My name is Mayank Tandon. I cover fintech at Needham. I'd like to welcome Joseph Sanborn from EverQuote, the CFO. Joseph, thank you for joining us.
Thank you. Great to be back.
Yes. Well, you guys are here every year, and we appreciate that very much. So, Joseph, maybe I'll kick things off with just a more broad question about the state of the insurance industry. If you could just give us a little bit of color on sort of where you exited 2025, and I don't know how much you can comment on 2026, but any sort of indications of how the market has been evolving as it relates to your business?
Sure. So, thanks. Thanks. Great to be back. Thank you for inviting us again. So, in terms of those of you who don't know EverQuote, auto insurance marketplace. We help P&C carriers and agents find consumers online to help grow their business. Our mission is to be sort of the number one growth partner for carriers and agents in growing their business in the property and casualty, which is auto and home insurance. So, that's our vision. You know, it's funny. 2025 was a year where we had; it was for the first year in a long time we went on offense. We actually had a town hall yesterday for employees, and we were actually talking about 2025 was a year we didn't have any storm cloud over us. 2021 through 2023, we had the auto insurance downturn, all those changes.
2024, we had this regulatory issue that was supposed to be an issue in the start of 2025. That disappeared within a week of a new administration, and this was a year for us to, 2025 was a year we really focused on offense, and you saw that in lots of ways of how we execute the business. We focused on really trying to help drive better. At the end of the day, our strategy from the summer of 2023, when we said, let's exit areas that were outside of P&C, we said, let's focus on how we help insurance carriers and agents grow their business profitably. How can we help them do that in a differentiated way, and 2025 was a year where we did that quite a bit.
You know, we haven't given results for 2025, but I would say if you look at the midpoint of our guide for Q4 with this year, it is a record year for us across all financial dimensions, would be implied. And it's a year where we say we see going into 2026, the momentum continuing. And generally, I would say the industry we serve of the auto insurance carriers are categorized by a very healthy and underwriting environment, and it's very broad-based. We started 2025 with a handful of carriers who were really trying to lean in aggressively with growth, but that has become more broad-based as we progress through 2025, and we see that continuing into 2026. And for those of you who are new to sort of the P&C insurance industry, the benchmark the carriers often look at is something called combined ratio.
Some of the carriers talk about having a combined ratio in the mid-90s as sort of like a barometer of healthiness. If you look at the industry right now, a lot of those combined ratios are in the mid to high 80s. So, they're very, very healthy, and it speaks to they've gotten a lot of rate increases over the course of 2024, 2025, and they're coming into this year what is categorized as a, we were in a soft market, and that's actually a good thing in auto insurance. And what it's categorized as the following: carriers are broadly healthy, they have rate adequacy, and they want to focus on growth. One analyst who covers the insurance space categorized this as a period of two years ago as about a year of retrenchment, you know, for carriers trying to survive.
This is a year about all-out competitive war, which is quote, and I sort of love that analogy as we start 2026. So, we think we're well positioned to help those, you know, our role in helping those carriers and agents grow is we help them do it through digital channels, and we've done that. We're excited for 2026.
Perfect start to the conversation. So, Joseph, as you look at your business, how dependent is it on the state of the insurance market versus things that you can control in terms of your strategy with your customers that can drive growth, even if times do, for example, change, and maybe there's a tougher stretch for the insurance industry, hopefully not in 2026, but how is your business related to the market overall?
So, obviously, the industry we serve, P&C carriers, their underwriting health and property is obviously important. And why that matters, to give you context, is it's not just about being profitable. They need to have something that's called rate adequacy. So, if they feel like if they're acquiring something, if you think about carriers, the business at the end of the day is about having stability in underwriting costs relative to the prices they get in premiums. If something destabilizes those costs, makes costs less stable, all of a sudden puts pressure on the premiums, but more importantly, it says to carriers, hey, until we get new rates, until we go through the rate filing process, we don't want to acquire a consumer because they may not be profitable. So, there's this dynamic of it's not just profitability, it's that they have to have rate adequacy.
If you look at it right now, we have broad rate adequacy, you know, and quite stabilized. That's an important piece of it. I would say one of the things that has changed for EverQuote over the past few years with our changes in strategy is we've become a closer growth partner to the carriers and agents. That's not to say that our fortunes are not tied to the industry we serve, but it's also to say that those carriers and agents are increasingly developing deep relations with us. On our agent side, for example, we used to have only one product per agent. We basically sold an online to offline lead. Today, we have a multi-product strategy. The reference you made in our last public comment was that's like 1.35, 1.4 products per agent. A few years ago, that was one.
It speaks to as you become a more multi-product strategy, that agent becomes much more, you're much more embedded in their workflows, helping with their digital presence, not just giving them leads. Carrier side, another side is carrier side, we have an offering called Smart Campaigns. And what Smart Campaigns is, just very simplistically, is it's an AI-driven large language model where the carriers, as opposed to trying to place their own staff placing bids in our marketplace to compete for consumers, they turn over their disposition data and let our large language models take over their bidding. That's a product we started probably about four years ago. We had version 3.0 come out this year, and it's really had shown significant improvements for the carriers. And what's notable about that is, you know, the carriers, for this to work, they have to trust us with their information.
We came out with this three, four years ago. People were like, oh, carriers will never trust your information. As we continue to focus on going deeper in this vertical, we're building deeper trust. So, when you build deeper trust, you build deeper relationships. They're starting to turn over their data. And as they turn over their data, I would say that makes us more embedded in the industry. And I think, you know, as you go through the ebbs and flows, that certainly is important. Another thing I would notice on the industry is, which I think is an interesting departure from what you've saw, you know, in prior hard market, last one was 2017, is carriers are also very focused on the endurance of this period.
You see the combined ratios, you know, for the industry ending 2025, they were in the, as I said, the mid-to-high 80s. Some investors say, well, why aren't they in the mid-90s or why aren't they moving quickly to get there? The industry has also learned from this experience that they want to have a more enduring model. They want more stability, and that ultimately benefits us as well. We think that's the dynamics. We're fortunate to have a, you know, this soft market cycle as we're in right now, typically categorized by, you know, four to five years when we're in the early innings. We think it's a nice backdrop. In that time period, we've gone deeper with the carriers and agents. That I think is key to really winning long term and being their close partner.
Absolutely. And then, Joseph, I think you've talked publicly about California being maybe, you know, the outlier in terms of not where it needs to be. Could you give us sort of the state of the landscape there in California and how important would that be in, say, 2026 to drive a lot of your growth?
Sure. So, for those of you who don't know the states, what we've talked about, maybe I'll start with maybe broadly where we are in the industry recovery. So, broadly, I'd say most carriers are back. We have one notable exception who will be online this year. A carrier was a top three carrier for us prior to the downturn is coming back in this year. I won't mention their name publicly, but they sort of pulled back pretty broadly for multiple years from customer acquisition to focus on rebuilding. So, that carrier is coming back. So, broadly, carriers are back. They progressed through 2025, went from more narrow to broader as we progressed through 2025, and that's continued in 2026. We have this one notable addition. In terms of the state footprint, states are largely broadly back. The outlier has been California in terms of rate increases.
California has taken a view. There's an elected insurance commissioner, and it tends to be that getting rate adequacy there has been challenging, and what I've observed is that if you talk to folks in that market, what you're starting to see is you're starting to see some rate increases, and we're starting to see some, you know, as we progressed through 2025, we've seen some improvements in California. And I would say that started with rate adequacy so carriers didn't pull out of the state, so that didn't mean they wanted to necessarily acquire new consumers, but at least wanted to stay in. Good starting point. Then they started to get some rate increases that made it better, so I think we still have more to go, but I think that could be important for us in auto.
You know, we've said California is 10%-15% of the U.S. population. Generally, they were 10%-15%. You know, they're below that. And then on the home side in California, that's probably further behind. They think that will probably take some time to recover. But I think, you know, there's some encouraging signs. Maybe not as much for first part 2026, but second half, maybe in 2027.
Got it, so we got the questions on the overall market.
Yep.
Overall market.
Yeah. Cool.
So, as we sort of focus on, you know, EverQuote specifically, maybe just talk about why do you win? Because it's a pretty competitive market. A lot of marketplaces claim that they have the best solution. Why does EverQuote win in this market?
Sure. So, I think it goes back to our strategy and approach. When you go back to our business, when we started this business, we knew nothing about insurance. For our founders here, I wasn't here at the time, but I heard them say that they knew nothing about insurance. Apparently, one of the stories was one of them couldn't even get insurance online, which is why they started to do their business. The start of the idea for the business came to them one night. What we were having is we used how to use data and tech to acquire consumers online. Before AI and large language models were a topic at all, investor conferences, that we were using data and tech to acquire consumers. That has always been our secret sauce. You know, from, and that's what made us a public company in 2018.
As you look through 2019 through early 2021, we did a lot of diversification to other verticals, health and life. We also had our own first-party agents, and I would say we sort of lost, we sort of forgot what makes us special. What makes us special is how we use data and tech, particularly in the P&C space, and so, in 2023, we made this decision to sort of double down on P&C. And what that has done, as opposed to taking the same tech stack and trying to sort of go an inch deep and a mile wide and copy it across everywhere, we said, let's go deep. Let's help those carriers and agents really grow their business in a differentiated way. Let's be their preferred partner to grow with, and that has been really about how do we drive better performance and how do we optimize.
So, I'll give you some examples to sort of help make it sort of real for you. So, I gave the, well, I'm going to start on the bidding side on traffic. So, on traffic, one of the things we talked about a lot of the first part of last year, maybe we talked even at this conference, was we talked about traffic acquisition and invested a lot in our bidding stack. And so, if you think about a marketplace model, it's really about how can you drive performance for your carriers and agents. And if you do that successfully, how do you in turn get data insights to then inform your traffic operations, that flywheel of a marketplace, right? So, we've done a lot on our traffic side.
And, you know, in the bidding investments we've made in our large language models, they've been really important in helping drive efficiency, but also helping us scale in a way that we can drive better performance for our carriers. On the carrier side, I talked about the Smart Campaigns offering. That has been an important piece for driving better performance for them. The interesting thing about that is not only does it drive better performance, but we actually get the data, which informs our traffic operations. So, it's this flywheel that we think is really important. And then I think the other part of it is also just listening to what our carriers and agents need. In 2023, we spent a lot of time before we committed to this course in our strategy, we spent time interviewing carriers and agents. Call it old-fashioned. We talked to our customers.
People pay us money, say, what can we do for you better? Our agents, we had one product strategy. We now have a multi-product strategy. I'd like to say it was this great visionary idea that came to us. We actually talked to our agents and said, guys, like you could help us grow more successfully. These are the things we need. These are being done by mom-and-pop shops, and so, can you help us do that, so when I think about all of that piece, it's really been focused on how do we drive more aggressively on that data and tech advantage and these investments we're making in AI, and so I talk about on the traffic side, talk about on Smart Campaigns as well, and we'll continue to do that.
I think the other thing that's been beneficial for us in sort of this mentality of playing to, when I talk about this, 2025 was a year we said to our employees. I said, we actually went on offense in an aggressive way. We're really focused on how do we build the business, not just for now, but how do we play to win in this space? Our belief is that in any sector, and I say this as an investment banker for 25 years before here, vertical markets will evolve. And how can you stand out in that pack as it evolves? And we think there's an opportunity for EverQuote to do that. We look across the landscape of players. We have a differentiated offering. We're getting that feedback consistently from folks, partly because we're only doing P&C. That focus matters.
Then, investors will say, well, geez, aren't you worried? You're only in P&C. I'm like, it's a massive market. There's a lot of things I don't sleep well at night, but one of the things I do not, that does not prevent me from sleeping well is the size of our market opportunity. It's massive. I feel like that is the thing that will continue to propel us. And these carriers and agents are relatively early in the digital journey relative to a lot of the room. That's a backdrop we think is pretty exciting for us.
That's a good segue into the overall market. So, if you think about the carriers and the agents and with these newer products that you have, this multi-product strategy, has that expanded the TAM? I know it's already large, but maybe you could put some numbers around the TAM and what your penetration today is?
When you think about the TAM, there's this idea of advertising and distribution spend. When you think about premium dollars, right, generally P&C industry spends 10%-15% of premiums on sales and marketing and advertising, right? In that $100 billion and roughly $120 billion advertising and distribution spend, the lion's share of that is agent dollars, right? I'll come back to that in a moment. The other piece is advertising. Advertising is like a $15 billion market. Digital is a third of that, you know, depending on which study you look at. Much lower digital penetration than areas of financial services, travel. You have this dynamic where we see this expansion continuing to happen in the digital area on sort of pure advertising. But then you look at these dollars around agent distribution costs.
One of the things you're seeing in the landscape is the market's being remade. The carriers, structurally, the industry has sort of three, if you put them in class box, a third of direct-to-consumer carriers, a third of captive agent carriers, and a third of independent agents. Increasingly, those walls are changing, right? And so, you have like Allstate is a captive carrier, but they are a very large direct-to-consumer carrier. So, some of those dynamics are coming into it. And so, you look at that and you say that has an opportunity for us to help someone work across multiple areas in a way that sets us up to the strategy we have. And so, just give you, I guess, a little flavor on it.
Right. Great. And then I wanted to ask you, so when you think of P&C, obviously auto is a big part of your revenue today. How big is the opportunity in areas, you know, like, I don't know, renters? Maybe it's a small opportunity, but you think of home and other areas within P&C, you know, how aggressively are you targeting those opportunities within the P&C space?
Sure, sure. So, our business is roughly 90% revenues, 10% home. Renters is part of home today. And I would say we look at the insurance market of P&C insurance. So, roughly, if you look at the home market, it's roughly half the size of auto. So, for us, it's 10%. So, between 10%-50%, we think there's a lot of room for growth. You know, a couple of things just to note on the home market for us. If you look at how carriers came out of COVID, the auto market was talked about a lot about how COVID impacts supply chains, labor costs. Very similar things happened in home, right? The difference was carriers prioritized getting profitability in auto first. They started to shift into home in 2024 to 2025.
As we look ahead, we see that 10% of revenues being home versus 50% in sort of broader premiums. We think it's a real opportunity for growth. In the midterm, we would expect home to grow at a higher rate than auto, and one of the things we're doing to help do that is we've put new leadership in charge of that home vertical, which I think has really been successful. You've seen, we've talked a little bit at some of our calls, some of the success we've had. The other thing we're doing is we're also focusing on how we think about, although there's a lot of complementary nature of the distribution between auto and home, not all carriers are the same. Some large national carriers, for example, are only focused on or primarily focused on auto, but like the captive agents, they're very focused on home.
So, as we think about the industry, how do we think about our distribution activating that further on home? What are the things we can do to make those home offerings more robust for those agents? And so, I think we're doing a good job on trying to do that. And that'll be an important piece of it. And then, as I look beyond home, you know, under the P&C umbrella, property and casualty umbrella of personal lines, there's a variety of things that could be interesting. So, small business commercial is not distributed through brokers, as you might think. It's more distributed to the same person. And these are sort of small business owner-entrepreneurs. Half of businesses in America often distribute insurance through their independent agents. They're captive agents. We think there's an opportunity there. There's some other verticals that are smaller, you know, the toys, the boats.
Someone said, "Well, those are really small." What's interesting is that they're really small. There's an opportunity potentially for differentiation that could be a way to cross-sell consumers into the other verticals. I think there's some exciting things there. Then, you know, to our previous question, we talked a little bit about TAM expansion. You know, I think there is an opportunity as we think about the agent side. We were really a one-product company. We're leads online to offline leads going to agents. As we've added, you know, Digital Marketing Services, Lead Connection Services, that's been helpful for captive agents. We really have done very little on the independent agent, which is sort of the other third of distribution. Historically, independent agents were not. They're sort of further behind, relatively speaking, on using buying digital leads, buying leads.
But some of the other products we're doing for captive agents, there could be overlap there with the independent agents. So, you could see us broadening out there. And so, those are some of the ways we could think about, you know, additional expansions. And I think there's some really good opportunities for us.
Joseph, turning to growth, I think on the last call, you talked about, I think a lot of your clients, like 80% of your clients are not even at peak spending levels yet. Maybe just walk through the math on that, because that could obviously suggest, you know, potentially even stronger growth in 2026. You're not giving guidance today, obviously, but maybe just walk us through sort of where you're at on that front and then how we should expect that to play out.
Sure. And Mayank did ask if I had to give guidance. I'm sorry I said no, but you know, we got to wait till the earnings call on Friday. But good question to ask. I would say as we sort of think about it, I'm sorry, would you say one more time?
The clients are not at peak spending levels.
Peak spending, 80%.
That translates into 2016, potentially.
Yeah. So, the comment we referenced in Q3 was that 80% of our top 25 carriers were not at peak spend. And so, what I'd say is what that speaks to us is a lot of our carriers still have opportunities to grow higher. Now, I would preface it by saying not every carrier will be at peak spend in any given quarter, because carriers go in and out of competing in different markets. But I see that as we see there's a broad base of carriers who still want to grow. And the fact that 20% are above their peak spend speaks to some of that 80% will be above their peak spend as well. So, we think that's a very favorable backdrop in terms of the industry being healthy.
Then, as we progress through 2025, we had this dynamic where we started 2025, you know, on the heels of 2024, which is growth as we had digital, as we had auto carrier recovery, as they engaged in digital channels, it was more narrow and became broader. If you look to our comments, even at this conference last year and even in our May earnings call, we talked about how we'd expect as we progress through 2025, we'd see that broadening out, and that is what we've continued to see. And we think that will be continuing into 2026. So, we feel good about that. And I think what drives that, we've talked about this sort of path to a billion, right?
One of the comments we made in our last earnings call is in two to three years, we see us, you know, our business this year will be high $600 million in revenue. We made a comment in November call articulating a path to $1 billion in two to three years. What does that mean? If we do it in three years, that's probably mid-teens growth. If we do it in two years, it's low-20s growth, top-line growth on average. You know, what gives us conviction about that growth? I maybe touch on that a bit for you.
Sure. I was going to go there later, but.
Oh, you were okay. Sure. So, I think that's one of the things that is, when you think about the opportunity for us. So, first, you think about the secular shift of insurance online. We just talked about auto insurance. It really continues to be a laggard relative to other industries. And we think that has always been a tailwind for our story. We think that will continue to be a tailwind. And I just gave you some stats that reference that. You know, the second is carriers have a 40%, roughly 40% on average rate increase over the past few years. In an industry like auto insurance, which is a quasi-regulated industry, as things normalize, carriers generally spend 10%-15% of premiums on sales and marketing. So, you look at that backdrop. That's another tailwind for us, right?
Third, what I mentioned was obviously a large carrier was the top three is coming back, which I think is a good sign for us. And then we've mentioned, for example, the broad base of carriers I think will be leaning in. We think there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of state recovery still to come in California. And then obviously these non-auto verticals. So, I think that combination gives us a lot of ways to think about paths to getting to top-line growth of, you know, $1 billion in revenue in two to three years. And I guess the other thing I'd probably add to it is, you know, you think about since we've done our changes in the summer of 2023, we put out a variety of goals to investors.
We've said we're going to do, and we've done what we've said pretty consistently. So, I'd say when we put forward these goals, we put a lot of thought into it. You can't know exactly the pieces that'll come together. We don't know it perfectly, but you know, we have lots of paths to get there. That's what we think speaks to just the market rent is a great market. It's a very favorable backdrop as we continue into 2026.
Joseph, on that, and this is maybe more near-term, how should we think about growth between traffic and RPQR or revenue per quote request? Because I know that was something that you guys used to share in the past, but you don't provide that metric anymore. But just maybe walk us through sort of the math around that, how important is traffic versus RPQR to drive to those target growth rates?
Sure. So, when you think about our business, in any given quarter could be led by more volume or pricing, right? So, both metrics, and we have had both in any given time lean in one or the other. What you've had is more pricing-driven changes in the past year than volume. Why is that? Because volume's been quite elevated by consumers. And now you have more competition from carriers and that's driven up the pricing. I think consumer volume levels will remain elevated, we expect. And you'd say, well, why is that? Well, if you think about auto insurance, it's a top five expenditure for the average American family. And it's now gone up on average by 40%, right? So, I think there's, and then you have an environment where there's some, you know, economic pressures in the U.S. for the average American family.
So, you put that together, I think that's a good combination for us. To give you a little insight.
Got it. And then I have to commend you. You guys have done an incredible job on the profitability front really over the last couple of years and brought the company to GAAP profitability, very healthy margins. And of course, based on your $1 billion revenue target, if I remember correctly, you've talked about a 20% EBITDA margin goal. Could you just walk us through sort of what the levers are to drive further margin expansion from here?
Sure. So, the goal we are taking just for everyone to have is averaging 20% growth in the long term and getting to 20% EBITDA margins. And just to give you some context in the EBITDA margins, in 2023, they were negative. We said starting 2024 they'd get to 8%. We ended up about 11.5%. I think it speaks to that we have created this very disciplined approach to how we think about investment. And I can touch on that a little bit further. As we started 2025, we said, hey, we'll probably add 100-150 basis points. You know, based on the midpoint of our guide for Q4, it's probably more like 200 basis points, so like 13.5%. And so, we continue to see that growth. And so, as we look ahead, we've talked about adding 100-150 basis points a year for 2026 till we get to 20%.
You know, we've said for 2026, we've grown so much in margin right now, maybe you'll see it more than 100 basis points as you start out, as where we think to target more than the higher end. And what gives us conviction? I said a couple of things I'd type to you. So, first, philosophically, we've taken an approach to running the business that is much more disciplined in how we think about investment. If you think about the EverQuote journey, you know, 2023 marked five years of us being a public company. And you think about a lot of companies, when you hit that five-year mark, how do you think about processes? How do you think about changing from a youthful post-IPO company to sort of a more disciplined public company? We put a lot of those processes in place.
And so, you think about how we make decisions on operating expenses, the quarterly review process, all that has much more rigor into it than it had before. And it comes into like, how do you think about ROI? Concepts that, to be honest, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about in the early days of EverQuote, because it just, like a lot of early public companies, it's not how you think. That discipline is in there now. And then I look at what allows us to continue to maintain the market. We're an asset-light model, right? We continue to be an asset-light model. We're going back to using focus on data and tech. So, you think about what gives us advantage in data and tech? It's those investments we're making in the engineering team and in AI.
And if you look about what we're doing in that area, those are things that we feel a lot of conviction will continue to drive improvements. You know, AI for us is, and I'll maybe touch on this a little bit in efficiency, which is when I think about AI investments, there's two flavors, right? One is efficiency and one is innovation. And sometimes you get lucky and get both, right? And so, examples on the efficiency side, you know, just to name, I feel like our bidding technology. We've had a lot of investments in our bidding technology to be more efficiently take our data and drive performance for our carrier partners. What's interesting about that, it drove a lot of innovation. It drives better results in it. But also to our efficiency, we have far fewer people running that platform than we did before.
So, that's a good example. We'll continue to see those examples, right? Another example on innovation, we started an effort in the spring of this past year. We took a view on AI. We said, listen, we want to make sure we're thinking about AI. We really, we had this feel like, hey, we're behind. We're behind. We're always a little paranoid. We're behind. And we said, everyone's going fast. So, we actually did a lot of benchmark. We got a third party in. What we found is our aspirations are here. You know, we're here, but a lot of our competitors are further behind. Why? Because I think we've been thinking about these efficiency things for a while.
The mantra we think about on efficiency is, how can we take our employees, as opposed to saying, hey, we're trying to replace employees, how can we make our employees, you know, super employees? How can we make them be more, get the basic work done so they can focus on more of the analysis? And we have efforts underway across all areas of the company, whether it's our finance team, whether it's our legal team, whether it's our analyst team. In each area, what is the initiative that they bring forward to how they're bringing AI in to drive efficiency? The CTO, Dave Brainard, and I lead this effort together for the company. And it's really been powerful to think about those things.
If all of those came together, and I wouldn't expect all of them to come together, but if, you know, there's a lot of paths to improving the EBITDA margin, I feel really good about. And I think the last piece on efficiency, there's also opportunities where some of the new products that are created that will be AI-driven that will also be interesting efficiency. So, for example, we offer one of the new products we offer on the agent side is a Lead Connection Service, sort of a PSR. As opposed to getting an online to an offline transfer, a PSR actually does a call. You know, an agent would much prefer to have that connection with a live person. That's a product today that is a human doing it. And we have a lot of outsourced talent who does it for us.
But as we think about PSR there, conversational AI is a real opportunity for us in that area. And that could drive certainly efficiency to bring out that product more, but also could drive potential for innovation where the market for that offering could become broader. Today, a lot of, because it's a premium product, your larger agents can afford to pay it. The smaller agents have less ability. As you start to bring down the potential to bring down that price point, as you make it easier to deliver with using technology versus outsourced operators to do it for us, that becomes really powerful. So, I think there's lots of ways to drive the EBITDA margin. The last thing I'd say is it's a philosophical view as well. I think probably all these technologies are ways to drive things.
At the end of the day, how are we as an executive team, how are our employees thinking about how we're building value? And at the end of the day, God bless you, it is balancing top-line growth and profitability. And that is in our DNA now. And you're seeing us, and that is how we execute the strategy. And that is the discipline we have. The joke we have is that we can't control everything, but those things we can't control, we maniacally control. And our operating investments fall in that category.
We've seen that play out, and it's a testament to the execution. And maybe a last question from me before I open the floor to the audience. In terms of capital allocation, you bought back 2% of your shares last quarter. M&A hasn't been high on the agenda, at least in recent years. So, just how are you thinking about capital allocation going forward?
Sure. I love this question because a few years ago, people were worried we're going to run out of cash, so it's lovely to have the question turned this way, and so, you know, if you look at our cash, just, you know, roughly $150 million at the end of Q3, and you look at that, we stipulated three views of capital allocation. We've sort of continued to have those. One is, well, make sure we have a strong balance sheet. If you look across our sector of the public companies, you know, we have no debt, and we have a strong balance sheet. That's not true of all our competitors. I think that's important, and why that's important is not just, you know, hey, how do you compare to your peers, is when you think about the mindset of making investments, we are playing to win.
We're playing to win long term. To do that, some of the investments we make, they will not give a meaningful return this year. They may not give a meaningful return until late 2027. But that's what we have to do. We have to be doing some of those as part of our strategy. And having that conviction and the balance sheet allows us to do that. Go back a few years. We had some great ROI investments. We didn't do because like the payback period was just too long. So, that's one. That's really important. It also allows me to sleep better at night and Jayme at night, which is good. The second one is how do we think about capital allocation to shareholders? We instituted a share buyback program, put a $50 million plan in place in August. It was our inaugural buyback program.
We executed $21 million of that in Q3. And we interestingly did that. This was not planned, but we actually are doing it from our David Blundin and our majority shareholder. Why that worked out nicely is we were able to do a $21 million buyback without disrupting the float of our public company. We got a very nice deal based on the financial metrics. So, I think that was a good example. We'll continue to look at buybacks on an opportunistic basis. And then the third is M&A, the topic you touched on. And so, when I look at M&A, I would say a couple of things. So, first, the path to a billion, pure organic path in our mind. We think that we are not, we don't view that as requiring any M&A. But we do say there could be an opportunity to accelerate our strategy through M&A.
I think there's probably two flavors of it. One is sector consolidation. You know, there's a variety of public, a handful of large private players. At some point, will sector consolidation take place? You know, if you look at any given company, you know, you would say there's probably dynamics of the doability. To use my former M&A term, the doability of it. There's challenges in any one company. But over the next 24 months, I'd be surprised to not do some consolidation. We'll see what's the right way for us to play that. I think for us, we have a vision on our strategy, and we'd have to make sure we continue to execute and build value doing it. So, that's one.
Second is on the insurtech side. There's a lot of private insurtech companies who have been, you know, have hit a point where they really, there's not an IPO market for them given their size. From a structural viewpoint, the investments they brought in in, you know, early 2020s, past, you know, a few years afterwards, they're kind of stuck a bit from a capital structure perspective with preferences and things. I think some of those will start to open up for opportunities, and I think those could be ones that may accelerate our strategy. Some of the areas we talked about for growth and some of the other verticals under P&C could naturally fit with that, so we think there's some opportunity there. I will say this though, we have a clear corporate strategy. The P&C M&A will align to that corporate strategy.
From a financial viewpoint, assume we'll continue to be disciplined if we spend the money there or internally.
Got it. Very helpful. With that, let me open the floor for any questions from the audience if there are any. Excellent. I think I'm out of questions, Joseph. Any last comments you want to make? People might be missing on the story. People don't appreciate it enough. Anything you want to call out that we didn't cover?
Sure. So, I think one of the big things with our story in EverQuote is we've gone through this period where we had, we went the depths and we came back, we had a really nice recovery and started turning. The question is, where do we go from here? And I think if we had talked about, we haven't talked a lot about our intermediate plans until our November call. And the reason for that was if we actually talked about, people say, well, I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about, you know, the next quarter. We are, you know, I wouldn't suggest what we're saying publicly as a view is how we think about internally. We're very focused internally on how we're playing to win. What's the way we're going to win in this space? We've started to share more of that with investors.
We've talked about this path to a billion. We think it was really important. We've also talked about how we're going to be building, how we define value creation, which is cash flow and top line growth, this balance. As those pieces come together, we feel there's a really exciting time for the story. And as we progress through this year, we're looking forward to sharing more of those details with you. So, thank you for the invite.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.