Here for Raymond James, and pleased to continue on with our schedule, and honored, really, to welcome back the management team from Baldwin. It's been a very successful, high-growth insurance broker, and it's one of our top picks in the space right now. And so we're looking forward to the next 30 minutes, a good conversation. For management today, we have Trevor, Brad, and Bonnie, who's in the audience. Congratulations, shout out to Bonnie, who's engaged. Congratulations, Bonnie. I'm not gonna let that pass. Just wait till dinner tonight. In all seriousness, Trevor, I think before I have a list of questions here, and obviously everyone's welcome to participate with their own questions, but before I begin, maybe we could step back. You issued a shareholder letter. There's a lot of moving pieces going on at the company right now.
Maybe give us a state of the union and, you know, an updated view on the outlook.
Yeah. So, one, Greg, thanks for having us, and it's great to be here back at the Raymond James Conference again. It's one of the events we look most forward to every year, from a shareholder engagement perspective. So, 2024 represented the five-year anniversary of our listing on NASDAQ as a public company. We went public in October of 2019. Raymond James was involved, and at the time we were a $138 million in revenue, $28 million EBITDA insurance brokerage business. We had a regional middle market retail broking business. We had a nascent MGA with less than 20 people, single product, and less than $60 million of premium. And we had an emerging embedded personal insurance strategy that was largely built around a handful of builders in the state of Florida. Over the next five years, we've been able to meaningfully grow the business.
We grew top line by 10x to nearly $1.4 billion. We grew bottom line by 11x to $312 million of Adjusted EBITDA. And we scaled headcount from roughly 500 people to just over 4,000. And so it's been really a great kind of first five years. As we think about, though, the construct of our business, I think that's what's even more exciting and more impressive. So we've taken our IAS business, our retail middle market broking business, from what was kind of a regional southeast-centric footprint to one that's national in scope. We scaled from 400 people to over 2,000, and we've built out deep industry sector and risk product expertise and capabilities across the country.
We took our MGA business, which was one product, less than 20 people, and $60 million of premium, and largely organically scaled that to over 20, nearly 20 products, over $1.1 billion of premium, and nearly 700 insurance professionals, all built on a completely proprietary technology infrastructure. And we took kind of an emerging embedded personal insurance business that was really Florida-centric to what is today the leading purveyor of personal home insurance solutions at the point of new home sale, with 72% market share with the top 25 home builders in the country, an emerging mortgage channel that we've been spending deeply through our P&L to build over the past couple of years, and a really, really strong market position. We've done all of that, while completing 35 acquisitions over the first three years as our time as a public company.
Over that time period, there's been, to Greg, to your point, a lot of moving pieces. We took leverage up to a high point of 5.8 times EBITDA in May of 2022 after the acquisition of Westwood, the last large strategic acquisition we've made and the largest in our history. We, you know, have invested deeply through our P&L to build an integrated operating business, enabling us all of the infrastructure and capabilities to operate a business even significantly larger than where we are today, but that's come at a cost both through cash add-backs and just pure P&L investment over the past few years. And so as we sit here today, I can honestly tell you I've never felt better about the momentum in the position that we're in.
We're emerging out of this kind of period of rapidly scaling with real top line momentum as evidenced by some of the underlying metrics around whether it's sales velocity of over 20% in our IS business, organic growth of 20%, and our Main Street business or premium growth of 32% in our UCTS MGA business. We've got margin accretion that's starting to really flow through in a meaningful way. You saw 200 basis points of margin accretion in the business in 2024, but that is far from telling the whole story. This year we were able to provide some more financial disclosure in the K at the segment level financials. And if you look at the outside commission expense line item being broken out for the first time, you can actually look at what would be net revenue on an apples-to-apples basis.
If you normalize for the impact of continued increases in outside commission expense, which we've been talking about being a dynamic in our business as we rapidly scale the new products in the MGA and a headwind we expect to persist for another year or two, the underlying margin accretion momentum is far more significant. We improved our comp and benefits ratio by 490 basis points in the year. We had operating leverage in our OpEx line item of 150 basis points in the year, and we're experiencing margin headwinds in the outside commission expense line item for the very best of reasons, which is we're having a ton of success scaling these newly launched products that launch with immature gross economics, but have the market level outside commission expense.
What that means is that trend begins to reverse in a couple of years and starts to drive real operating leverage on a much larger base of new product premium in the MGA. So I apologize if I'm a bit long-winded, Greg, but very excited about how we're positioned, the momentum we have in the business, and what that means for the next few years going forward.
So, it is a lot. I think one of the differentiating features of your company versus many of your peers is the organic revenue growth that you've been able to achieve. I think the guidance for this year is still really robust as I think about it in the context of your other public peers. So maybe you can spend a minute and talk about, you mentioned, sales velocity. Talk about the different levers and the three business units that are driving organic revenue results.
Yeah. So starting in our IS business, sales velocity is kind of the most meaningful of the drivers of organic growth there. And importantly, it's entirely internally controllable. It's driven by the work we do to put our professionals in a position to go out and take share and win new clients in the market. Our sales velocity last year was 21.5%. That compares to the industry median, as reported by Reagan Consulting, of 11.5%, and the 75th percentile of about 15.5%. And so just industry-leading new business generation, which is evidence of the value and the impact that we're having out in the market on behalf of our clients and the success that our colleagues are having.
You can see that flow through whether it's we recently posted a new investor deck to our website this morning, and then there's some stats around advisor, our nomenclature for the sales producer, productivity from pre-acquisition to post-acquisition. We're doubling their new business productivity on our platform as a result of the access to these tools and capabilities and how it enables them to be more successful in their careers. If you move into our UCTS business, we've been leveraging and mining all of the rich insights from our data assets across our business to identify opportunities to build proprietary insurance product that uniquely solves the challenges that many of our clients have.
Building that product, distributing it oftentimes through embedded channels, whether it's our renter's product at point of lease via the property management software providers that we partner with, or whether it's the home products that we're embedding at point of new home sale and mortgage origination, enabling rapid growth with controlled and very thoughtful underwriting, and so 32% premium growth last year, inception to date loss ratios of less than 55% through last year, leading to great underwriting outcomes for our capital partners and rapidly scaling product pool for our own business that provides a unique competitive advantage for our retail businesses at point of sale, and then lastly, our Main Street business, we have the leading position in the new home builder marketplace as the exclusive partner for more than 70% of the top 25 home builders in the country.
We won six new top 50 builders last year alone. And so we continue to dominate that marketplace, taking share as the leading provider, and we've been investing deeply through our P&L to build out the technology platforms to enable that same type of embedded point of transaction home insurance solution offering for the mortgage, real estate brokerage, and title channels, which, relative from a scale perspective to the home builder channel, is going to be multiples of it.
We're incredibly excited about the momentum we have across all three of these businesses, and that despite the fact that we have outlined roughly $25 million of one-time in-year headwinds related to the replatforming of our QBE program inside UCTS and how that flows through to our Main Street organic, as well as, you know, roughly $10 million of potential headwinds related to increasing reinsurance costs tied to the wildfire losses in California, we're still able to comfortably guide to double-digit organic growth. So just speaks to the durability of the business model and our ability through internally driven organic growth drivers to drive outsized growth through the cycle.
Yeah. Before I pivot to the margin piece, one of the observations I have in this answer that you just provided, which is unique relative to your peer group, is nowhere in this conversation did you introduce the concept of, you know, the pricing cycle has benefited our top line. I know it's benefited your peers, but you're not really talking about where we are in the pricing cycles and having an impact on your top line. So maybe you could just bridge the gap for us?
Yeah. So, you know, the pricing cycle, I'd say, is most acute in our retail businesses of where we feel the impact of that. And it's certainly been a tailwind over the past couple of years, as you would presume. But I'd say, unintuitively maybe to many of you, rate and exposure, which is how I kind of broadly think about pricing impact, was only a 40 basis point tailwind for IS organic growth last year, which is likely meaningfully lower than what you would expect across many of our peers. And there's two really idiosyncratic drivers to that. One is we, and we talked about this a fair amount last year, we have some exposure through our construction practice to what we call not one-time project-based revenue or policies. We have a lot of large GCs as clients.
When they start new projects, we oftentimes put project-specific insurance in place. We saw a meaningful downtick in that revenue stream last year, which shows up through our P&L in the form of reduced exposure because we still have those clients. They just have less project starts in the year. The second is we have a very large real estate practice. And for tier one cat-exposed real estate clients, we were seeing 20%-30% rate reductions on property insurance last year. And so I'd say those were two unique drivers that we probably have a bit outsized exposure to relative to some of our peers. Beyond that, I think about rate and exposure, putting the cycle aside, going forward to be a mid-single digit or better tailwind. And the way I get there is I first think about rate on the insurance side.
You think about what's happening in the world today. We have loss cost trend and casualty that's high single, low double digits as a result of things like legal system abuse, social inflation. We have natural catastrophe losses that continue to accelerate both in size and frequency. $140 billion of NatCat losses last year globally that were insured. Based on where we started the year with California this year, we're likely headed towards another outsized year. All of that kind of lands you in a place where the cost of risk is going to continue to grow at an outsized relative rate compared to the broader economy. You then factor in exposure, which is you can think about really as being GDP plus inflation, and then you moderate the combined impact of both of those for evolving buying patterns.
When costs go up, our clients tend to look for ways to mitigate those costs. And so they're going to take larger retentions. They're going to buy less limit. They're going to do things to defray those increases. But you put all that in a blender and it points to mid-single digit or better, which compares to what I would characterize as low single digit over, say, the time period from 2010 to 2020, so a very favorable overall backdrop as we think about kind of the world we're heading into over the next five to 10 years.
So, I was going to pivot to the margin piece now, and recognizing you have three different business units with three different margin characteristics, maybe you talk about the embedded technology. It seems like there's an opportunity for you to report improving margin. You talk about the 200 basis points last year. The margin guide this year is a little bit less robust. Unpack that for us and just talk about longer-term trends.
Yeah. So effectively we're guiding the 25-50 basis points of margin as a backdrop. This wasn't guidance, but we've put out a five-year plan that we're calling 3B30, $3 billion of revenue, 30% margin, which bridges you up about 750 basis points from the 22.5% we landed last year with. What we've also said is we expect to deliver margin accretion each and every year for the next five years, but it's not going to be linear. Some years will be on the lower end of that scale. Others will be far higher on that scale. I'd say specific to what we're looking at this year, that 25-50 basis points is in the face of $25 million of identified margin headwinds.
$15 million from the QBE replatforming and up to $10 million from the potential impacts of reinsurance cost increases and some of our programs related to the wildfires. And so when you think about that, if you normalize for those one-time impacts, you're north of 100 basis points this year. Let's talk about margin profile in each of our businesses, though. Our Main Street business, where we're delivering this technology, this technologically embedded solution at point of transaction. Our view is home insurance is a secondary transaction. Why do you buy it? You can't get a mortgage without it. You can't close on your new home without it. And so we're positioning ourselves ahead of our competitors in that transaction flow as that solution of convenience. And the builder channel, we attach to 58% of the homes our builder partners sell.
For 58% of the new homes our builder partners sold last year, we sold them a homeowner's policy. Margin in our builder business is mid-40s on an EBITDA basis. That's what margin looks like at maturity on gross revenue in this business model. We've been investing deeply through our P&L, building out the capabilities to grow that same type of business in the mortgage, title, and real estate brokerage business. You would have heard us talk about losing $14 million in our P&L related to that effort a year ago. We're continuing to make improvements. We grew margin in that segment nearly 300 basis points last year. We also provided disclosure that shows outside commission expense broken out for the first time, and you can back into what the net revenue margin in that business would be.
At maturity, you're talking about a business on a net revenue basis that has a margin north of 50%. So you're talking about double-digit organic growth, net revenue margin in excess of 50% at maturity, which is within visibility. You're talking about a north of a rule of 50, rule of 60, rule of 70 type company. It's an incredible business. It also, if we're successful, has the potential to be the largest of all of our businesses. You think about the U.S. property and casualty market, $1 trillion of P&C premium, $600 billion of that's personal lines, most of which still resides today in the captive agent channel, call it the State Farm, the Allstate of the world, or the direct writers, the Progressives, the GEICOs.
And we're focused on skipping ahead of all of our competitors in that value chain to the very front of the line and the transaction flow. Our UCTS business, where we're built on completely proprietary technology, again, that business earned about a 20% EBITDA margin on gross revenue last year. And that's in the face of pretty meaningful outside commission expense headwinds as a result of the rapid scaling of newly launched products that's occurring. If you look at that business on a net revenue basis, which we provide that disclosure in the K, it's a 42% EBITDA margin business on net revenue, highly differentiated already. You can think about that at maturity, that business of being a low 30s EBITDA margin business on a gross revenue basis and on a net revenue north of 50.
That's a double digit, a business grown in excess of 20% a year ever since we've gone public. Last is our IS business. It's the most traditional of our insurance distribution businesses we own, most like a Gallagher or a Brown & Brown's retail operations. Today, that's a 24% EBITDA margin, up nearly a couple hundred basis points in the year. You can think about that being a 28%-32% EBITDA margin business at maturity. We invest through our P&L about 250 basis points of what we call NUPP, which is net pay and unvalidated production talent. We expect that to remain constant going forward, and that's about double what the industry average investment level would be.
But we have real operating leverage and overall client service payroll and operating expense and benefits and employment taxes to the tune of somewhere between 400 and 800 basis points, depending on where you assume we can get to. We've got direct line of sight on where that is and how we're going to get there. And it's just a matter of letting the clock run and revenue continuing to scale.
Beginning at part of that answer, you mentioned this five-year, 700 basis point margin sort of aspirational target. Has there been some adjustments at the board level that your compensation is going to be geared? Are those identifiable goals going for your management team?
They're absolutely identifiable goals that we're focused on. What I would tell you around executive comp in our business is, we have a general philosophy of being highly levered to pay for performance, and you can see that evidence in the base salaries of our executive leadership team. My base salary is $400,000. It's below the 25th percentile of our peer group. The next highest base salary is $300,000. That's as high as we're taking fixed comp. Everything else is pay for performance, annual bonuses, and LTIP tied to outsized results and metrics like organic growth, growth in earnings per share, and growth in overall Adjusted EBITDA. If you look at kind of the percentages or the absolute kind of targets that we outline relative to what you would be accustomed to from our peers, there are multiples of what you would see on average.
And so, we have high expectations for the business and high expectations for ourselves. And that's how we set goals and manage performance as a result.
Excellent. So, with all the organic revenue growth before you and all of the margin opportunity before you, talk about your attitude towards acquisitions at this point, which, you know, for the last five years were important, maybe not so much important anymore, or?
I think so. In the year-end earnings, we provide an earnings supplement that's on our IR website. And both this year, at year-end, and last year at year-end, we provided disclosure around the results of the M&A we had completed three years earlier because that three-year time period marks the end of the earnout time period when we've paid and settled those earnouts. And so it's a scorecard of sorts. How did we do allocating our shareholders' capital to M&A? And I think what you will find is that the results were quite, quite good. You know, we averaged down our average multiple from 14.5 times at time of closing in 2020 for the, I think, 12 acquisitions we completed that year. And after fully settling the earnouts at the end of last year, really, they'll be paid this quarter, our multiple is below nine.
So significant buy down through operating leverage and growth that we were able to achieve. So I say that just to say I think we've proven we can be good, shrewd allocators of capital specific to M&A. We've proven we can create value in our business via M&A. And we're looking forward to a time in the not-too-distant future where our business is going to be back in the financial position where we can responsibly begin thinking about allocating capital to M&A again. Importantly, though, we're not going to return to the type of programmatic M&A you saw from us immediately following our IPO where scale, quite frankly, was existential. We're going to have an incredibly tight filter, as we always have.
We're going to be focused on M&A that brings accretive capabilities around in-client industry sector expertise, product expertise, makes really good financial sense, and has very strong cultural alignment. As a result, I expect M&A for us will be episodic in nature going forward. When we see the opportunity to deploy capital responsibly, we will, with the governor of maintaining leverage below four.
Excellent.
I'll just add to that quickly, Greg. I think it was 16 acquisitions and 21 that we evaluated. When we were acquiring these businesses previously, and bringing them onto the platform, we actually had expense dyssynergies. We were scaling the business so rapidly that you had to build infrastructure heavily through our P&L alongside bringing those partners on board, and I think for the first time, as you look at our M&A going forward, since we've built that infrastructure now, we'll for the first time actually be experiencing expense synergies that will be a dynamic that will allow us to really capitalize on what is oftentimes an even better EBITDA margin in some of those operating platforms.
Makes sense. In your answer, you mentioned earnouts. And, I know that's a popular topic at this moment in time because I think you're going to finally sunset with the last major earnout this quarter. So, we just have a couple of minutes left, but I think it's important to spend a minute and talk about the effect that earnouts have had on free cash flow and what free cash flow is going to look like in the post-earnout era, which begins in 30 days or so.
Yeah, so we are incredibly excited about signing that final earnout check before Bonnie plans her engagement party. She'll be planning the earnout settlement party, which we're thrilled about. But look, we pay earnouts for the very best of reasons. As Trevor articulated, if you look in that partnership scorecard, you can see how those partners have performed on our platform and, you know, they have earned those earnouts. But you know, it has been a pretty massive drag on our free cash flow, and so we enter a world starting in Q2 this year where we are actually generating free cash flow that is not already contributed to a past transaction, and I think it just opens up significant opportunity for us in terms of the deployment of capital.
We, I believe, can have a path over the next two to three years to achieve a free cash flow conversion rate that compares to our peers, who are, you know, converting on an Adjusted EBITDA basis at probably 65%-70% on average. I think we've got a very clear path to getting there, as one sort of cash add-backs go away. This earnout headwind is not in our face, and interest expense as an overall percentage of our Adjusted EBITDA goes down, as we're not, you know, operating at the leverage that we've operated at in the last couple of years. So again, it's an exciting time to start focusing again on capital deployment and what type of return that can earn for our shareholders.
Excellent. Well, we're clipping up at the 30-minute mark. So, we appreciate your time. And for everyone here, there's going to be a breakout session. I think it begins after lunch, but there is a breakout session. Is it right now? Yeah, breakout sessions right now downstairs for 30 minutes of follow-up. So thank you very much, everyone.