You know, in this market, especially in the property segment right now, you know, we can be pretty selective about what we write and don't write, because we're seeing virtually all the commercial earthquake, all the wind business, we'll see it, for the most part.
Maximize our position as the largest MGA. Product innovation is really core to our value proposition. We're always looking at new products. And, you know, really, what's really nice is a lot of times, the carrier partner will come to us with an idea. You know, here's a line of business that they see as an opportunity. Can you guys get in there? And then, then what we have to evaluate is, you know, do we have the expertise right now? We may not. If we don't, can we go find it? Can we go hire the expertise, the underwriting expertise? And then do we have the distribution? So we have to make those, those kind of decisions. We're a culture of recruiting, developing high-performing teams. We've been pretty successful extracting some teams of people out of insurance companies.
You know, they see us as an entrepreneurial, successful place to work with a great parent behind us in Brown & Brown. So, you know, we've been able to attract some pretty talented people through this whole journey that we're on. We've got a lot of data. Data analytics, those are really important to us. We really pay attention. I mentioned before, we've got a modeling team that's led by a gentleman who has his Ph.D. in mathematics, I think, but he came out of RMS. RMS is one of the largest modeling firms, along with Karen Clark & Company. Those two are probably the leaders. But this guy, Liang, he's a brilliant guy. He leads our modeling team. He really understands how that model works.
You know, we just had a new model rolled out by RMS called RMS 23, so we're right now in the evaluation of how that's gonna impact our business for PMLs, et cetera. And then, obviously, we're looking at acquisitions. We've really been pleased with the ones we've done. We've done a few now. We've got Canada, called Special Risk Insurance Managers. They were on that page earlier. Really specialized operation out of Vancouver with offices across the provinces. We're happy about that. Orchid has been great. Riedman been great, so we're really good. Last thing, and then I'll go to questions. Last thing is, you know, there has been this flight to quality, and we've seen it firsthand. We've had a lot of storm activity. You know, no surprise there, right?
We've had $50 billion of convective storms in the first half of the year. $50 billion of insured loss from tornadoes, hurricanes, big thunderstorms, et cetera. It's a record number, right? We've had, obviously, earthquake activity. You know, we've had hurricanes already, $3 billion, roughly, of insured losses from the most recent one. And a lot of carriers are looking at their portfolio and saying, you know, "How has it performed against our expectations, our modeling expectations?" They model these things, you know, constantly. And there have been some of our—some of the other general agencies, the program writers, haven't performed as well as perhaps it was expected. Our portfolio has performed very well against modeled results and versus actual.
So we've seen a couple situations where there's been this flight to quality, where they've taken capacity away from someone else and brought it to us. Now, not one for one. They might have cut somebody's PML by $100 million, and they give us $75 million of new PML. That's a big victory for us, huge victory. So the flight to quality has happened. So, with that, I'll open up to questions here.
We got Meyer over here. Oh, okay. There and then Meyer.
Go ahead.
Hey, Mike Zaremski from BMO. Thanks for hosting this day. Question on, on kind of, on growth, or organic, specifically, growth, in the national program segment. So, you know, growth has outpaced kind of the, the broader marketplace. I guess, you could use the retail segment, over long periods of time. And I believe that's a phenomenon that's not just Brown & Brown specific. I think it's kind of an industry phenomenon, but you can correct me if I'm mistaken. Maybe you can kind of talk about what, what's driving programs to, to grow, you know, much faster than the broader, marketplace.
Yeah, that's a great question, and it hasn't happened by accident. You know, we've been... What we try to do is we try to, as best we can, look around the corner. And, you know, there's obviously been various markets, and I mentioned how large we are and diversified we are. So we've been planning for these type of market dynamics for a long time, and how we do that is we try to get as much carrier partner support as we can. We try to clearly lay out a plan with those carrier partners around, you know, if this happens, how are we gonna move? Well, or what direction we need to go? How much are we gonna push rate? How much are we gonna push deductibles? Things like that. It gets very granular.
But we plan that ahead of time, ahead of some of these markets, as best we can, to prepare for what happens if, if we do have a tightening insurance segment. Again, these specialty areas are a little bit easier to predict, not easy, but they're a little bit easier to predict where you might see some things. I mean, if you, if you think back on the property market specifically, all this loss activity, all this talk about climate change, you know, people running from certain areas, running from California, running from Florida, et cetera. You know, we kind of see that coming, and we think to ourselves, well, there could be some opportunity there. So let's try to get our carrier partners lined up. Let's try to get our data in a good place.
Let's get our modeling ready, so if that presents itself, we can move quickly. So I think the fact that we're pretty nimble, we're so specialized, and we have carrier partner support, we're able to enter those markets and take advantage of a situation. So that's, you know, that's growth. Now, you—the next question might be, well, what happens when the market gets a little soft? Well, we've got to deal with that, but we think that then, another one of our segments is probably gonna rise a little bit. You know, maybe it's professional liability, maybe it's personal property. You know, who knows? But again, we're trying to position ourselves to take advantage of the next opportunity. We're not going to get them all right. We try to look around the corner and get those right. Okay, you got Meyer.
Hi. Meyer Shields, KBW. So two questions, I guess. One, I was hoping for maybe a little more color on the amount of property capacity that you've been able to retain and grow, because that seems to be in significant demand. And second, I was hoping you could touch on the cost of underwriting talent within the MGAs and MGUs.
Sure. We can't really get into specific PMLs because that's, you know, private, that's public, or not public, it's private information amongst those carrier partners. But our PMLs, if you look at the commercial earthquake, they've been gone up a bit, I'll say, over the course of the last 12-18 months, which is, again, a huge victory because that's, you know, how we're measured around how we, how we allocate that PML, when we model it, what's the average annual loss looking like, et cetera. So the PML in commercial earthquake has gone up. I'd say about the same scenario in our wind overall. It's gone up a bit. So we've, we've been able to...
I guess, the best way to answer it is, we've been able to stay active in both the wind and the earthquake marketplace, to, you know, a pretty large extent, over the course of this marketplace, and we foresee that for the rest of the year, we could, you know, stay pretty active. The talent piece, we're very competitive in how we reward our people. And, you know, we've got other tools at Brown & Brown. We've got the stock purchase plan, we've got the stock options that we can use. So we can entice people with that, but it's more about letting them really do their thing in a very entrepreneurial culture, and then, you know, we reward them to a large extent on how their profit center performs.
You know, they'll certainly be rewarded on Brown & Brown's overall results as they get stock and things like that, but also, they're rewarded in their profit center and how National Programs performs overall, depending on their level. So there's a lot of tools that we can use to make sure we get that strong talent.
Perfect. Chris, let's, let's cut there.
Oh, cut there. Okay, great.
Yeah, we'll do the two, and then that way we get Steve up.
Yeah.
We'll field more questions at the end.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
All right. Well, good morning. I'm Steve Boyd, and, I think Chris kind of gave a bit of my background. So, I've been in the industry about 28 years. I got a fantastic opportunity to work at Arrowhead out of college, 20+ years in that space. And then, just a few years ago, was given the opportunity to move over to oversee Bridge Specialty Group, which is Brown & Brown's wholesale division, and work with the 1,500+ teammates we've got over there.
So let me kind of, before I kind of get into our space, and we'll unpack that in some detail, talk a bit about the E&S marketplace because, you know, you can't find an article in our press where you don't hear about it, but also the dynamic in the relationship we've got with the National Programs division, because I think it's very unique in how we're structured. And I thought the, you know, the E&S chart that Chris put up there to kind of show the various layers or levels of delegated authority, I think tells a pretty good story. In many ways, you know, we see kind of ourselves as an incubator for product ideas.
When you think of the wholesale space in the US and its growth over the last decade, in particular, you know, I always kind of grew up in the industry looking at the wholesale space as that place you go to kind of innovate, create products to anticipate the next set of emerging risks that consumers are going to need. I think that's kind of one of the things we bring to the marketplace, our ability to obviously be nimble in rate and form and this product. The last couple of years, it's been a little bit different, right? For a whole host of reasons.
I think, you know, the current studies out there right now by WSIA and others indicate that the E&S marketplace this year could cross $100 billion, which is unbelievable when you think about where it was just 10, 15 years ago. 22-23% of the commercial GWP in the US could be in the E&S space by the end of this year. And so whether it's in Chris's business or my business, you know, the growth of that over the last couple of years, I think, has created some interesting dynamics for all of us. I think when we look at it and you ask the why, I think everybody assumes it's a property phenomenon.
Yes, property, specifically around not just cat risk, but as Chris indicated, kind of those, what we call secondary perils, convective storm, wildfire, has really kind of put the fear of God into a lot of insurance companies. That on top of the fact of a very challenged reinsurance marketplace has forced markets to reconsider their portfolios. And that's why we start seeing more business flow into the E&S space. And it's not just a property phenomenon, it's also casualty. You know, whether that's nuclear verdicts or social inflation or whatever, you know, the coined term that they're going to put out right now, you've just got adverse development playing into some of these casualty books, which again, is forcing a number of standard markets to reconsider. But, you know, that ebbs and it flows.
And I think if you follow the last 30 years of this space, you know, that won't stay forever. And so what you'll, you know, hopefully take away from my presentation and segment is how we have built Brown & Brown Wholesale over the last couple of decades to be a very diversified platform. I think one of the things when I go to a lot of these events is there's kind of a misnomer that we are a Florida property wholesale platform, right? I see you're laughing because you think the same thing. And, and that's funny, if not the case. And I think the reason a lot of people think that is, you know, 40 years ago, Brown & Brown got into this space with the acquisition of McDuff Underwriters here in Daytona, and that is one of our platforms.
But as you'll see in my presentation, there's a lot more to it than that, okay? So let's move on a little bit. So again, Bridge Specialty Group, we rebranded essentially, in early 2021 when I joined the team. And really, we've evolved from, you know, I'd say, you know, 50-plus boutique specialist wholesale platforms across the US into what we have today, which is a leading global wholesaler. We'll place well over $5 billion into the marketplace this year. And we'll talk about, you know, the various levels and, and certainly segments within that.
So you know, when I talk to our teammates and certainly to our retail partners and carriers, there's really five core strategic pillars that we operate Bridge around, starting with, you know, seeking clear differentiation in the marketplace through, as we'll call it, continuous innovation around both product and, and segment specialization. So, you know, we're not an all things wholesaler. We're not going to write every single segment out there. Instead, we intentionally focus on becoming kind of that go-to expert in a couple of core segments, and we'll talk in some of those. But just to give you some examples, public entity municipality.
We're one of the largest wholesaler platforms in the country in that space, and that includes everything from, you know, police, police liability, which is a very tough class, which obviously sits in the E& S space today, school board legal, you know, small towns, big towns, you name it, water districts. We're in that space, have been in that space for over 25 years. And retailers of all sizes, shapes, and, you know, from the small to the large, they've come to Bridge Specialty for that solution. We talked about property. We do property, right? It's not our biggest segment. People think it is. But we do a lot of, obviously, southeast wind because of our roots here in Florida, and that's a specialty today with, you know, the shared and layered property and obviously, the dynamics and challenges.
That could be in the public space, it could be, you know, obviously, we'll talk about homeowners and personal lines later as well. As we go—and I'll actually get into some segment specialist breakdown later, but transportation, executive risk, that's an area as well. We talk a lot about kind of the rate movement, you know, whether it's public company, D&O, or some others. You know, that's the other side of the spectrum, right? You're seeing heavy, good, strong rate increases coming in the property side, but we're seeing the other dynamic playing out in cyber and some other lines, and we've got a very healthy book there. But, you know, that's much to, I think, a point Chris made earlier, intentional in our strategy.
We want to have that strong diversification in our portfolio because we know that market's going to move back, in time, and we'll see, we'll see that rate movement, and, I would say the inventory that we see is very strong still in that space. Second one, talent acquisition and career development. Boy, this is something I think, for all three of us, Barrett, Chris, and I, that we're all very passionate about. You know, it's not just the recruiting, it's the onboarding, it's the career development and career pathing. It's, you know, whether that's creating opportunities for future leaders, whether that's enhancing the skills of our brokers and creating a compensation plan that allows them to start their career and finish their career at Brown & Brown. We create a lot of opportunity there.
Whether that's crossover opportunities, where we can have somebody in our group go over to wholesale or programs, or go to programs or retail, much like I did, coming from programs and now stepping into the wholesale space. Greater internal connectivity to ensure that we provide our, our customers with the broadest set of solutions. This is really critical, and I think this is a cultural differentiation. Look, competitive, you know, retailers and wholesalers, by nature, are highly competitive people. Barrett hit on that earlier, and I've got my share of them in our business. But, you know, what I think is unique about how we operate, and this is where the greater internal connectivity comes in, doesn't really matter which of our 50-plus locations a client comes in with a need, you know, we will bring the best capability set across our platform to solve that problem.
We win together. It is that power of we, and that's something very unique about the culture that we have within Bridge. Talked about data, same here, right? I mean, we use data-driven insights to improve outcomes for our customers, for our teammates, and for our carrier partners. That creates opportunities for, again, on roads, for programs, where we'll see a lot of data coming in on a certain segment. We think we've got enough critical mass that we could go to Chris and we could partner with the national programs group, create a product we could deploy through Bridge, or depending on the... You know, looking at that business or maybe another distribution model that's better suited.
And so, again, it gives us a lot of kind of dynamic opportunities in terms of where that distribution flow is going to go and how those products might come together. And lastly, and I think probably most importantly, continuing our tradition of delivering consistent, profitable growth. Andy can probably touch on this later, but if you look at the last 10, 15 years across Brown & Brown, the wholesale segment has been a very consistent performer. And a lot of that is what I'm going to go into now, which is really the dynamics, if I can advance this, there we go, of our business. So already touched on the fact, $5 billion placed. In terms of locations, US, very diversified from the Northeast, obviously down the Mid-Atlantic, Florida, a number of offices in Texas, Chicago, and out west.
Recent acquisitions, which Mike will touch on a little bit later in London, we've got three Lloyd's brokers, and that's a really important part of our strategy because it provides capacity access into the wholesale space of the US through the Lloyd's platform. Over 17,000 independent agents, they're our customers. Barrett's a customer.... But again, there's 17,000 other customers that work with us. So again, it's a very, very diversified platform in terms of distribution, geography, and product mix. On the lines of business, 72% of that is commercial. Not all of our business is E&S. I think a lot of people just assume because you're a wholesaler, you write all E&S. We actually do a fair bit of admitted standard business, and I'll explain that later as well.
In that 72%, if you unpack that, it's primary casualty, it's excess casualty, it's transportation, it's property, a number of segments within that, and again, very diversified. Professional lines, of all shapes and sizes, a big piece of our business, public entity, municipality, and of course, personal lines. You know, personal lines is a segment today that you're seeing, again, more business in states like Florida, certainly coastal Carolinas, my home state of California, that are starting to shift out of that standard admitted space into the E&S marketplace. You know, I don't think that trend is going to change anytime soon. So, we've got some strong solution sets around that. Our business mix, this is really important because it kind of leads into the metrics up above. That almost 50/50 split between contract binding and brokerage.
So, you know, when you think of the contract binding space, what I would consider that or define that is, that's your steady eddy. You're not typically going to see massive rate increases, so you're not going to see this dynamic growth coming because you're suddenly getting 20%+ rate. Doesn't work that way in the contract binding. And there's an underwriting component to it as well, so very similar to Chris's case, we're going to be very careful and deliberate in how we approach that business. But what it is, is steady. The flow is steady, it's consistent, we see it across the US, and it does a nice job of just providing that great steady balance. So as the market dynamics change in the E&S space, where you might have these huge, you know, and you'll see these dynamic swings in, you know, the large brokerage space.
If you look at our large brokerage business as a breakdown of what we've got, you'll see the same organic numbers of some of our competitors. But that is, I mean, it's a roller coaster ride over the last 30 years. The contract binding space provides that stability in terms of, you know, that performance. So again, about 50/50 between brokerage and binding. And if you look at, again, obviously, our 3- and 5-year trajectory of revenue growth, a number of nice acquisition pickups over the last couple of years, I'll touch on that a little bit later, and very steady organic growth. So let's kind of break down our actual platforms within our business. So the binding authority, again, high transaction, E&S, think, small businesses, high level of automation, national contracts.
That business, again, that we just highlighted, you know, 47% of our business today. On the brokerage side, we really break it in two areas. Our national brokerage would be your large, complex type accounts. Again, the big public entity business, complex, excess construction accounts, shared and layered property, that type of thing. The regional brokerage is actually something we've intentionally embedded with our contract binding offices, because what we found over the last couple of years is that as underwriting appetites have changed, you know, again, we're in the business of bringing a solution to our retail client. So embedding brokerage with our binding teams allows us to account round. It also allows us, where a risk falls outside of the guidelines of a binding authority, to have a solution set for that customer locally.
One thing to understand about also our business there, we operate in five geographic regions, the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, the Central region, which is heavily weighted towards Texas and Oklahoma, and the West. Within those various groups, you've got both binding authority and brokerage capabilities. We operate and execute locally, we partner on a regional level, and then we scale nationally and internationally. The third bucket there, international and our, our Lloyd's business, I'm not going to spend much time on that. Mike will be discussing that as part of the international part of the conversation, but I will just reiterate, this is a critical connection point for Chris, myself, and Barrett in terms of delivering capacity and solutions into the E&S marketplace in the US Admitted market access.
A lot of people don't really think of a wholesaler as, you know, bringing solutions to the admitted side of the world. We do, and we have two different operating models within that. In some cases, we have relationships with large standard markets who the cost of distribution to go to every small retailer just doesn't make economic sense. So they'll use us almost like an aggregator to provide access to that product set. And so again, as the standard market picks itself back up, we get lift on that side of the business. Additionally, we have other standard markets that give us exclusive distribution for our product set into a state and region, and we can use that to, again, round other E&S solutions alongside that. And then personal lines.
We have some offices that are heavily focused on personal lines, others that do it almost as an accommodation, but we have a national practice that oversees that to provide consistency to how we model, how we introduce product. And again, with the certainly the focus, and one of the reasons we, we acquired Orchid last year, with the focus of more of this business going to the E&S marketplace, we wanted to make sure that we were well positioned to be able to solve the needs of our clients as they come knocking on our door. So let's talk a bit, just high level, about products. I know there's a lot on this, but again, this, I think, does a nice job of illustrating just the really diverse set of capabilities and solutions that you'll see within a, again, a dynamic wholesaler like Bridge Specialty Group.
This is international as well as national, so we've got capabilities certainly outside of the US We partner very closely with Mike's team in London, our team in Italy, and in Belgium as well, to bring, again, the broadest set of markets and capacity we can to solve the solution, whether it's domestic or international. Just kind of, again, to highlight a couple of those, from agriculture, blood stock, cannabis. A lot of executive risk business, financial institutions, healthcare, business that, you know, it's funny, over the last 10 years, a lot of that might sit in the standard marketplace, and you've seen really that shift over the last couple of years into our world.
So, part of our strategy, again, is building out those vertical, you know, centers of excellence and deep expertise, whether that's on a brokerage side or on the under contract binding, underwriting side, to be able to deliver a solution to our retail customers. It provides, again, open opportunities for Chris's team to be able to partner with us and deliver specific solutions for one of those segments that's in a highly specialized way. In terms of capabilities on the left, this is really more just to kind of drive home the point, not your traditional wholesaler. There's a lot of pieces to kind of the Bridge Specialty toolbox, and again, a heavy focus on data, analytics, technology, and other solutions as well.
So as we think about building for the future, and, you know, and I would say this has really been the last couple of years, it's not something kind of going forward, it's more about where we spend our time and our investment and our focus. You've heard from all of us, we talked about the power of we, that greater internal connectivity. So many opportunities within our four walls here, but the ability to kind of leverage some of those solutions, capabilities, and investments to better our clients. From an expansion standpoint, I'll just, you know, point out a couple of the acquisitions in the last year and their impact on us. We recently announced an acquisition up in Vermont, New England Excess Exchange. You know, why did we go after that business? Well, it expanded our distribution.
We didn't have a very strong footprint above New York. This gave us Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, access to over 1,200 agents. It was a very strong, well-run, well-managed contract binding platform that looks a lot like our other businesses. And so, you know, strategically, it does a lot for us. It gives us more retail distribution partners. It solidifies and strengthens the portfolio we have with key trading partners, because now, instead of just being heavy in the Mid-Atlantic or Texas or Florida, they've now got a New England... sorry, a Northeast piece to that business as well.
The acquisition we did in London last year, BDB, you know, it may seem very foreign, no pun intended, to what we do in the US, but the operating model is almost identical to the operating models we have here within our contract binding shop. So we are very comfortable with that operating platform, and the trading partners and carriers that they use and partner with are the same partners we trade with in the US. So on the expansion side, we'll continue to focus on finding good cultural fits that bring product expertise or distribution capabilities or a geographic footprint that doesn't match. We've got a nice pipeline. There's a lot of firms out there.
There's obviously been a lot of acquisition work in the wholesale space over the last 10, 15 years, but there still remains a lot of good ones. And if you don't believe me, come with me to San Diego this weekend, to WSIA for seeing 10,000 wholesalers, if you can believe it, in San Diego for three days. Probably the more people ever they've ever had at WSIA. So, again, very active space. Distribution. This is our lifeblood, right?
So taking that 17,000 retail partners and continuing to create the right incentive structure to grow those relationships, bring solution sets to them, but at the same time, recognizing, certainly on the transactional E&S side, that, you know, changes are coming, and making sure that from a digital standpoint, we can deliver products to clients on their terms, where they want to be met. So whether that's an API connection, whether that's a portal, whether that's just taking an old-fashioned email and processing it, you know, and continuing to advance and invest in that space, which goes into operations, technology, data, digital. You'll hear the same thing from Chris, you'll hear the same thing from Barrett. These are key areas of investment and have been for a number of years. We'll continue to plow in because this is a data game.
It matters to the carriers, it matters to our retailers. It helps us be more impactful in terms of bringing the right solution sets and seeing the opportunities for our customers and bringing the right products to that. Capabilities, product development, vertical practice groups, an area of focus with my background in programs. You'll continue to see us delivering proprietary product solutions that are really exclusive into the Bridge Specialty Group channel. And lastly, talent, right? I mean, I got to end with that. I'll start with that. I mean, this is a talent game. It's always about having that pipeline for new people coming in.
We continue to see strong activity of people looking to get into the wholesale marketplace and making sure that, you know, we create the right incentive structure for them to, again, grow their careers here at Brown & Brown and finish here. So with that, I will happily take any questions.
Hi, Paul Newsome from Piper Sandler. When you're thinking about building out your wholesale operation over time, are you considering the sort of permanent, the surge we've seen in the cat-prone property as a, you know, a secular or a cyclical change in the E&S market? And does that have any impact on how you're building out your business?
Well, and I'm glad you heard that question. I think, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we're although we write in that space, funny enough, it's not the driver most people think, compared to maybe some of our competitors. So I think we've got a fair bit of insulation if there was suddenly a massive swing the other way. That said, I think when you look at, you know, just where, again, the reinsurance marketplace is, there is not, you know, I don't know how many billions of capacity we lost last year, but I don't see it all coming back in on January one. There's still legs to this market. I think the challenge on the property side-...
that, you know, all of us in this industry that are dealing with this and deal with the client and have that empathy for the customer, are recognizing is, you know, you can only continue to push 20, 30, 40, 50% rate increases, you know, to a point. We started seeing that this year. I mean, we started seeing, the rates may have gone up, but don't assume that means the revenue for everybody in the space is going up. Because in a lot of cases, those, those clients just, you know, they've got a budget, and they're just going to take more risks themselves, and they're going to buy less limit. Barrett sees it, Chris sees it, I see it. And so, you know, I don't see the market softening anytime soon. I don't see business swinging back from the E&S space.
I will tell you, our inventory levels are strong across all lines. We still see a lot of property opportunities, but I don't think you will see, in my opinion, you know, 100, 200, 300% increases continuing in perpetuity.
Over here.
Hi, Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. Just a quick question on which E&S lines do you think over, like, you know, the long term won't go back to the admitted market? Maybe because the risks are just too complex and, you know, carriers are just trying to get out of some of the volatility, especially with cat activity, kind of, you know, above the long run and most likely going to continue. Like, I guess, which E&S lines do you think will stay in that space and will give you, you know, growth potential moving forward?
Well, as I mentioned about property, right? I think property still has legs. I think the personal line space is still shaking itself out. There's obviously a lot of pressure on state regulators here in Florida, my home state of California, to kind of get the standard markets back in, but it's not an easy fix. You know, I think I'll answer it from the other side. I think we've seen probably more pressure from the standard markets coming on the professional line side. And you're seeing that with just the, the rate activity and what we're seeing in that space, and just the level of competition. So we're already seeing that one starting to swing a little bit. You know, on the, on the casualty side, a lot of it comes down to the underlying performance of the account.
You know, to some degree, the complexity as well. Lines like public entity, where we, again, we do a lot in that law enforcement liability, I can't see that business going standard anytime soon. I think on the casualty side, you know, again, carriers do need to grow. I know they want—they're under earning profit, but they also want to see some growth in the top line, and so I, you know, would expect to see some of those segments, maybe even some with a little hair on the account, starting to move back into that space. But it's been slow. We haven't seen that aggressively over the last year.
Thank you.
Okay. No more in the room. Why don't we... Because we're a little behind on some time. So, Steve?
Yep.
Thank you. And then Michael, you're up.
Thank you, Andy. Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be here. My name's Mike Bruce. I was appointed to the Brown & Brown Europe business about eight days ago, so fairly new in the role, but I've been around a little while. I'll try not to. Okay. Just in terms of my background, as Hyatt knows, I was a mathematics and physics graduate, and when I graduated, I did some rather interesting things like writing fingerprint systems, sonar systems, the system that you start to control the creation of nuclear warheads down in Aldermaston. So, as you can imagine, the ideal grounding for a career in insurance broking.
But I got into insurance broking about 20 years ago, 22 years ago, and in that time, I've held leadership roles in UK retailers, London market wholesalers, and also global, sort of international brokers, so quite well, quite a well-rounded background. Previously, before joining Brown & Brown in July 2022, I was chief exec of GRP. And just as a quick aside, both Powell and Barrett talked about on acquisitions, that magnetism. I remember the first time I met Powell, 8th of November 2021 for breakfast, and we had a 45-minute breakfast in the diary that took three and a half hours.
And that was purely because as soon as we met, I realized was huge similarities between how Powell thought about the business, how Brown & Brown operated, versus my business, GRP, and that was really the start of that journey. So in terms of what I'd like to cover in this presentation, Brown & Brown Europe are the businesses that are headquartered in the UK and Ireland, but may have locations outside, like Europe, US, and a couple in Asia. So I'm not going to be covering some of the North American businesses that are embedded in Chris, Steve, and Barrett's businesses. I guess the two key takeaway from this is, it's really important that we don't think Brown & Brown Europe, we're plowing a furrow 6,000 miles away, running in opposite direction.
I see the Brown & Brown Europe as actually providing geographic reach to the strategy you've heard about so far, executed locally by people who understand those local markets. So it's a really important... We just see, honestly, Brown & Brown Europe as an extension of all the presentations you've heard this morning. If you look at the left-hand side, you've—the word discipline has been used a number of times already this morning. You can see how the businesses that comprise Brown & Brown Europe have been built over time through very disciplined investment. There hasn't been a rush to put a flag in the map and buy businesses in an ad hoc way.
And as you can see, it started in 2008 with the investment in creating an in-house broker, Deckus, that provided London market placement for the Brown & Brown offices in the US, initially focusing on property, but that's broadened out to cover other lines of business like transportation, financial lines, et cetera. Quite a hiatus there, but in 2021, the first retail business was bought in UK and Ireland, which was O'Leary's in Ireland. Again, a really strong, family-led, community-driven broker. Rapidly followed in 2022 by the acquisition of GRP, which extended the retail platform to include the UK, but also gave us our first programs capability outside of the US, and added further skills to the Deckus capability.
So again, all these acquisitions are additive, bringing new capabilities and new skills to the group, as opposed to duplicating what we already have, a really key point of the acquisition strategy. In 2020 Q4, we're hoping that we will be completing the Kentro acquisition, and again, another program business. But again, they provide a whole new set of products and a whole new set of broker relationships to the business we already have in the UK. In terms of how we think about the business, we've covered that already a little bit. It's very much a replication of the Brown & Brown playbook. It's local sales and service, it's entrepreneurial leaders, it's the same growth drivers, and actually, we're organized in exactly the same way as in the US.
So it's a real replication of what you've seen works incredibly well in the US Chart on the left-hand side, just to clarify what those numbers are. That's different to the previous numbers you've seen in the presentations. That's a trailing twelve-month revenue figure, which includes an annualized pro forma for Kentro. So that's more illustrative as opposed to the sort of audited numbers that Andy provided earlier. You can see there, $465 million of revenue. A business of scale. We have over 3,000 teammates. We operate out of over 150 locations. So again, we have a business scale in Europe, and you can see the actual distribution of the revenue across the three divisions we talked about already.
The retail business is the largest. We place in the UK and Ireland, we handle personal lines all the way up to global businesses who need international placements. The balance of the business, though, is in the regional SME market. Within the UK, over 99% of the companies in the UK are defined as SMEs, which is less than 250 employees. So we think we're in a really, really good place. It fits our model of small businesses who want advice from an individual they can trust and have a relationship with. They don't want to be going onto the web and getting a quote and guessing if it's the right cover. So we think we're in a very good place in terms of our distribution platform there.
As we do write a real cross-section of, of regional SME business, we have no, no huge geographic, no huge geographic bias, no product bias, and no trade bias. So it's a really, really nice balanced portfolio from an underwriter's perspective, which actually ensures, in the same way as Chris and Steve and Barry do, we actually deliver real value to our underwriters, which again, is so key to our model in the, in the UK So as well as the generalist capabilities, we also have niches as well. We have businesses that focus on trades or industry sectors, we have farming businesses, we have solicitors, we have motor traders, and from a product perspective, we have professional indemnity, motor trade again, cyber.
So we have the broad distribution supported and complemented by the local, some local businesses who are real experts in a certain topic. Steve touched on the wholesale, the components of the wholesale model. When you combine the three investments we made in wholesale with Decus, BDB, and Lonmark, we're actually a top 10 Lloyd's broker, so a real business of scale, again, real weight in the market. And just to reiterate the point that Steve made, we get our business from third-party brokers, but the key part of the value proposition of our Lloyd's business is to provide access to that market, to all the divisions in the US, as well as our other businesses around Europe. Steve mentioned some of the niches earlier.
We have blood stock, fine art, professional lines, marine, UK and US property. The list is endless. We really got some, but again, it's all around good quality people who are experts in those sectors. And as we program, it's the same story. We've grown through acquisition of GRP and Nexus to follow soon. Those businesses are very complementary in terms of how they approach business, but it's a totally different product set and totally different areas of distribution. So again, one of our opportunities going forward will be to cross-fertilize and cross-pollinate the relationships we have in our, in the UK with some of the products that Nexus and Kentro will bring to the party. The chart on the left, map on the left shows where we are in terms of presence.
You can see very heavily retail focused, or totally retail focus is in, is in the UK and Ireland at the moment. Strategy going forward, clearly, organic growth is a key part of the play, but also we will continue to look at potential acquisitions. We, we permanently evaluate opportunities, and we use the lenses, the Brown & Brown lenses that, that you know about. From a, from a geography perspective, look at countries where there's a rule of law, stable government, stable economy, and if it totally passes that test, we then look at the business itself. Does it have the right cultural fit, and does it make financial sense? So we're permanently looking at businesses across the platform here, but we have that very, very strict discipline, which Scott will talk about a little bit, a little bit later on.
It's really important because there are other businesses in Europe who adopt a very, very different strategy to our international expansion, and those looking to plunk a flag in a map with no real thought or structure, just to sort of show we're a big global business. That's not what we're about, as you know. We also talked earlier about, I touched on when we do an acquisition, it isn't just about buying revenue or profit, it's about buying new capabilities, new products, new classes of business. So an acquisition, as well as working financially, also has to bring something new to the party to complement and help expand the whole of the business. And finally, how we drive this forward. We bought businesses that actually invested in businesses, which are very complementary.
The trick now is to really combine them together. As businesses, we're all better together. So it's taking those skills and capabilities and varied distribution channels and actually merging those together, aligning capabilities. Part of my role with my other leads in London is to make sure we can join the dots between the experts in London and the people in Steve's, Barrett's, and Chris's world, so we can have that real connectivity between the balance we have in London and the huge distribution in the US So really exciting times. We will continue to make investments, as we've said. But it's all around collaboration. I think my role is very much as a—we've some great businesses in the UK and Ireland, and Europe with great leaders.
My role is to sort of work with Steve, Chris, and Barrett, to navigate how we best collaborate together globally. We just have that extra dimension of time zones and six hours travel, et cetera. But I'm good. Happy to take any questions there. I was a bit quicker than the others because obviously, a lot of the detail had been covered in the previous presentations.
Hey, Mike Zaremski from BMO. I believe GRP grew fairly rapidly over the last decade through acquisitions. Do you expect a similar pace of rapid, acquisition-like growth in the coming years?
We always look at businesses all the time, and we have the same approach as Brown & Brown. We never had targets. It was all... all about finding the right businesses with the right fit, et cetera. So yeah, we talk to business all the time, so we'd expect some continued acquisitive growth. But again, as Powell mentioned earlier, we don't have targets. It's all around bringing something new to the party. There's still over 3,000 insurance brokers in the UK, so there has been a good degree of consolidation, but there is still more to go, a bit like Steve's example of CIB next week when he has thousands of wholesalers there.
Greg.
Good morning. It's Greg Peters with Raymond James again. Yeah, some of your peers operating in the UK market have really been in the headlines about paying up for some of your competitors.
Mm-hmm.
Can you talk about, you know, your ability to retain talent, and then talk about, as you're going out, looking at other properties, about the pricing of that in the context of what some of your other peers might be offering?
Yeah. I think retention is it. I think being part of the Brown & Brown team has really helped retention. We were previously private equity-owned, which was a good journey, frankly. We did have good investors. But ultimately, we're for sale every three or four years in that model, and it was fine for me, who's used to that model, sitting in London, being quite relaxed with that. But we've got 2,500 teammates working in local provincial offices, worrying what's going to happen to their job in a few years. So that was one of the reasons, having got to know Powell, and I was really very keen to become part of the Brown & Brown team, because we've bought great businesses in the UK.
We've invested and recruited great people. To give them a long-term home where they can thrive and develop was really important to me. So I think we're in a really great place now. So it's been a... It's really helped retention. The second question around valuation?
Valuation of other properties in context.
Yeah. Yeah, again, the valuation, a lot of people expected valuations of businesses to go down, given the given sort of the interest rate rises. We haven't seen that yet. I think that's being pushed up in the UK because there are some smaller consolidators who are PE-backed, and they have money burning a hole in their pocket and probably they need to deploy that capital, which to some extent encourages maybe a less disciplined approach to pricing. We've always been really disciplined with our pricing. We've done well over 100 deals, so we do know how to value a business, but we also know when to stop. We always say the best deals we do are the ones we walk away from because that proves we have that discipline.
So yeah, we look at businesses, we know the right value of a business, and if the right business comes up at the right price, subject to agreement with Barrett, et cetera, we'll be happy to talk to them. But we're not going to pay daft prices. We don't need to. We have built... We have a long-term business here. We don't have to build EBITDA to flip it in two years' time, which some of those competitors have to.
Um, Meyer.
Thanks. Meyer Shields, KBW. I just want to confirm, is everything outside of either the US or North America, your remit, so Latin America, Asia, et cetera?
Yes, well, in terms of geographics, but clearly, we have a very... Well, nothing in Latin America and a very small, sort of, nascent presence in Asia, which will come via the Kentro acquisition.
Okay, but that's all under you?
Yeah. Hey, Meyer, just for clarification: so—so we kind of look at, you look at Europe or international in there, right? So those are all the businesses that report up into Mike. Our Canadian business in Bermuda and Cayman Islands report back into the, into the States here.
Okay, thanks.
We have a question over here.
Hey. Hey, Charlie Lederer with Citi. I think you've said the organic growth profile in Europe is, has been similar to the rest of the business at Brown & Brown. I guess longer term or medium term, just given the lines that you're in and some of the deals you've done recently, how do we think about that growth profile versus the rest of the business?
From the European business, it's very, very similar, broadly in line with, with the numbers you've seen from the other divisions. It's a very similar playbook, very focused on the customer base, so it's, it's really pretty much totally in line with the numbers you've seen already.
Thank you.
Okay. All right. Thanks, Mike. All right, perfect.
Wait a second.
You're going to do this or you're gonna-
Just going to say, we have about five minutes before we go to break, so-
We're going to do this in five minutes.
Got it. Okay, do it.
I also wanted to answer one other thing for Greg's benefit and everybody else's. Number one, as you can see, Mike is like-minded with our team, which we're very, very fortunate to have Mike and the team.
... part of Brown & Brown. We weren't looking to do a large acquisition in England. It presented itself. And so the-- that is, we had always thought there might be an opportunity, but we had not found the right one. The other thing that I think is very important to stress here is that Mike and his team did not run that business like a private equity firm or a private equity-backed firm. As you know, I don't usually think that much about how those are put together because the way they think. Mike and that team, you wouldn't have known they were owned by private equity because Mike and their senior leadership team shielded them from everything.
And what that means is they grew the business organically and acquired businesses that grew the business in an acceptable manner, so they got to run it their way. So we got a lot of cool opportunities there, but it starts with him, and you can see why. And so, you know, this is one of those things where I know Mike's wife, Debbie. Like, I met her during the acquisition process. I wanted her to meet me and us. The other thing that I'd like everybody to know is that when we announced this transaction in March 2022, Scott Penny, Barrett, myself, and Mike got in planes, trains, and automobiles and went out and met 1,000 teammates in eight days.
And when you go out and shake hands and meet the people and talk to and try to gain the hearts and minds of the team, you would be interested in knowing what was the biggest question or two biggest questions that they had. It's very simple. Number one: Do I still have a job? Which is, are you going to consolidate a bunch of this small business into one location, Birmingham, Manchester, whatever, and our job, and you're going to automate it, I'm out of a job. That's number one. And number two: I want in on the stock plan. I had more people, Greg. I've never seen it like this, where we describe the stock plan, this is what they'd say. I had two or three ladies on the team in different offices who said... I said, "Yes, ma'am." "Well, when can I get in?
I'd like to give the money today." I said, "Well, we haven't even closed yet." "No, no, no, I still want to get in." I said, "I'd like to assure you that you will be able to participate," okay? So here's the thing, this is awesome. In the first year of the equivalent of the employee stock purchase plan, it's called the Save as You Earn plan over there, 45% of our teammates decided to participate in some capacity. Now, you remember, the economy in England has slowed a little bit. I thought that was unbelievable, that 45%... So people want a piece of the rock, which is that ownership thing. I want to briefly touch on services, and I'll close in three minutes or less. What is our services business? You know that this is a claims-paying or advocacy businesses.
And if you think about it, we have everything from programs type related claims-paying businesses to standalone workers' compensation, professional liability, general liability, automobile liability. We do individual claims on homeowners. We do all kinds of things in there, and we have this other business called the advocacy businesses, Social Security, disability advocacy, and Medicare set-aside businesses. What we found fundamentally in this is we haven't seen the growth like we've seen in our other businesses, and I think it's, if I were boiling it down, there's a little bit of variability like this because of claims paying. You have storms, you have things like that. You're going to have up years. When you don't have storms in the affected areas where we go adjust claims, you may not have that revenue.
Quite honestly, the other thing is a backlog in the US government paying disability claims and Medicare set-aside claims. Hard to believe, but true. So I think that, you know, when I think about those businesses, I want you to think about our ability to have nationwide claims-paying scenarios, but we do specialize claims services in the advocacy businesses. So these are the other part of what I call the outsourced insurance company model. So inside of Chris's business, if you were to go into Chris's office in San Diego, if you didn't know better, you would, you would feel as though you were going into an insurance company. Actually, it's even better than going into an insurance company because there's high energy and a bunch of pumped-up people. It's good.
And so, having said that, this is embedded in some of his business, but it's also outsourced services that we provide to our carrier partners. Having said that, before we break, do I have one moment for a question? I'll take one question, if anybody has any questions on services, because I'm concerned that you need a break. Okay. Having said that, what is the story, Andy, on the break?
All right. We have for everybody online, we're going to be taking a break until bottom of the hour, so 10:30 A.M. For everybody here in the room, bio, there's also snacks out there for a break. We'll be back in here and start at 10:30 A.M. Thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. So the next section that we have for the remainder of the morning, we've got Scott Penny, our Chief Acquisitions Officer.
... is going to lead a discussion around our approach to M&A, and we'll let him go through and do his introductions. And then, Julie Turpin, our Chief People Officer, will talk to you about our overall people strategy for our-- all of our teammates. And then Gray Nester, our Chief Information Officer, will talk to you about what we're doing on the technology front and our strategy. And then I'll go through financial, and then Powell will wrap us up before lunch. Okay, take us away, Scott.
Okay. Well, good morning. Am I on?
Good morning.
Okay. Actually, some of the stuff that I might say, you've heard it before, and that's because, it's tried and true, so bear with us as we continue to go through and reiterate, what's important, inside of our organization. It's interesting because, I've been a salesperson at Brown & Brown for the last 34 years. I started here in Daytona Beach as the assistant to the assistant. So I've done a little bit of everything. Had the opportunity to take on my first leadership role in Jacksonville, about 3 or 4 years after we had acquired that office. Then, after several years there, I moved to Indiana, took over an office that we had just acquired 12 months before that. That was our first entree into the Midwest.
And then, as Powell mentioned, we acquired the Riedman Agency, which actually got us into the Midwest in a larger way, including the Northeast. And I then, at that point, started operationally to build out, help build out the Midwest and our Northeast presence. So as you know, today, I'm the Chief Acquisitions Officer, but, you know, I, I became the Chief Acquisitions Officer in 2011. So, I've seen a lot, not only since then, but prior to that. And, and actually, prior to 2011, I was thinking about this, I actually have had the opportunity to lead, operate, and acquire as an operator in all four of our segments. So I think that's one of the reasons why Powell may have asked me to kind of step into this role, 'cause I've seen a little bit of everything.
You know, we use the term Chief Acquisitions Officer, and the best way to describe what I do, I'm gonna use a term that we don't actually use internally. And the term is, I'm in, in effect, Brown & Brown's internal investment banker. So, you, you think about, well, what does that really mean? You know, an investment banker, all they're looking to do is do deals, and you've heard us say, we don't have a goal. The goal is to do deals that fit culturally and make sense financially. So the difference between what, what I do or what we do versus a traditional investment banker, traditional investment banker just wants to do the deal. So as a shareholder myself, along with 10,000-- the 10,000 global teammate shareholders, that's 63% of the 16,000 that Powell mentioned.
So we have over 10,000 teammate shareholders. Between us, when we're actually looking at a transaction, we're not looking to get the transaction done. We're looking at making the transaction successful long term. That's the name of the game. So, you know, in effect, my responsibility is to help evaluate every acquisition that we do, period. Got a team of folks around us, but we, in effect, are an extension of our four segments. We don't do anything by ourselves. They don't do anything by themselves, so think about it as a hand-in-glove relationship. So, what I'm gonna actually do is talk a little or just mention about why we do acquisitions. I think it's already been said before.
But just kind of give you a little bit of color today on the day in the life inside an M&A prospecting opportunity. But before I do that, I'd like to maybe just share with you three or four, five kind of guiding acquisition tenets that we basically subscribe to. So it's already been said before, but you know, the best deal is often the one that you don't do. So the best deal is often the one that you don't do. This has been said, I think, by every leader before me, that all deals need to make sense or fit culturally and make sense financially. The next hasn't been said, but I think it's been inferred, and that is that we don't do a deal without a senior leader sponsor.
The acquisition team doesn't do the deal and say, "Here it is." We are actually doing it collectively, and they're alongside us from the pro forma through the close and through the integration. We have a disciplined process. Follow the process. And the last one that I'd just share with you is, and you've heard everyone up here talk about culture. The right culture creates long-term shareholder value, period. So, having said all that, let's just talk about why do we do acquisitions? Powell alluded to this in his opening remarks. We want 1 + 1 to equal three, four, five, and beyond. What do we call that? Long-term shareholder value. If 1 + 1 equals 2, we're not interested. So if you think about... You can see on the screen there, you know, we talked about talent that fits culturally.
There's been a lot of discussion about the other three bullet points, and it did, you know, that ultimately drive the success of an acquisition. It also drives the long-term shareholder value, enhancing our capabilities. And I'll talk about that when we get to the last slide there. Barrett talked about enhancing capabilities quite a bit. But, you know, we can't overemphasize the fact that I think Powell mentioned earlier that we're not just Florida-owned agency anymore. You know, when I started in 1989, we were Florida only. We're also $25 million in revenue. Think about that. And so, you know, when we expand geographically, that allows us to go across multiple economies, so we can weather, you know, average out, you know, the economy that's hot versus one that's struggling versus middle of the road.
When I first started, we couldn't do that. We were Florida, Florida, Florida. We're a different company today. Likewise, when we make acquisitions, we increase our premiums with our insurance company partners. So you've heard Chris and Steve talk about CAT, and you guys are asking questions about CAT. How do we get more CAT? Part of the way we get more CAT is we diversify our book. How do we diversify our book? We go to Europe, where Mike is. We go to Europe, and so now we can say, "Hey, we just added $150 million with you that's non-CAT. Give us more CAT." We didn't have that before.
So listen, I'll just talk a little bit about why or, or, about the how, and this is where you kind of get into the day of the life of what we, what we do every day. And so, you know, we've talked about cultural fit. Everyone talks about culture, but how do you make sure it's a fit? I would tell you, it's, it's art, it's science, just kind of mushed together. It starts with spending a lot of time with high-quality people, spending a lot of time. It's interesting, you show up at many first meetings, and they say, "Well, how much are you going to pay?" And I say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Who said we were paying anything?
I don't know you, and you don't know me." So, you know, I don't know how many of you got married on the first date, but I didn't. And we do actually think about cultural fit and acquisitions as a marriage. It's forever. So, you know, ultimately, we spend a lot of time with candidates, and that's both in the office, that's out of the office. As Powell mentioned, it's with spouses, significant others. And so quietly, we're fortunate that many of the acquisitions candidates that we talk about, someone in our firm already knows them. Whether they know them or not, or whether they've come through a third-party source, we go through the same discipline process. And so I'm sitting there quietly, having these conversations and thinking to myself, this is my inner self, so be careful. It's scary here.
Would I be willing to invite these folks to my house with their family and with my family to have Thanksgiving dinner? Don't talk a lick about business during that event, and actually enjoy our time together. So that's what my inner voice is asking the question to myself the first time or when I'm at having spent some quality time with the candidate. And if the answer is yes, then they, you know, passed the first test. They didn't even know there was a test. I call that the Thanksgiving test. And then from then on, as you're continuing to have conversations, you're thinking about, are these team players? Could they subscribe to the power of we, or are they using the vertical pronoun? We don't use the vertical pronoun I here at Brown & Brown. It's all about we.
So you're listening, thinking about, you know, how, how are they having that—how, how are they thinking about themselves, and they're thinking about others. Oftentimes, we're at a restaurant, or you're in a cab with them, or a ball game or whatever it might be, and you're thinking to yourself, well, first of all, how, if there's multiple sellers, how do they treat each other? How does one seller treat the other seller? How do they treat the waitress, the cab driver? How do they treat their team, if you get an opportunity to go into their office? How do they treat carrier partners? You know, carrier partners talk about other agents. And in some cases, when you come behind them or you're competing with them, how do they treat their customers?
So you, you continue to go through this process, and Powell alluded to this earlier, you get to the pivotal moment. The pivotal moment is, it's like when you, when you thought you were going to propose, right? You've got the science, you got the art, sometimes you just have the emotion. We try to take the emotion out with a disciplined process, but that is, do they want to be with us? And so we call that capturing the heart and the head of the seller. If you can capture the heart and the head of the seller, that means they want to be with Brown & Brown. Price is always important. Take price off the table. We haven't even talked price yet. And if that's the case, so why is that important?
Because we're in the people business, and if we have the head and the heart of the sellers, we need them. People work with and for people. We need them to deliver their team. And if we have their head and their heart, they will deliver the team. And I find it interesting that a lot of people talk about integration risk, and they attribute integration risk to post-close. I don't actually think of it that way. Yeah, we have post-close integration, trying to get the privately held company's books closed faster than they ever closed before because we're publicly traded, get converted to GAAP and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately, I would tell you the most difficult and yet the most important, ultimately, integration piece is the culture.
And we actually take care of that up front before we even consider writing the check. So, you know, then how do we figure out what check to write? How do we figure out how to structure the transaction? So, you know, we apply a disciplined approach over on the principal side here. We apply a disciplined approach. So we ultimately. Can you go back to the slide before that, please? So we ultimately have a standardized process from building the pro forma through integrating on how to do each and every transaction. And so we have a whole array of thresholds and metrics that we use, some financial, some non-financial, and ultimately, we compile all that in working with the regional leaders, and we come up with a construct. Most of our deals are 100% cash.
We are willing, from time to time, to utilize our stock. And, most of or pretty much all of our deals, we're buying 100% of the business. Most of our deals, there's some opportunity for them to continue to get some more money off the table. We call that an earn-out. And in the UK, they call it an earn-up. So same thing, just different term. So if you look at the acquisition overview slide there, you know, I think it says that, you know, what it might say to you is that 7 of the last 10 years, we've acquired over $100 million of revenue. Yeah? It says something else to me, and Barrett touched on this, and so did Powell. It says that we actually executed a plan that we laid out in 2010.
That was before I became chief acquisitions officer, so I was a regional president inside of our retail division at the time. And Powell challenged us that day and basically said, "What do we need to do to double again?" So we sat around, and one of the things that we concluded was we needed to go upmarket. You heard that from Barrett. So how are we going to go upmarket? Well, well, why do we need to go upmarket? Well, we need to go upmarket because a number of our customers that we grew up with basically had grown, and if we didn't keep up with them, they were going to wave us bye-bye. And the other, we were just getting too many new business opportunities, and we needed to cover the gamut. So we decided, how are we going to do that?
This is 2010. We're going to buy it or build it. Actually, we're going to do both. That's what we said we were going to do. So Powell alluded to, in, 2013, what did we do? We bought Beecher Carlson. Large accounts, property, casualty business. 2014, what did we do? We bought a large accounts, non-medical, ancillary benefits business, only focusing on Fortune 500 customers. 2015, what did we do? We acquired, and, and Powell mentioned this, we acquired a medical, large medical, benefit shop, that had tentacles, really, all over the Northeast, which we've since expanded. And then Powell alluded to this, in 2018, we bought the Hays Organization, which I'd only been, getting to know Jim Hayes for 20 years, before he ultimately said yes.
But, you know, they, they had both large accounts, medical or employee benefits, and property casualty. And let's not forget, Mike talked about collaboration. In buying those businesses, they were, other than Hayes, which was multi-lined, the other was either ancillary, non-medical, medical, or property casualty, all in the large account space. So what did we start doing? Cross-selling between the two. So as Barrett talked about today, so that's just one example of, you know, we do have various initiatives and strategies. We can't really share them with you until kind of after the fact, because if we shared some of those things with you today, then everybody would know what we're trying to do, and they'd try to outrun us. So, with that, I'll pause and see if there are any questions.
I want to hear Greg.
Oh, Greg?
... We had no questions on that. So, you know, given your long career and involvement at Brown & Brown, it's nice to, you know, be able to talk to you because you don't answer questions on the conference calls. But, you know, one of the things that we all have observed, and you guys have had to live with, is the rising multiples on M&A. And, maybe, you know, give, give us some of your perspective about where the multiples are today, especially with interest rates being higher and what you're seeing domestically. I know I asked the question before of the international, on the international side-
Right.
But talk domestically about the pressures you're seeing on pricing, et cetera.
Yeah, well, I would start by saying, Greg, you know, multiple of what, right? So until the industry actually comes up with a common metric, or let's call it a GAAP metric of multiple, we don't talk multiples anymore. It's all about return, you know, use of capital. And so, I think our logical head and our financial mind would say that interest rates have gone up substantially, and therefore, multiples need to come down. The reality of it is, is there's too much capital out there. And so while interest rates have gone up, there's still what I'll call too much capital, dumb money, whatever you want to call it. And ultimately, in our industry, we've also had rate, insurance rates going up, too.
So I think until insurance rates start to level off or come back down, or interest rates start to come back down, and I think I'm not sure which one's going to come down first, but if we continue to have high insurance rates, you know, ultimately, there'll be enough capital. Yeah, I'm sure that their return models have they're getting less returns, but it's still a good return. It's not like the good old days, but it's still good. And so what we have seen is you may have a premium asset that, believe it or not, might actually interview 30 firms, 30 meetings. Can you imagine that? We're not interested in that, by the way. You know, if they're gonna go through an auction process, forget it.
And our advice to somebody who's gonna go through that auction process, why waste your time? Or if you're gonna go through, figure out the 5 you think you wanna be with, meet with those 5, and then go get off in a corner and figure out how to do a deal with one of them. So you may have 30 people interviewed, let's say, a year ago, and in this example, you might have 15 or 20 actually offers. Today, you might have 7-10 interviews, but you'll have 5 offers. Those 5 offers are really all good offers. You'll have 2 offers that are actually low. You'll have 1 that's kinda middle of the road, and then you'll have 2 outliers. But as far as multiples, multiples really haven't come down.
Yeah, Meyer.
Thanks. Meyer Shields, KBW. I'm not sure if this is just a question for you or for Powell and Andy, but the brokers that are bringing you also have adjacencies in consulting that goes beyond employee benefits brokerage, and I was wondering how you think about that.
Well, you know, what we know today is our core, and it's worked well for us, so we're gonna continue to do the same over and over again. That doesn't mean that. It's also what we know today and works best for us. We're open for new ideas, but, you know, we've—if you're—I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but, just because someone else is doing it, doesn't mean we're gonna do it. We like to stay within our core lane.
Yeah, Meyer, if I could just touch on that real quick. I think, Barrett, you know, went over a little of this before. I think when you look at some of the other brokers that are out there, the challenge in all of this is: how do you get to an apple to an apple? And in most cases, when analyses are done, it's apples to bananas. And you can kind of see it when you look at our numbers, right, and the way in which we lay things out by segments. That's why the discussion earlier about wholesaling programs. If you really want to compare it to others, you almost need to put those two of them together. If you start to then say, "Well, there's consulting businesses and these others, why are you guys not in those?" We have healthcare consulting.
We do a lot of the same thing. It sits inside of retail, so we don't break it out in that fashion. Now, there's other things that we don't do inside of those that some of the other brokers that do. So just important to maybe ask some of the questions to kind of tease those apart. Generally, we probably have that inside of our business already.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Okay.
Is there a way to think about tuck-in acquisitions in terms of... It seems like that's more repeatable. Clearly, the big acquisitions are gonna be a little more chunky, but the smaller acquisitions, the tuck-ins, given your size, any numbers you can throw at it? I mean, should tuck-ins be a couple points of revenue in a given year, five points? You know, just how do you... 'Cause as I said, it seems like that's more routine, and so therefore, what is the expectation in your mind, or what should we think about how tuck-ins will contribute aside from the bigger deals?
Yeah, I mean, we really don't think in those terms of you know, we need to do X number of fold-ins or tuck-ins, as you refer to it. You know, just because it's smaller doesn't mean it takes less time or it's less risky. So, you know, ultimately, we wanna do as many deals that we can that fit culturally and make sense financially. And, Powell said that, you know, the larger deals are always gonna be lumpy. You know, what I would say to you is, we get to look at a lot of deals around the world. And so just because but we don't get to talk about anything except for what we actually do.
So we're fairly active, but we're also picky because, you know, 21% of the company we own, so we think long term.
Scott, can I, can I add to that, Mark? Two things. One, we choose not to talk about all the deals we look at, okay? So we don't get... That doesn't do anything for us. That's number one. Number two, and Scott has talked about it, and Barrett and Chris and Steve and others, but at the end of the day, the first question is: What are you getting with an acquisition other than a revenue stream or an EBITDA stream? And so sometimes in smaller acquisitions, there you gotta look carefully at the capabilities and the talent and what you're getting. And so, I, you know, Scott and I are very, we, all of us, are very well aligned on this, but the answer is, we don't wanna do tuck-in acquisitions just to do tuck-in acquisitions. I think that's an important distinction.
We wanna do tuck-in acquisitions that can be accretive to our capabilities, not just accretive to our earnings. It's an important distinction. I'm not saying anybody else is doing something different, but I'm just saying that's an important deal. Thanks.
Yeah. Hey, Mark, just... This is why we think this slide is so important, because we think it actually represents the, the rigor and discipline that we think about. If we wanted to do, I'll just make up a number, if we wanted to do 75 or 100 million every year consistently, we can do that.... we're probably not gonna drive the shareholder value that we do today if we implemented the, "We're gonna buy X amount every year," right? So we don't have the PE model where we just- we absolutely have to grow. Our goal, when you look at it, look in 2017, we did $18 million of revenue, and then we come the next year, and we do over $300 million. They're gonna kinda come in waves for us. Why? We gotta get that marriage correct.
It's super important in our model, and when we do, the deals almost always work out for us. So if we have a year where we don't do a lot, that's okay. We'll probably have another year somewhere after that, where we'll catch up in the cycle. And so we don't have this target number every year for the organization. So we'd like for, you know, all of our shareholders, think about it this way and why culture is so important to driving shareholder value and the alignment, but it won't be consistent over time. Okay.
Mike Zaremski from BMO. Just to add a follow-up to your point about the episodic nature of the deals. Is there any storyline on kind of 15, 16, or maybe 17, or of kind of why maybe your hit rate wasn't as high, or maybe you weren't looking as hard or anything, kind of reflecting back any secular trends that we that took place during that time frame that led to a lower deal volume?
Yeah, that was a lot of deals ago. You know, there was one thing, and I'm drawing a blank of what it was, but,
Well, I'll tell you what it was.
Yeah, go ahead. It's kind of simple. We were trying to get our head around the purchase price multiples. And so, you know, it's funny, if you look back there in 2012, we did the acquisition of Arrowhead, and we paid $400 million, and we paid 10x earnings. And everybody out there in the investment community said: "Ooh, Powell's changing the company." It's not about me, but that's what they said: "And by God, he's gonna break it. We're going in the wrong direction. Ooh!" Well, we were changing the damn company because we love this place, and it was one of the best acquisitions we've ever done. But we saw it in 2012. A lot of other people didn't. And so I would tell you, that's my impression in that period of time.
We did a couple large acquisitions in 2012, and then 2013, and then 2014. So remember, that would be Arrowhead, Wright, Beecher Carlson, and then Wright, those three. And so, I think it's a combination of purchase price multiples and then figuring out, quite honestly, what we really thought and we wanted to be. Because there was a lot of valuation of capabilities there, out there, that maybe we weren't either ready to get into or we weren't ready to pay up for. That's how I would answer it.
Yeah. Mike, so look at 2017 and 2018 for a second. So inside of 2018, that's got the acquisition of the Hayes Group inside of it. So that was over $200 million of revenue. That deal could have closed in 2017, right? So you can move it around between.
Yeah.
But if you come back to Scott's point about the importance of getting to know people, right? We could have somehow figured out how to force that deal in 2017, maybe, if we wanted to, but if we didn't have all the alignment of Jim and all of his leaders, it may not have worked out as well as what it did today. So we're completely comfortable. If things move between periods, but we get all the alignment we want, we're all good with that. So we were talking to a tremendous number of companies during 2015, 2016, 2017. It just, they kinda come in at the right time. It's kinda like: "Hey, when did you have your best friend?" Well, I don't know. It just takes time. You gotta get to know them. So that's why I say, think about that they're gonna kinda come in, in those cycles.
That doesn't mean that we're not talking to people. We're always talking to people. Okay?
Mike, I have one other comment that I think is important now, and I, I know you know this, but I think it's really important, and Scott alluded to it earlier. There are firms out there that will sit down with a, a potential acquisition, and in the first 30 minutes, they'll throw a number on the table, and we don't do that. And quite honestly, you know, we subscribe to the Scott Penny and the Brown & Brown philosophy, which is, if somebody asks us, how should we do the process of selling our business? It's a pretty simple answer. Go out and meet with a group of people that you think would be a potential fit, assess the cultural fit that you, you fit best with, and then go get in a corner and cut a deal.
If you want the absolute, categorically highest price, you will probably be at private equity, and then let's bring the future to the present. You won't be there in three years. So the business that you created and worked so hard, and you say that you care all about the people, you won't be part of because you won't like the way it's run. And so some people listen to that and agree, and some people don't. But we're not gonna go... Scott Penny and I, you know, the bankers, sometimes on these big deals, they say: "We want a number." I love this. This is my favorite. "We want a number up front to see if you're serious." And you're like: "Well, that doesn't work for us. We gotta meet with them first." So Arrowhead's a great example.
We said: "We gotta meet with Chris Walker and one other person from there before we ever make an offer." And they said, "Well, you can't do that." I said: "We're not paying. We're not, we're not playing." And I think it would be a fit. So the point is, is, people work with and for people, they don't work for companies. And over all the time we spend talking to people, part of it is a learning experience for us. So I could meet with somebody, I'll make this up, I could meet with somebody in Germany, I just pulled that out of the air, and we might not do a deal in Germany anytime in the near future or ever.
But I take that learning and share it with Scott, and we talk about it and how they think about business there, and how does that relate or not relate to England or Ireland or Brussels, where we do have an office? So this is a cumulative thing, and that's an important, you know, the idea of long-term corporate knowledge about businesses, there's great value. And what you're seeing up here is we're operators. I'm an insurance salesperson. Everybody else is an insurance salesperson up here, too. Andy, Gray, Julie, Scott, we all sell insurance. So the conversation that we have with people is much different than if you were a financial wizard, or you know. That doesn't mean you can't be smart and... But what value do you add in terms of selling and servicing insurance if you don't have never sold insurance? That's okay.
I'm not crushing it. I'm just saying I view that as limited. They may help you control expenses, but do they understand how to create long-term, sustainable, meaningful growth, which translates to value? That's it.
Hey, what we can do, we can take some more questions at the end on other topics. Just conscientious, we want to get Gray up to, to cover technology. So, Gray, take us away.
Awesome. Good morning, everybody.
Good morning.
My name is Gray Nester, and since it's my first time chatting with you all in this forum, just want to give you a little bit about my background. I started in the insurance business writing software in about 1995, and then in 1997, I found my way to my first independent agency in Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1997, I've been delivering technology solutions to enable businesses to help sell and service insurance-related products, and really care a lot about helping people protect the things that are most important to them.
But also think a lot about how do I partner with the business leaders and the operators that you saw a few minutes ago to ensure that we're enabling them for success, that we're able to level the playing field in what all of our competitors are doing, and that we're actually using technology to improve business outcomes instead of investing in things for the sake of investing in things. And so that's a little bit about how we think about it. When we talk about using technology around Brown & Brown, we talk about three things very simply: How do we make it work securely? How do we run it like a business? And how do we use it to improve results? And if we can't do those three things, then I don't deserve the opportunity to talk to you today.
All of our people that we have that show up every day and work in our technology solutions organization, while they fit culturally, and we have to make the right investments around talent and all the things that you've heard about, all the other investments that we're making, we have to ensure that they align to wanting to do those three things. We've been very fortunate, since I joined Brown & Brown in December of 2019, to be able to add some really talented people to this organization that are delivering technology solutions in a different way. They're able to do that because they have different experiences, and they've seen things from outside of the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that the teammates that have been here for a long time are not doing a fantastic job.
I think about, we've talked a lot about the Arrowhead acquisition, all the great talent that we got through that acquisition. I think about Joe Shamp, one of our divisional CIOs, that came through that acquisition, that still today is one of the best business partners that we have, and all of our divisional CIOs do an amazing job delivering technology for the businesses they align with. So it's not all about how do we bring talent in from the outside, it's about how do we help people in their talent journey be successful as we move forward. As we think about how this works inside of the business, one of the things that you might be asking is: How are we doing from a technology investment perspective? A few years ago, we talked about the need to make some strategic investments in technology. How are those investments playing out?
It's important to know that we are doing a really good job as it relates to technology, data, cybersecurity, and innovation. You've heard about that from each of the operators this morning, and we're continuing down our journey of consolidating core platforms across the business where it makes sense and there's an appropriate return on investment. If you were to go back two slides and you were to look at the investment dollars that we have in acquisitions, each one of those creates a new and interesting opportunity... for us to continue down this journey. This is a journey, not a destination. There's not a finish line. We continue to invest a healthy amount of capital into technology, data, information security, and innovation around the business.
As we think about data, it's really important to understand that we're not trying to do data for the sake of data. We're actually trying to figure out how to deliver actionable insights inside of the system of engagement. So where our teammate is, how do we deliver the information they need to help them have an outsized result? How do we help them have a better business outcome? So it's not about, for us, how do we build these huge data warehouses and dashboards that people have to go outside of their normal journey to get to, and then find information that they then have to go back and drop into where they were, but how do I deliver that information at the point of engagement so they can have that? Don't get me wrong, we have tons of data.
You've heard every operator talk about how important that is to their business, and we have tons of systems that deliver very interesting analytics outside of that system of engagement. But if I think about the normal sales process, how do I enable one of our teammates to have a different conversation than maybe what somebody else is having with them while they're on the phone or in that meeting without having to drop out and find that information somewhere else? How do I enable them to win in the system of engagement? And then, as we think about innovation, one of the things that we are very fortunate to do through our decentralized sales and service culture is we're able to try things.
As Barrett talked about the difference in providing insurance in Portland, Oregon, and Miami, Florida, earlier today, we're able to experiment with things inside of different market segments and inside of different geographies, see how those work, test and learn, fail fast, but when they're successful, we're able to then take them and scale them across the business quickly with the team that we've established at the enterprise to be able to deliver that across all of our teammates where that makes sense.
I think it's a competitive advantage of ours to be able to test and learn in very different segments and in very different geographies and have that ownership mentality around the investments that our people are making in technology across the business, but also be able to roll those up and say, "Hey, wait, we're winning with this particular technology inside of this particular business. Does this scale?" We think that makes it very unique for us. As we go deeper about data and artificial intelligence, I think I've been asked about data a handful of times already this morning, so I'm happy to answer any of those questions, but it is the biggest thing going on, and it is one of our most important assets behind our teammates.
And so there's a few things that we're doing in the data journey that we think are interesting and that you may want to know about. The first is, how do we use our data to enhance the customer experience? And so when you think about how our customers want to engage with us, and you think about when we're really successful, we're selling a very complex product across multiple risk bearers that have different delivery methods and different ways of integration into the service profile, depending on what size account that is. How do we simplify that for the customer? And that all starts with how we integrate with our carriers, with our risk bearers, and it also starts with: what do we know about that customer, and how do we help them get to the answer faster?
Everybody in the world is trying to do this right now. It's not an insurance-specific thing, but we're doing this very successfully within our retail business through a purpose-built business environment. We're doing this within our programs business in how do we build and develop new products to help people cover the things that are most important to them. We're using this in Steve's business, as you heard him talking about our ability to make sure that when somebody comes to us for a solution, we get the right people solving the right problems for that particular customer. That's really important. It also is helping us enable innovation. Behind the enabling innovation point is quite simply what Chris was talking about earlier.
As we start to look inside of our data, we tend to be able to see what risk bearers are interested in and not interested in. And that creates opportunities for us to win and opportunities for us to deliver products to the market that the market is looking for, but nobody else is solving. And so that gives us a unique opportunity, with the diversity across the business, to really think about how we use our data to innovate in the product development areas of Brown & Brown and deliver unique and interesting solutions, potentially proprietary products inside of Barrett's business, that help us win more business. We're also using our data to fuel sales and growth, so a customer like you might buy products like this.... How do you have that conversation with people?
How do you talk about the products they're not buying, and how do you help them understand why other people are buying those products? And so we're starting to see, and have been seeing for many years, back to the program slide, real wins within our data. We also have artificial intelligence deeply integrated into our business today. That's been integrated into our business, in many different ways across the typical machine learning types of artificial intelligence, and we are beginning to work with new forms of artificial intelligence in different parts of the business to see how they may help us move things forward faster.
Wouldn't be a conversation about technology if we didn't talk about cybersecurity, and also it wouldn't be a conversation at Brown & Brown if we didn't talk about physical security, because if the teammate's the most important thing, providing them a safe place to come to work is really, really important. We have invested a tremendous amount in cybersecurity and in physical security around Brown & Brown to protect not only our teammates but the organization, our data assets, and the systems that we process on every day. And so there's a couple of things inside of this that I'm really proud of, the first of which is our cybersecurity awareness program. We have tons of money invested in cybersecurity programs, as everybody else does, but at the end of the day, those programs are only as good as the last actor.
All you have to do is pick up The Wall Street Journal, and you'll read about the latest breach. The last line of defense in protecting an organization is the teammate that sits in the chair every day and is educated around what a threat may look like. Our cybersecurity knowledge at the desk level has increased significantly, and the number of phone calls that I get on my cell phone actually makes me proud of our 16,000 teammates, because when we go in and do one of our simulations, it won't be an hour, it'll be minutes, that my cell phone rings and somebody goes, "Hey, is something going on? Because I just got, like, 30 messages at the same time." That's something that we're super proud of.
Now, we still have more to do, as does everybody else, and this world is changing faster than any world you can imagine. And so we continue to invest in this, we continue to do the right things by the organization, and I think that that is going to continue to be a place where we have to deploy more capital to protect the business and to protect our teammates. As we think about all of that, though, it gives us a pretty interesting perspective, because one of the things we get to do every day is we get to help people manage risk. And one of the risks that we talk a lot about managing is actually cybersecurity risk through our different cyber programs.
And so with the addition of people like Barry Hensley and Rob Burch to our leadership program inside of our security organization that we announced, call it 90 days ago-ish, we're able to take what we know, take those broad experience that they have before joining Brown & Brown, and actually be able to help our customers think differently about how they manage their cybersecurity risk with the deep expertise that we've added into the organization. And we think that's one of the competitive advantages that we have. The last thing that I'll just talk about before we open the floor up for questions is we are trying at every turn to integrate security in the operating model. You cannot successfully go in and bolt on security after the fact to legacy systems and all of these things and expect it to keep up.
And so we have to continue to integrate that into the operating model, ensure that as we're building new systems and that we're thinking about risk, that security is engineered in the process and not after the process, so that we can appropriately protect those assets. So with that, I'll be happy to take a couple of questions.
Over here for Greg.
Greg Peters with Raymond James. ChatGPT, large language models, generative AI, supposedly or potentially can be game-changing for a lot of different industries. Can you talk about your perspective on those technologies and how you're thinking about it inside both Brown & Brown and for your customers?
We're thinking about it and talking about it a lot. It will be game-changing. We think that a significant portion of the workforce will do different things in the future based on the ability to implement platforms like that effectively. We think a lot about how it can help us enhance the business. We also think a lot about responsible AI and how we deploy it effectively. And so we are working right now on implementing a few proof of concepts, proof of technologies within the business that'll go live, you know, call it over the next year that will allow us to test and learn inside of the business and better understand that. We're also watching the regulatory side of that, Greg, because you've seen some things come out in California across the last seven days.
The UK, in Mike's area, has been very open about what type of licenses you may need to hold to deploy technologies and things of this nature. So I think it's one of these things that it definitely is gonna change the world we operate in. It definitely is going to impact the workforce and move people into different types of jobs. It's definitely a great opportunity for business, but it's one of those things that, while we're moving into it and we're moving at pace, we aren't moving into it blindly because we understand there's some real challenges around it.
Mark, right here.
Should technology reduce costs for Brown & Brown? Is that part of your charge?
So, Mark, that's a great question. I think it depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about a standard process that we've done for a long period of time, we should be able to get more efficient and effective through many different operating models, technology being one of those. And I think you see our business scale over a long period of time, as Powell showed the results earlier. That doesn't mean that there aren't new technologies and investments that need to be made. And so, yes, there are certain things that technology is gonna reduce the cost in, but then there's also places where you're investing new dollars that sort of blend out the average, and that's, that's how we think about the margin and how we invest in the technology business.
But net-net, you know how we like numbers.
Yeah, so, I mean, we talk a lot internally about that. We don't come out and say: Here's our targets around these things, right? We talk about how do we utilize the technology more efficiently. Net-net, over a long period of time, you should see us be able to deploy technology that would make a process more efficient if that process is highly repeatable, and drive improvement in those areas. But with all the different businesses that you've heard from this morning and all the diversity that we have and the businesses that we're adding through what Scott does, we always have a new influx coming in.
So net-net, over a long period of time, if the business was to stay flat, you should be able to use technology to make that more efficient, and we've seen that, in many industries over a long period of time. The business isn't static, so it makes it really hard to say, "This is what you should expect.
Thank you.
I think an important point, too, there is, and Gray alluded to it, is the increased cost of cybersecurity. So let's not kid ourselves, whether you work at a bank or a financial institution or a brokerage operation or whatever the case may be, there's an offset, so we're, we're facing increasing costs there, too. So I think that, the best way to interpret what... how I would interpret what he said in a very basic way is, there will be offsets, and there will be increases, but until and at which time we give you clear direction, figure it's not changing.
Yeah. Excuse me, Mark, if I can add to this because I think it's some of the other pieces, and Powell touched on it earlier. This is about how we think about profitable growth for the organization. We've got a tremendous amount of moving parts inside of a $4 billion organization, and everything's not static. That's the challenge. It would be perfect in some aspects if it was, but it's not, 'cause it's, it's real business for all of us. And so we're driving a lot of different programs and technology to give us different efficiencies, but that also gives us the capital to reinvest in other areas inside of the business in which we have to, right? So, it's hard to say, well, I'm just gonna take one variable and hold it constant because you're gonna have hundreds of other ones moving around all the other time.
What we're trying to do is say, when we put all that together and we can see all the moving parts, how do we get profitable growth over the long term? That's our balance that we're trying to do. Okay.
Two questions. One over there. Go ahead.
Okay, I was hoping you could provide a sort of simple outline for which technologies are uniform across all of the Brown & Brown offices and which ones are not, to maximize the benefits of decentralization.
As you think about those platforms that align to delivering business, we try to have the people that are delivering the business systems of engagement as close to the business as possible. And so that looks differently depending on what business you're in. So if you're in Mike Bruce's business, and you're in the retail side, that may look like a standard operating platform across all of retail, whereas in Mike Bruce's business, where he talked about Landmark, Decus, and BDB, that looks like three different operating platforms 'cause they deliver three different solutions to our clients. So if you think about enterprise finance, enterprise collaboration, enterprise security, those types of things are operated at the top of the house.
Those types of things are delivered consistently across the business and allow us to not only scale those things at cost, but also allow us to meet all the requirements of being a publicly traded company and doing the right thing for our customers. As you start to think about how we engage with our clients and how we sell and service business, those are delivered more at the local level, bringing them to the highest point that we can in all situations. So inside of Barrett's business, in traditional benefits, right, we have a platform that allows us to look at that similarly, even though there are different requirements in a large account than there is in a small account.
Can, can we do this? Just, 'cause we're gonna be tight on time. Can we have? Guys, can you hold those, and we're gonna grab them on the back end? We just wanna make sure we get through all the areas. So Charlie and Kristen, we'll come back to those. Okay, Julie.
Hi. Hello, everyone. It's wonderful to be here with you. I'm Julie Turpin, and I have about 20-plus years in the insurance industry. I was formerly with a competitor, and then I started my own property casualty firm. I understand how to bind insurance, how to place insurance, and how to bill for it. And I happen to be the Chief People Officer here, so that, I think, serves me exceptionally well. I joined Brown & Brown 11 years ago, and I was an operator at Brown & Brown. I operated a number of profit centers and had the ability to learn how to work with Scott and do acquisitions. I was responsible for a couple of acquisitions within one of our segments of business.
So when Powell asked me in 2020 if I would be interested in taking on the Chief People Officer role, that was right before COVID, by the way, I thought, that's really interesting. I'm an operator, right? I understand how to operate a business. I understand how to lead teammates. I'm not sure I understand the whole HR function, and, you know, we call it TR. And so I take sort of exception when someone says to me, "Oh, TR, you do HR, you do TR." And I say, "I'm actually an operator that has the absolute pleasure of serving 16,000 teammates in our organization." And so that's how I view myself.
I think the advantage for us as an organization in that perspective is, when we think about rolling out programs from a TR perspective, we think about it from the operator's viewpoint. That's very different. If you think about that for a moment, I sat at the desk as the profit center leader, so I know what it takes to implement something. I also know what they're struggling with or what they're balancing. So when we're asking them to roll something out, we do it in a very different way, and we do it from the lens of the operator. That feels different, and we get a different form of compliance, if you will. Today, I have the absolute honor of talking with you about our teammates.
I'm not sure how many investor days you've been to where TR gets the opportunity to talk about our teammates. You've heard consistently here today and this morning about how important teammates are to our organization. I want to start with sharing with you really our people strategy. Here, I'm gonna highlight a couple of things that are very important to us as an organization. I'm not gonna talk about all of this, but I will talk about just bringing our people strategy to life for you. When we think about attracting teammates, we attract the best diverse talent that fits culturally. We know that not everyone is gonna fit in our organization. We understand that not everyone is as disciplined.
We understand that not everyone wants to work in a decentralized organization where you get to make decisions and the decisions you make, you're ultimately responsible for. We understand that that doesn't work for everyone, and we're okay with that. We're very slow to hire in terms of being deliberate about who we have joining the team. That matters to us tremendously. When we think about onboarding, I imagine many of you can think about an onboarding opportunity where it was really good. Some of you can probably think about one that wasn't so good. Onboarding is very important in our organization. It gives you a sense of who we are. It gives you a sense of what matters to us. It gives you a sense about how much we care. So we take onboarding very seriously. Our senior leaders are involved, the local leaders are involved.
We ask for feedback along the way. We do check-ins with our individuals, our new teammates who are joining us. They have the ability to build a development plan and partner with their leaders through a one-two year process. To us, that's critical. And then we come back around and ask them about how that experience was. And we have the ability to allow for decentralized onboarding. So we have an enterprise program that we help the teammates through, and then you can formalize it, or you can structure it in a way that's in support of your own culture and your own local office culture and your own demographic culture. So for us, that's a really important piece. That's another piece of our decentralization that we hold very close, if you will.
When we think about engage and develop, there's a number of programs here that are important to us. So leadership is really critical to us as an organization, and leadership doesn't come naturally. You just don't learn it over time. And so for us, we want to be really deliberate about bringing together and bringing to life programs that allow you to understand, number one, is leadership something you want to get involved in? So we have a program for that. So it's a program where you identify: do you want to be a leader, or do you want to continue to be an individual contributor? We think both are excellent, but we want you to have the opportunity to determine that. And so you can do that early on in your career. We also have programs that help you as you become a new leader.
When you change from becoming a producer, responsible for your book of business and maybe yourself and a small team, it's different when you become a profit center leader and you start becoming responsible for a number of teammates. We recognize the difference in that, and we want to make sure that we help support teammates in that particular journey, so we have a way to do that. We also have a way when you get a little longer into your career, maybe you've been leading teams for five-six years, but we have another program for that that really helps you step up your game there, to teach you how to be more strategic, to teach you about vision, how to capture the hearts and minds of our teammates. So we offer these programs to really help develop our leaders throughout the organization.
We also have programs for our producers and our sales team, our service teammates. Those are just as important to us as well. So once you decide really the direction you want to go, we've got a place to really help support you. We also have a lot of training and development opportunities on demand for our teammates. So our teammates have the opportunity to create their program, but they also have on-demand opportunities. We also offer internship programs that are really an opportunity to invite younger teammates into the organization to truly understand what insurance is all about and what that looks like from an opportunity to grow and develop and build a career. When we think about perform and progress, we have a couple things here that I think really make us very different from a culture perspective. Number one, we have a set of competencies.
So how we think about how you perform at Brown & Brown, how we connect you to the business, how we connect your growth and development. We have a common language for that. So how you show up in the organization has a common language so that we can speak to that. We can measure that. It flows through our engagement programs. It flows through our performance management. We expect our leaders to provide feedback to our teammates, and they can do that through our set of competencies. That creates a consistency and an opportunity to understand how you can grow in our organization. The other thing we do there is we give teammates an opportunity to connect with each other, to connect across the organization, to build their networks, to understand why collaboration is so important, to understand other businesses, to understand other opportunities within our organization.
Those are elements that are deeply important to us, and we really want our teammates to understand that there are a number of opportunities across the organization. When I started, we were about 8,000 teammates, and now we're 16,000. That means there's a number of roles that weren't available, you know, eight, nine, 12 years ago that are available now. And so continuing to help our teammates understand that as we grow as an organization, that creates opportunity for our teammates as well. And those opportunities create growth. They create the opportunity for retention. They create the opportunities for thinking differently. And so we want our teammates to really understand that you can build a long-term career here. We talked about earlier about the importance of long-term investments.
We feel that way with our teammates, too, and we want to make sure that they have opportunities to experience different things, learning in place opportunities, some career pathing, succession planning. Those are all pieces to us from a perform and progress perspective that are deeply important. When we think about retention, which is critical to us, we think about listening to our teammates. We do surveys every year, and what we do with those surveys is we read all of those comments. We categorize them, and we build a plan of action so that we're certain to address our teammates' concerns, and that we develop programs to help them, to respond to those, to show them that we're listening, to show them that their feedback matters. The other pieces here that we've developed is really our TRGs, our Teammate Resource Groups.
So in other organizations, they're called employee resource groups, but here we call them TRGs, and those TRGs create a sense of community. Teammates come together who either want to learn about each other, or they want to learn about other ways in the organization to connect. We also do. When we do our Be Our Best survey, we actually ask our leaders in the local offices to build a development plan themselves, to sit with their teams, to share those results, and to come up with a solution on how to implement one thing in their office that will improve their culture, that will improve the teammate experience. We think that capturing the hearts and minds of our teammates is one of the most important things that we do as leaders.
We want our teammates to stay, we want them to recognize how valued they are, and we want them to recognize that the opportunities they have across our community. Next, I want to share with you, our leaders talked a lot today about the power of our culture and how connected we are and how collaborative we are. I feel like some of these numbers really demonstrate that. When you look at, we've got 16,000 teammates. Powell mentioned this. Scott mentioned it. We have 60% of our teammates are shareholders. That creates a different mindset in the organization. How you make decisions is different if you look at that as your money. How you lead is different when you think that the investment you're making matters. Our teammates think about our business. They care. They ask the questions.
Powell talked about when he comes in or when teammates ask about our, our ESPP plan. That's meaningful. Teammates really care about that. They want to know how they can participate. They want to know how we're doing. They make decisions based on that. We also have a culture of caring. We truly believe that teammates want to work for a company that demonstrates they care. We care a lot. We have 90% of our offices really support local nonprofits. We also have a disaster relief fund, where we help provide support to our teammates and others across the communities who are in need of that help. We fund that ourselves. I fund that personally. We have other teammates who fund that. We fund that across the organization, so we can take pride in how we share those and distribute those funds to teammates and others in the community.
93% of our teammates say we're a great place to work. That's a tremendous recognition. We believe that that says a lot in terms of how our teammates feel about being here, about our leadership, about how much they trust our organization, about their intention to stay, about wanting to be here, and about growing in our organization. You can see our workplace awards there. We've got a number of them, but I want to just wrap up in spending some time on our teammate resource groups. These are resource groups that we've put together over the past couple of years. They are sponsored by our senior leadership team... but they're teammate run. So our teammates get together, they create a sense of community, they work together, they share stories together. They celebrate on a monthly basis. They get out into the communities. They create educational programs.
They help us recruit talent that thinks about things differently. So we, we spend time with these teams. We also have them operate like one of our businesses. We have an accountability process for them. So on a quarterly basis, they come back and share really how they've spent their time, how are they meeting their goals, and how they spent their budget. It's really important for us to really hold them in the same sort of standard, if you will, and same level of discipline as we hold our businesses. So with that, I will open it up to some questions.
You've got back here.
Mike Zaremski from BMO. I'm curious if Brown & Brown has teammate hiring goals annually, and if there are, you know, incentives for the offices to meet those goals?
Well, the way I'd answer that is we're always in the market to onboard talent. I think Powell mentioned that this morning. Even if we don't have quite the right seat, we're gonna put them on the team because that's really critical for us. So I think for us, it's we're always recruiting, we're always wanting to bring on teammates, and then we'll find the roles for them. And we'll put them in roles that they can demonstrate their talent, and then we can shift them. So we're always in the recruiting business.
Are there specific, like, you know, 5, 5-7% band, 7-10, in terms of recruiting?
No.
No, Mike, I think what Julie tried to do with all of the leaders is trying to work with them to actually put together a strategic plan for their teammates, right? So some people might need to hire 10, some might need to hire three, some might need to hire 30. That's all about having a specific plan tied to that business and then making sure that you're hiring the right talent to feed into it, right? Because all of our businesses are at different growth cycles inside of it, and that's really what, you know, Julie's tried to try to implement across all of the teams. We don't have everything all perfectly figured out, but that's really what... Every business has a people plan inside of it.
Mm-hmm.
Greg's go ahead.
Greg Peters from Raymond James. Julie, maybe you could step back, 'cause I know it was mentioned in, maybe Powell mentioned it earlier, but Brown & Brown University is a pretty unique creature inside the industry, and there's some cost-sharing going on between bringing in new talent. So maybe you could step back and talk to us about Brown & Brown University, what it does, how it works out with inside the organization, et cetera.
Yeah, thank you for the question. So the way it works is that we've got some schools of service in there. So we've got a producer school, we've got a service school, we've got a finance school, and we've got a couple of others in there. So teammates are in that program for about two years, I would say, and that they work through that program. They're producers, so I'll just use the example of producers, and they learn the business from a technical perspective. So they spend the time in there, they work directly with the leaders in that BBU, and they actually help guide them.
They help teach them how to look at the risk, they teach them how to sell it, they teach them how to consult, they teach them every element of the business, and then they graduate from there. I don't know if you guys would add anything else to that?
I'll add something. It's also, as Barrett said, Greg, it's not just for the entry-level person-
Yeah.
-we are starting to stack on top of it. So it's in the sales, roles, which we're all in sales, but I'm talking about producer, broker roles. It's technical and sales training. But you could be three, five, seven, 10 years in and then come back to, let's say, advanced training, and we continue to build out those capabilities. But you're in, if you're in service or you're in marketing, then there's specific things geared towards service and marketing, and how to handle new business and things like that. But we're really pleased with the way the, Brown & Brown University has evolved and will continue to evolve. All right, anything else?
I was just gonna add that we have leadership programs wrapped around that as well. So, we've got one leadership program where we have the opportunity to teach our teammates. Number one, we collect feedback about their performance. We do a 360, and then we help them build their strategic plan, their vision, and help them really understand how to sort of move their particular profit center forward. This is after they're in the role for about five or six years, and that really gives them the ability to see that business slightly different, differently, strategically move it forward.
Okay, any others? Okay. Okay, before we get into the financial piece, I'd like for all of you to envision something for me. I'd like for you to envision a little small boat out in the middle of the ocean, okay? And what happens when storms come up? That boat rocks really hard. Okay? Now, I want you to think about a really large barge. Right. Real wide in nature. It's in the same seas. Does it rock as much? It sure doesn't. So what did you hear this morning from Powell? What did you hear from Steve, Mike, Chris?... Barrett and all the other leaders, is we have, with purpose, we have built our business to be a really large barge. Why? We want stability inside of it. You've heard us talk about diversification and the power of diversification in every one of our segments. Why?
It's because sometimes things are going up really well, and then there's other times they're going down. Not all businesses perform the same way. It sure would be great if they did. The problem is, if they all perform really well at the same time, high likelihood they're all gonna probably perform really bad at some times, okay? That's not what we want inside of our organization; we want stability and consistency in how we deliver our financial results. And hopefully, what you've heard today, and what I'll go through today, is really the culmination of what comes out, okay? 'Cause we don't get our financial performance if we don't get all of our teammates to be able to pull on the oar to push the boat forward all the time. We don't get it to work if technology doesn't function for us each and every day.
We don't get it if we don't have all of our carrier partners. All of that comes together to then deliver the financial performance that we do each and every year. We've been able to grow our organization, total revenues, double-digit. We did it last year. We did it five years ago. We also did it 10 years on average. And that's really the combination of leveraging the acquisition strategy that Scott talked about earlier, so that's fueled inside of there. Then we couple that with the organic growth of our organization, and we believe that is one of the cores to how we grow this company, is organic. We've got to link those two together, right? We can grow the heck out of the organization if we want to, from an acquisition standpoint.
We won't create the same amount of shareholder value if we don't fuel the organic growth inside of there. So when you look at these numbers, we outpace the S&P 500, and we outpace all the other large public brokers. It doesn't matter if it was last year, if it's this year, if it's on the five-year average or 10-year average, we always end up outpacing everybody. Maybe not on an individual quarter, 'cause things go up and down, back and forth, but you heard from Powell earlier, we don't get overly worked up about the 90-day sprint. What we're thinking about is: How do we grow our organization? How do we grow shareholder value over a 12-, a 24-, 36-, 54-month period? So we're very, very pleased with what we're able to do organically as an organization.
If you look back to our organic, we're almost always right at the top. Maybe not number one, but we're always right there at the top. Now, it might not be that retail is all the way at the top or that program is at the top, it might be the wholesale at the top. It's the culmination of that combination of our business is what drives our organic each and every year. So if we can grow the top line, the question is, what do we do with our margins? Well, over the last 10 years, we've been able to average margins in that kind of that 32% range. So we've heard from a lot of people said, "Yeah, as Brown & Brown gets bigger, what's gonna happen?
Well, your margins are gonna go down like everybody else because you're gonna revert to the mean." And we would say we built an organization that has the ballast inside of it, the discipline and the rigor to deliver consistently strong industry-leading margins, right? So we've seen some progress in the others, but think about our organization. In the last 10 years, we've doubled it. The margins are still in the same range. Now, we made some investments during that time period, back to Gray's earlier comment about technology. So we, with purpose, took the margins down during the 2017, 2018, and 2019 period, but we knew that we would get the returns back. So markets, a little bit to your question, we will do that inside the business.
We've had very strong margin expansion over the last three years, and we're having a great 2023. We think all that sounds really good, but the question is: How much cash can you generate as an organization? And we're really proud of the fact that about $0.25 of every $1 of revenue that we generate as an organization is available cash for us to invest back into the organization. That can be in the acquisitions, that can be in dividends, share repurchases, or capital expenditures. But look at the gap that we've had over time, right? We run anywhere from 35-70% better than the average of all the other public peers. It's not by mishap that we're able to do that, right? It's because we have a really disciplined organization. We have a decentralized sales and service organization.
We can see everything in there. We have an ownership culture. We spend the money like it's our own because 21-22% of it is our money, so we're not gonna do anything unusual. We're not gonna waste money inside the organization. We can do that. We focus on how we collect our cash. We talk about it all the time. It's really important. We want to collect our money as quickly as possible and pay it out at the last possible time that we can as an organization. There's nobody in the industry that has been able to consistently deliver that cash conversion over decades. We could back this up over 20 years and 30 years, and it's actually gonna look very, very similar.
So as you think about Brown & Brown and how we've been able to grow the organization, look at the consistency that we've been able to deliver. So what does that mean in cash flow from operations? So earlier, I talked about the fact of we've been able to grow our revenues double digit, a little over 12% on the ten-year average. What have we been able to do with cash flow from operations? Well, we grew it faster, so that's over 13% on a compounded basis. Last year, we delivered over $880 million. This year, we're on the trajectory to probably deliver somewhere around $1 billion of cash flow from operations. Should be another outstanding year for the organization.
Then when we look at our earnings per share, so this is on an adjusted basis, so we account for foreign exchange inside of here, any unusual items in nonrecurring in nature that's out there, integration costs, trying to get it fairly close on an apples to apples. Well, we've grown our earnings per share also almost 14% on a compounded basis. So even with all the acquisitions that we do and the amortization of the intangibles, we've also been able to grow the bottom line even faster than revenues. All right? We can do that because we're very strategic about our tax footprint, how we think about where we operate as an organization, and trying to operate and optimize that the best that we can. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the capital we generate and how do we deploy it.
Well, over the last 10 years, we've generated almost $6 billion of cash flow from operations. We are a net deployer of debt - of capital, excuse me, right? Which means we're also a net issuer of debt, so we've deployed almost $8 billion of cash over the last 10 years. Most of that has went to fuel the acquisition strategy that we talked about earlier. We've also bought back shares over time, some of those opportunistic. When our share price, we believe, is below intrinsic, we will buy some of those back, and we'll also buy back at times in order to manage the creep. With 29 years of dividend increases, there's not many companies that have increased their dividends for 29 years in a row.
It's only 70 basis points of return, but we're really proud of the fact that we're 29 years, and we've been recognized as a, as a Dividend Aristocrat. And then, share repurchases and, and CapEx, two items inside there. If you look at how we think about our capital deployment, it looks really similar to the acquisition slide earlier, right? When we have time periods where we have opportunities to have great companies join the Brown & Brown team, you're gonna see we're gonna deploy capital, okay? And then, on those other years, we'll have excess capital. We'll build that up, and then we'll redeploy that that's out there. We think that the most efficient use of our capital is to pay in cash. That is the, the best way for us to get returns. We do not want to use a tremendous amount of stock.
It's way, way too expensive. Let's talk about our financial policy, liquidity profile. So a few things on here. As an organization, we're generally pretty conservative in how we think about our balance sheet. Why? Because we own over 20% of this organization. We never want to be in a position where we're highly levered, the economy takes some sort of a blip, and a big chunk of our cash flow gets consumed through higher interest, right, and we're not able to invest back into our business. Some people have asked us: What's been the impact on your cash flow of higher interest rates? We tell you, it's about 3%.
We have done an outstanding job of managing the combination of fixed and floating to make sure that we can dip into the market at the right time and take advantage of it, and it has been great over the last seven-eight years to have a portion of our debt floating and to have a portion of it fixed, and I'll talk about that in a little bit more. From a leverage standpoint, we have a pretty wide range on this, so 0-2.5 on a net basis and 0-3 on a gross basis. The reason why we have that is we don't set a lower tier.
If there's times where we'll drop down below 1.5 on a net basis, which we have over time, we will not go reissue stock j- or s- debt, just to put ourselves back in the range. Why would we do that if we're trying to drive shareholder value? The same thing applies in your house. Why would you go take out a line of credit and then park the money right back in the bank and pay the spread on it? We have as much access to capital as we need as an organization. So we're a debt minimalization model. We'll go get it when we need it, otherwise, we're gonna pay it down over time.
We finished last year with over $880 million of cash that I mentioned, over $650 million of Brown & Brown cash, and the important thing here is we have a revolver of $800 million, as well as we have access on our bank facilities to increase that by another $900 million. We've got plenty of flexibility. If we find the right companies between the cash that we generate, so think about the $1 million or the $1 billion I talked about earlier, and what that will look like in the future, and the access here. We can lean in for great companies at the right time. So what have we been able to do over the last 10 years?
We have a proven track record that when there's acquisition opportunities, we're gonna take our debt up a little bit. Now, for us, you know, we look at 3, we're like, "Ooh, that's, that's pretty aggressive for us." Others might say, "Well, that's not very aggressive at all." Right? So if you go into the private equity world, they're gonna be running at 6, 7, 8% of some sort of an adjusted number, so they feel good about it, that's out there. That's not the real number, right? We like to be able to come back down. So if you look at that in 2014, those are the acquisitions we talked about earlier. We did it in 2018, 2020, and 2021. We have a track record.
We go up, and we de-lever the organization right on the back end. Through the combination of growth of the business, so the EBITDA I mentioned earlier, and our natural maturities, we will de-lever somewhere around a quarter to half of a turn each year. So think about the capital capacity that creates for an organization of our size. So as we come back down, it put us in a position last year that we could deploy $2.5 billion of capital, issue $2 billion of new debt, and we took our leverage up to 3x on a gross basis. We're on a trajectory to come back down, probably by the end of this year, we'll be somewhere in a 2.7-2.9 on a gross basis. We're just repeating this again over time.
It puts us in a great position as an organization so that we can capitalize on opportunities to grow our business, to create shareholder value if we don't have our organization overly levered at different times. On the bottom is our debt maturity ladder. You see the blue bars there represent our bank facility, so that's all the floating rate debt, and all the red is all of our public debt that we've placed. Strategically, we have spent a lot of time trying to think about building a ladder that's very level in nature. We did not want to have any year where there was a tremendous amount of debt that would come up for maturity in any one period, and you can see it's pretty level in nature. We did that for a few reasons.
We'd never want to get ourselves in a position that if the debt markets were not receptive, that we still had to go. We would never want to put ourselves in that type of position. So if you look in 2023, we have about $250 million of debt that was coming up for maturity this year. At the end of June, we'd already paid off about $150 million of that. We will more than likely take out the remainder of that in the back end of this year. That still gives us the capacity to pay for the Kentro acquisition that was mentioned earlier, that will be closing in the Q4, as well as closing other transactions that are out there.
So then what are we gonna do when it gets to 2024? Well, we got a lot of options. So if the markets are receptive, well, we may just take that $500 million, and we'll stretch it back out another 10 years, or we'll look at the 30-year curve. If the market doesn't look good at that stage, well, we've got other options. We could just pay off half of it if we wanted to, and we'll put the other half on a revolver, and we'll just wait it out for a little bit for the rates to go back down. Or if we wanted to, we'll just stroke a check, and we'll take the whole thing out. So we got plenty of options as an organization to manage our debt footprint and the overall capacity inside of the organization.
So we feel really good where we are on that front. Well, what does all of this mean? Hopefully, what you heard today is that we built an organization, highly diversified, great talent. We've got a lot of depth, and out of that comes industry-leading financial results. We grow the top line, generally double-digit, if you just look at it over time. No guarantees we can do that again. We have industry-leading margins. They continue to remain up there in that kinda 31-32% range. We have said publicly, anywhere, 31-35 on our EBITDA margins. We feel really good in that range. It can move up and down based upon the companies that we acquire and their margin profile, how we're growing organically, and any changes in our contingent commissions.
We think anywhere in that range, we're investing the right amount inside of the business. Some people have asked us: "Well, why don't you run it up to 40%?" Well, we could run it up to 40%. If you're a long-term shareholder, that would be a terrible, terrible outcome. That would mean we're not investing enough back into the organization through innovation, through talent, through technology. So we feel really good with where we are. Cash flow conversion was down a little bit last year. It's coming back up as we continue to pay down our debt. We'll get back to our normal kind of 25% conversion ratio that's out there. Feel great about our free cash flow growth, that we've grown that also double digit oer the last 5-year average and 10-year, and then with what we've done on diluted net income per share.
We feel great about our organization. We feel great about our capabilities, about the talent that we have, and the outlook that we have going into 2024.
...And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Powell for closing comments.
Thanks, Andy. I appreciate it. First, I'd like to say thank you to everybody for coming today or listening in on web land. We appreciate you coming to beautiful Daytona Beach, and I hope that you've heard some things that maybe you didn't know about our organization that sheds a little light on why we're so excited about the future and why the business is performing the way it's performing. I'd like to just make a couple comments, not on this slide, but kind of things that you heard today that I think are really important. Number one, you heard that we are different, and one of those things is based upon the fact that we have an ownership culture. That ownership culture is based on accountability and responsibility, also driven by customer-centric obsession by our teammates, but it all starts with teammates.
As an investor or an analyst, as you know, the publicly traded peer group, the insider ownership is roughly or generally less than 2%. So if you invest in Brown & Brown today or in the future, you're investing alongside of us, because collectively, we are the largest shareholder at 21%. We believe that, in and of itself, presents a different investment profile and a different attraction to certain long-term investors. We have a fundamental core philosophy, which is based on wealth creation for all teammates. Let me please say that again. Our employee stock purchase plan or our save as you earn plan, fundamentally is directed to enable all teammates to create wealth. So you can be the Director of First Impressions, a very successful producer, marketer, or service teammate, or a leader or senior leader in our organization, and you get to participate in those plans.
There are other plans that also allow people to gain ownership, meaning equity ownership, through grants across the organization. One of the things that we talk about that I think really summarizes what we're all about is, if you work at Brown & Brown, you've heard me say this lots of times, but the most important thing for you as a teammate is your health and your family. That's your health and your family. Second is Brown & Brown. In Brown & Brown, we define health in four ways. We define it physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially. Physically, I ride a bicycle. Barrett rides a bicycle. I'm going to talk about that in a moment. You don't have to ride a bicycle, but the question is, what is it that you do to take care of yourself? Are you a runner? Are you a swimmer?
Do you play pickleball? Do you play paddle tennis? Do you swim? I don't care what it is: what do you do to take care of yourself? I'm going to come back to mental health or brain health, as we call it. Spiritual health, far be it from us to say to anybody, what do you believe in? But what we do say is we know there are studies out there that say people with purpose actually have more contentment, which actually leads to happiness. Financial well-being or health, that's why we provide 01(k) plans, employee stock purchase plans, other savings mechanisms, and actually financial advice to our teammates so they can build wealth over a long period of time.
So I want to come back to brain health, and we have implemented in our organization certain tools and resources for teammates to use to ensure that they and their family members are healthy. Because if you're not healthy, you can't take care of the ones you love, your family, and your friends, and therefore, you can't be as good of a teammate. So we want people to feel good, and if you don't, then we ask them to talk to somebody. That could be somebody internally, that could be a coach, that could be a professional, that could be a leader or a senior leader in the organization, and if they don't feel talking to any of those people, I give my phone number out and people call me. And we want to get them to the help that they need.
So I'd like to ask each of you, a personal ask and something to consider. I have two brothers. Barrett works here in the organization, and another brother, Kellam, who is not in the organization, but he's a huge fan of Brown & Brown, obviously. And we did a ride last month in France called the Haute Route. The Haute Route is allegedly the hardest amateur bike race in the world. It was a 7-day adventure that started in Megève, France, which is about an hour and a half outside of Geneva, and we rode down the spine of the French Alps to Nice. That's 470 miles over seven days. That's not really the challenge. The challenge is the 66,000 feet of vertical climbing that we did in aggregate. So why did we do that?
Because we're cyclists, and we love to ride and be in the outside. A lot of people might say, "You got to be wired differently to do that," and the answer is, you do.... It's a different kind of deal. It's not for many people. 404 started, and only 298 finished. But the answer is, we also aligned that with something called on a goal on Shifting Gears on brain health. And so we actually set out on a goal to raise $6 million for nonprofit organizations in the US and England and Ireland. Four million is the goal in the US, $2 million in England and Ireland, and that money will be given by advisory groups in both areas to nonprofits that sit and operate in three areas.
One is research, two is education and prevention, and three is treatment. And so what I would ask of each of you is if you would consider going to the website, which is shiftinggears.world, shiftinggears.world. And for those of you that are large investors out there, I would ask you to consider to give till it hurts, 'cause we would really appreciate it. Because you would say, "Well, why are you doing this?" And the answer is: in 2019, I stood in front of 2,000 teammates at a sales convention, and I said, in the prior 12 months, we had three teammates take their own lives, and I knew two of them, and that's three too many. So we were talking about mental health before, or brain health, before the pandemic, and then we started talking about it through the pandemic.
For anybody that has any children in this room, you know that there's an epidemic, not only in adolescent mental health, but just in mental health in our, in America today. So it's a little bit bigger deal, and it might not have affected you directly, but it, it either will or has affected someone close to you. You may not know that. So we're about $4 million into our adventure, so we need about $2 million more. I think that we're very capable of raising that money, but we would sure love for you to consider it. That's. You know, we talk about wealth creation, but we talk about health and family first, and then Brown & Brown. We talk about the best athlete routine, and you saw it today.
So everybody that's up here on this stage, I feel honored to work with and for, but I wanna, I wanna just highlight a couple people, that they may not have said what will define them a little more. Steve Boyd, has been in the insurance business since 1995. Steve Boyd? Steve Boyd. He joined Arrowhead as the head of technology, and he did that for a couple years, and then he was promoted into underwriting. And he learned to become an underwriter and then became the COO and ran about $250 million of that business. Our business is based all on respect. Respect is earned, it is not granted. Steve Boyd was, and continues to be, an extremely respected leader in our company.
We had a problem before our friend Gray Nester joined with our technology, and I asked him to step out of a $250 million operating role to become our CIO. I said, "I need three years of your life." He said, "I want to be an operator." I said, "I do, too, but I need you to be help us get this thing going in the right direction." And he said, "Put me in, coach." And so he did it for, I believe it was 13 months, and then his opportunity came up, and we put him back in the game. And so he runs a $500 million business today. So he went from national programs to IT to wholesale in his journey at Brown & Brown.
And I would tell you, he's better at leading wholesale because he worked at national programs and in IT. Let's talk about Julie. Julie, what she didn't say is when she came into the business, the business was, what? $25 million of revenue? And she grew the business she ran in the Northeast to 40, organically and by acquisition, and then took on another $40 million. So she was running $80 million of business. Two businesses, $80 million of revenue, both in that Services segment, the advocacy businesses. And I went and sat down and talked to her, and I said, "I don't want you to give me an answer today," but I knew she was good at recruiting and developing people. I knew she had something special about and a passion around that.
What we said, several of us, that as valuable as she is as an operator, we thought she'd be more valuable touching, at the time, you know, we had a fewer people, but all of our teammates across the organization. So Julie said it, she's an operator first. Scott Penny, what he didn't tell you is he was a cornerback at Vanderbilt in college. He and I happen to be the same age. He went to Vanderbilt from 1985 to 1989, and so he had some wheels back then. But you gotta be tough to play in the SEC, and actually, at Vanderbilt, you get a good education. But remember, Scott Penny, he's an operator, and what he didn't say is, oh, by the way, not only is he the Chief Acquisitions Officer,...
But he works with our automotive business, Brown & Brown Dealer Services. So he's never too far away from being an operator now. And then Gray. And when I think of Gray, I think of business partner. He happens to be... He does IT, but I don't think of him as the IT guy. And what I want you to know is this: I don't know about any other public companies, and I'm not really worried about how they do it, but what I would tell you is, he and I have a personal and professional relationship, as I do with everybody that I work directly with, but we meet every week. So my point is, is I'm here to help him be better and be successful, and he's helping me be better and help lead the organization.
So the point is, technology is, like, never more than a step away from my agenda. And so part of that is because we got the right guy in the spot. And, oh, by the way, I just wanted to let you know that he's already generated several hundred thousand dollars of revenue this year because he asked people we do business with and people he knows if we can work on their insurance. And if we don't handle your insurance yet, we'd like to talk to you about your insurance, too. You've heard about our capability to offer differentiated solutions, and maybe you understand, hopefully, a little bit more how broad that capability is. One of the things that we talk a lot about in our organization when we create businesses or a program or a capability is three things: Is it lasting? Is it meaningful?
Is it relevant? We don't like flashes in the pan. That's not the way we think about it. If it's gonna grow real rapidly for two or three years and then fizzle out, we'd rather grow something that's got a sustainable growth curve and adds value over a long period of time. In our acquisitions process, Scott talked a lot about the kind of accountability and responsibility, and I call it the senior leader sponsorship model. Let me tell you how that really works. The answer is, if a senior leader is interested in doing a transaction, she or he has to be the sponsor, and at the end of the process, before we announce a deal or sign anything, yours truly will ask that individual: "Are you willing to bet your backside?" If the answer to that is no, we're not doing the deal.
And if the answer is no, unless something has come to bear in, you know, the last 24 or 48 hours, I ask, "Why then have we been wasting this time on this deal?" Which rarely happens. But Scott said some of the best deals he ever do actually are the deals he didn't do. And so we've been down into the opportunity where they want to do a deal with us, and we actually get into due diligence, and we find something that changes it irreparably, and we back away. Now, there are other buyers out there of short-term nature that actually they will give someone an offer in 30 minutes or less, and then when they get into due diligence, it's actually a license to renegotiate the contract on them, so we're gonna retrade, and then they jam them. We don't retrade.
In our acquisitions thing, whether you're talking about Scott Penny, Brown & Brown, anybody else, Vaughn Stoll, anybody on the team, there's three things that are real clear about our team and our style: We do what we say, and we say what we do. We pay with cash. And when we decide to get on it or do it, we giddy up and go. Okay? Now, not everybody's got to like all that, but the answer is, that is categorically the case. And so we aren't trying just to accumulate businesses. That's not the way we're doing it. We're thinking about capabilities and talented teammates who could work with us for extended periods of time and bring solutions to our customers. I would actually be remiss if I didn't say something about our carrier partners. Chris talked about this, Barrett and Steve alluded to it.
Andy talks about it. We all talk about it, but we actually view it as a partnership with our carrier partners. We understand that they have to make money over a long period of time, and that will enable us to be compensated fairly over a long period of time. But we like to think that they would like to do business with us because of the way we trade and the long-term nature of our organization. We are a survivor. We are forever. A lot of the firms that you hear by name are not forever. That doesn't mean you don't want to trade with them. It just means how much time and energy, and money do you want to invest in trying to develop a relationship when you know that in three-five years, they're gonna be sold to somebody else?
I ask the final question is: Do you fundamentally like the core values of the company, and do you think they're insurance people? If they're insurance people, they may not be exactly the way you do insurance, but that's different than if they're just financial people or something else. The final thing, and it always comes back to people, is this: Julie talked a lot about our talent and our teammates, and we believe, as I started with, the most important thing at Brown & Brown is our teammates. And so ultimately, how we recruit, how we identify, recruit, reward, develop, launch, and ultimately scale our talent is very important. And so we ask a great deal of our teammates. I believe that we work really hard, and we play hard, and that's the way we like it. And we don't think of ourselves as a large organization.
We think of ourselves as a bunch of very highly competitive teams that operate under this umbrella called Brown & Brown, which creates a nimble, fast-moving organization. So my parting thought before we open up to questions is this: everybody in every organization has a lid, and that is as far up as that individual or individuals are capable of leading teams. And so when we talk about culture, when we talk about doing the right thing by the customer, when we talk about working with carrier partners, not only domestically but globally, we're actually looking at the people on our team and the people we trade with in terms of their capability to be able to think beyond their current role. How do they add additional value to our organization and our customers or to Brown & Brown through a trading relationship?
So you got to see Mike Bruce for the first time as the leader of Brown & Brown Europe. And the answer is, I still remember the first day we met that November morning, and I couldn't believe it, 'cause at the end of the conversation, I would say something, and he was, like, finishing my sentence, and vice versa. And so the thing is, that just doesn't happen randomly, I don't think. That's not... I think things happen for a reason, and you gotta be out there meeting the people, and we do all of that stuff. But the answer is, you know, remember, he didn't know he was gonna be running a $460 million business two years ago, but he was running a damn good business already, and we were growing a lot organically and through acquisition.
We just accelerated it. So I would like to just say thank you for, one, your interest, trust, and investment in our organization. Number two, I'd like to actually say, if I were in your shoes, I think that I would like the fact that we have an ownership culture and that 21% of our company is owned by teammates because we get to sit alongside each other or next to each other on the investment horizon, and we're not doing something short term. And finally, and I know all of you have thought about this, but the average tenure of a public company CEO in the US is, I believe, five years. Isn't that right, Hyatt? I think that's right.
Okay, so fortunately, knock on wood, I've done it for a little longer than that, and I'm not trying to make a hit something in five years or less. So God willing, and health permitting, I'm only 55 years old. I'm gonna do this a long time. So we can get a lot done. A lot of the folks in the room right here will probably be retired, and I won't be retired. Now, Hyatt's only 86, and he says he's gonna live to 100. So, you know, he got a lot done. He brought it the first and toughest part. He brought it to $1 billion. So the question ultimately is: how far will we carry it?
I will tell you this, the management and leadership team that you saw today is very capable of doubling or more the company that you know today as Brown & Brown. Thank you very much for your time. We'll take questions now on anything we've said or, more importantly, anything that we haven't said. Questions. We got Meyer. Meyer. Meyer, and then, Christian.
Thanks. Pardon me. So Meyer Shields, KBW. Two questions from the early slides. The first is, you talked about the ambition to be the largest leading broker. Do you define that by size?
No. We'd like to be bigger and better, but no, that doesn't mean that if you're, you know, we're not. We, we don't want you to walk out and say we're chasing Marsh or Aon. That's, that's not the way we think about it. But we believe that we will get bigger and better as we continue to grow and add capabilities.
Okay, that's helpful. Second, you've got the customer segment slide that shows roughly equivalent shares for small to medium, middle market, large accounts.
Mm-hmm.
Is that to scale for what your current revenue?
No, it's not to scale. What I would say is the biggest segment is that, the red one in the top, which is middle market. We don't talk about the breakout of exactly how much as a percentage, but I would rather you think about this: We have historically said, and this is a retail statement, we have said in retail, this is-- that's not just a retail slide, though, that we have, let's say, $60 million or so of revenue under $2,500.
... $60 million under $2,500.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, in retail.
We've said that before, so I'm not stating a new fact. We're not gonna give you any more data, but look at small, commercial, and wholesale as an example, under, you know, a couple thousand in commission or in programs or whatever the case may be. It's very interesting because everybody, it goes back to, you know, Barrett or Andy or Scott's comments about how do you define segments? You know what I mean? And what, what, what we would say is this, Meyer, I don't think there's one common industry segment, but the way I'd like you to think about it is smaller accounts are maybe 50 or... let's say 50 or fewer teammates and less. All right? They're more smaller. Some of them are more main street-type businesses.
Middle market could be anything from 50 to 2,500 lives, and, and in many cases, large accounts might be 2,500 and up. But you could have a 1,000-life group that, that acts and looks like a large account and buys insurance like a large account, with very large deductibles or different kinds of... So there's not a hard and fast rule there.
Okay, thank you.
We got Christian over here. Yes.
Hi, Christian Getzhoff , Wells Fargo. One of your competitors yesterday mentioned that they are not seeing any signs of an economic slowdown at this point in time, and they're actually expecting brokerage organic to be similar in 2024 as 2023. Any similar color you could provide?
Do you believe that? No, I'm just asking you, do you believe that, what they just said about the economy? I'm asking you-
Yeah.
-personally.
From what I see, I feel like it's starting to emerge, like, around now. So maybe it hasn't fully shown up, but I think it is starting to show in pockets.
It's starting to slow down in pockets.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. So I just wanted to know. You live in Boston, right?
New York.
New York, sorry. Okay, so the short answer is, if you go out in the towns that we work in, you know, and go to dinner in a restaurant, every single restaurant seems to be full. All right? So we haven't seen that. But you want to talk to customers, and you start to see what is the inventory at a contractor 12 months out, if they'll tell you, 18 months out? How do people think, which I think is the most important thing, about investing in their business? So I believe, and it's very customer specific, and I'm not talking about just industries, I'm talking customers. Some people look at it very opportunistically today, and they're full steam ahead. They're going gangbusters.
Then there's other people saying: "Look, I need to put $10 million in our plant and equipment, and I think we're gonna hold tight for the next year or two because interest rates are up, and I don't know if the economy is gonna slow down." So we don't like to make broad generalizations like never or always, so we don't like to make broad generalizations about the economy that say everything's gonna be fine 12 months from now. If we had that kind of foresight or insight, it would be that would be very interesting, but we're not gonna speculate on that. We feel great about our business, though, and our capability to continue to grow. Remember, our business is driven primarily by exposure unit growth, so, you know, we are a proxy for the true middle market economy.
For my second question, would you guys consider switching to cash GAAP, similar, like the majority of your peers?
Again, I think it's interesting that we talk about this because the short answer is, the last time I checked, you could do the quick conversion. I know you can, but I think everybody... So I kind of get a kick out of it, and I don't really, to tell you the truth, the short answer is, I don't know. Okay? And Andy's gonna say no, which is fine. But let me tell you the way I think about it. It goes back to the first point that I said, which was cash conversion and free cash from operations. So if I'm in your shoes, you ask the question, so I'll tell you really. If you're, if we, the way we think about it is really simple. We're converting 24 or 25 cents of every dollar, and everybody else is converting 12.
Hmm, not bad. They got something figured out. And two, we have $1 billion of free cash this year, Andy said. I'm not gonna... I'm not speculating. I'm gonna let him—I'll quote Andy. And the short answer is, that's gonna grow next year. So quite honestly, I think—I just look at cash anyway, 'cause in our organization, we don't spend premium. We don't, you know, that doesn't do anything for us. We trade with carrier partners who actually finance our inventory in premium dollars. We actually invest in commissions and fees. So, no, but I think we see the cash pretty well. And Andy can help you if you'd like to see how the cash works better.
You guys do the quick, and maybe you would find that, maybe your valuation metric is different. Maybe you think we're undervalued. Never can tell.
Can I add a little, I'm gonna add a little color.
You gotta jump in on that, Dale?
I'm, I'm-
Not an opportunity?
I'm gonna jump in on this one. So if you saw the earlier slides, there were a couple of things inside of those when it looked at the margins and cash flow conversion. So one of the phenomena going on in this space today, adjustments. Everybody likes to adjust everything. And so we say, if you adjust all the bad news out, of course it looks good. If you look to Brown & Brown, the numbers that we report for GAAP are really, really close to any adjustments. We don't make much. The only real adjustments that we make are for change in acquisition earn-outs. If you saw on the previous slides that I put up there, the others have all their margins going up. Have you seen their cash flow conversion go up, though? No.
'Cause you can adjust around with your earnings per share, and you can make it cash this, and you can adjust your margins and all the other stuff, but you can't create cash unless you can grow the business, right? So we don't see that there's a lot of value in there, 'cause just take cash flow from operations, pretty simple. Just run that thing out. You can do that off of anybody. That'll tell you how organizations grow. So the other is just moving it around, back and forth. And the cash that everyone talks about today, that's an adjusted number. It's not apples to apples.
You can see we don't feel very strongly about it either, right? All right.
Thank you. We're gonna probably down to,
No, we got. We can do one more, right?
Yeah, we'll do one more.
Yeah. What else? Who else has got a question? We have a question right over here.
Hi, Mo Spolan from Weitz Investments. I was just curious, like, to what extent maybe there are advantages, like, between cross-selling on the retail side, like, to what extent the individual profit centers work together, whether the profit centers kind of leverage their collective scale, with the carriers, like the procurement scale with the carriers, and then also if there's... I know not to use the word synergies, but, like, I've never understood if there's any synergies kind of vertically in the way that you guys have it all under one roof. Thanks.
All right. But before you hand that back, I wanna just ask on the synergies part of the question. When you say that, meaning you're talking about, not expense synergies, but success synergies and the capabilities vertically, is that what you're talking about?
Yeah. Like, for instance, I'm thinking if, you know, one customer of one profit center could use a line that's sold by another profit center or something like that.
Got it. Okay. So, thank you for the question. Let's go back and say, let's just say 10 years ago, we were truly a very decentralized organization, whereby the individual offices thought about building capabilities in those offices and then being able to serve that client base. But we didn't do as good a job as we do now as leveraging capabilities outside the four walls, okay? So having said that, today, because we've invested and grown, both organically and through acquisition, the capabilities, and there's fundamentally, it's all about trust. So if I'm in an office and you're in an office, and if I don't trust you, why would I want to jeopardize my relationship, even to write another piece of business, if I think you might drop the ball?
In our organization, there's a lot of trust across the system now. And so what's happened is you could have a person, let's just say, for sake of this, where do you live, just so I know?
Omaha, Nebraska.
Omaha, Nebraska, that's right. The center of cultural enlightenment, right behind Daytona Beach. So let's say that you went to high school with somebody, and you, you grew up there. Did you grow up there?
No, I grew up in California.
Yeah, California. All right, so but you're in Omaha, and somebody you play golf with, or you work out with, or a friend of your wife's, if you're married, or whatever, somebody, they have a big business, 'cause you got some big businesses there, right? And let's say we have a small office in Omaha, Nebraska. We'll get, which we don't, but let's just say we might be coming to a town near you soon. But the point is, you have that relationship, and it turns out your friend is the CFO of this company, which is a multibillion-dollar company. Well, guess what? If you can marshal the resources, they're not gonna do business with you just because you're best buds. It's too competitive in the marketplace today.
But what they would do is they will give you an audience, and so it's like a warm introduction. So we might bring somebody from Atlanta, and somebody from Chicago, and somebody from, you know, Texas, all up to that meeting and basically say: These are the capabilities that we have, and this is how we would then service your... But you would be involved, okay? So I view that as a great win, and we have success stories like that across the organization. It's amazing. So, and particularly during COVID, where we did a lot of business and sold new business over the Internet, which I still can't believe. Big, big accounts.
We wrote really big accounts via video on, during—where we didn't even get to go and see them, and we were linking people up and being able to deliver them better solutions, better delivery than they'd ever had. So again, it's about trust, it's about capability, which you got to have the capability first and the trust, and the knowledge, and Barrett and the senior leadership team have done a great job of broadening, and we're still working on this, the knowledge of our capabilities that anybody on the team can access, whether you're in Omaha or you're in Syracuse, New York, or you're in Sarasota, Florida. So we're really psyched about it, the whole thing. Really good. You know, you could, you could have...
There's a gentleman there that's in the investment business that owns the second-largest car dealership in the US... Warren Buffett, and I believe it's the second largest. We could, we could help them with that. If you knew the person that ran that business, then—and by the way, if you do know them, anyway, we could still help them. But, but, but that's the way we think about it. It's good.
Perfect.
What other questions?
Do we have any other questions? I will do a final question, and then I've just got a couple, wrap-up comments.
I'm not sure you'll love this one. Mike Zaremski from BMO. Curious if the Federal Trade Commission disallows non-competes next year in the vote, what do you think that would have an impact on the industry?
Yes. So let's, let's just start with the fact that when somebody sells a business, it's customary, not just Brown & Brown, but it's customary for that person to sign a non-compete in the business that she or he is selling to the buyer. And in doing so, if in fact there are not non-competes, in that case, the value of the asset will go down. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, remember, in our industry, it's customary to have a non-piracy non-solicitation. So the way our contracts have worked and continue to work is there's three parts. Number one, if we have a teammate that decides to leave for any reason, we don't prohibit that person from working in the industry, making a living, the whole thing.
We just say, "Mike, you can't touch our customers for two years." That's the first thing. The second thing is, you can't solicit our teammates for two years. And then number three, you can't take any of our proprietary information, data, or solutions. That's it. And so we don't believe that that's, in any way, shape, or form, prohibiting commerce from occurring. Where I believe it is actually very much focused is on people that are providing services to customers. This is where the FTC is ramped up in service and marketing roles, and those people might be making less than X, whatever X is. And by the way, if you... I don't see a reason they would have a non-compete to begin with, but apparently, some people do.
And so the answer is, if she or he can't go down the street and get another job, and they're making whatever they're making, you know, that's, that is tough. So I think there's a big distinction. We watch with great interest, but our industry, and you know this, but we believe in the contracts. We actually expect people to honor the contracts when they have a contract in place because we honor contracts. Now, not everybody subscribes to that rule. There are firms that are out there that do the smash-and-grab or the steal method. Don't think fundamentally, core values, that's not good, but, you know, everybody's different. Did you have another question?
Nope.
Thank you. Andy?
Okay. All right. Well, we'll go to close here 'cause we're about 15 minutes over. First, for everybody that came down to Daytona Beach, thank you very much. We appreciate everyone coming for today. For everybody that joined us virtually, thank you again. I think we had 70 or 80 people online. Hopefully, you got a lot out of today, and you got real visibility across all of our businesses, but also into all of our leaders that are out there. I wanna thank everybody that is a shareholder for entrusting your capital in Brown & Brown. We know that you've got other places that you can put it, and we really do appreciate all of the trust in investing alongside all of us.
I wanna thank all of the Brown & Brown team, so we've got a number of teammates here in the room and some of them are not. They helped make all this happen today. So for all the Brown & Brown team, the events team, thank you very much for everything that you all did for us. We, we truly appreciate all of it. We have a number of our board members that are still here. Thank you for making the, the travel down. For everybody that has questions on the back end or anybody that was on virtually, just either reach out to myself or reach out to my wonderful assistant, Alicia, we will figure out a time to set up for any, additional questions that are out there.
And then for everybody then online, we'll go ahead, and we're gonna call this, and then for everybody here in the room, we have lunch outside. Then for anybody who would like, we have tours around the building afterwards. Thank you very much.