Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Horace Mann's Investor Day. Really excited to see so many familiar faces out there, some new faces as well. Welcome to the people online. I'd like to let the people online know that if you have a question as we're going through our presentation this morning, please feel free to input that question online, and we will take those questions during the Q&A portion. We are really excited to be here this morning. Folks ask, you know, why an Investor Day? We think it's our time. We want to lay out for you why that's the case, why we think we have a very compelling story for investors. Today, this morning, these are the people who will be speaking with you.
I will very briefly try not to bore you too much, but very briefly remind you of who we are, Horace Mann's history, how we got to this point in our history, and why that makes us so excited about the future and what's to come. Steve McAnena, our Chief Operating Officer, and Steve Chauby , our Chief Marketing and Distribution Officer, will talk to you about how we plan to win when we talk about the amazing opportunity we have for sustained, profitable growth. They'll bring it home. They'll show you how we plan to execute around that with some pretty good specifics. Then Ryan Greenier will talk to us.
He's our Chief Financial Officer about the finances of the company and how that all translates to what we feel is a very compelling value proposition for investors and the valuation model we use when we value this company and one we think you should use as well. That's the day. I will close to give Rachel some time to queue up questions, both those questions online as well as the questions we have in the room. With that, I'll get started. The boring part, remind you all of the safe harbor statement. We will be covering non-GAAP measures today. I will take this as read and save you me reading this word for word. I'm sure you've all seen it before. What are we here to do today? Like I said, I will give you the history. We have been around for 80 years.
We'll talk about those 80 years, why this is a great point for us to think about what's to come in the future. Like I said, Steve and Steve going through the very specifics, the levers exactly of how we plan on driving that sustainable growth, and then Ryan going through our confidence in delivering those. Hopefully that's what you'll take away from today. We celebrate 80 years today. We're here at the New York Stock Exchange. I noticed this morning many of you saying that this is the first time you've been here. Kind of Disney World for finance geeks, I like to say, but it's a great place with a lot of history, and it seems appropriate for an 80-year-old company here to be celebrating not only the 80 years that got us here, but how bright we believe our future is.
I think it all stems from we help educators succeed in the classroom and outside of the classroom. When we talk to school districts, we have done a big part over the last 80 years helping educators choose the profession, stay in the profession, and retire healthy from the profession. That means a lot, especially in the world that's swirling around our educators today. When a lot of folks will ask, how have you been doing this for 80 years? What's the secret of this company and why we've existed for so long? I think these are the reasons. Simply, we've been doing it for this long and the longevity of the company. We know educators better than probably anyone out there. Anyone who rates on occupation, anybody who thinks about this preferred segment that we have, and it is a preferred segment. Everybody likes these educators.
We understand them, right? And we bring solutions to those educators. When you think about the acquisition of NTA and Madison National, we added another 50, another 60 years of history in the educator space. Not only were those acquisitions accretive right out of the chute, they actually increased the power we have in this very distinct, homogeneous customer set that we serve. The second reason is our financial strength. Conservatively run, we understand our responsibility. We hit our numbers. There are a few times in our history where macroeconomic events may have got us off our predictions, but not very often. We tend to deliver exactly the results we say we're going to deliver. The other reason is this niche market that we understand, educators.
When we talk a little bit about how we intend to expand some natural adjacencies around that, it starts with an understanding of those who serve. Steve and Steve will unpack that a little bit for you. Lastly, the multi-line model has brought us a really nice balance in our product mix. It has brought us earnings diversification and helped reduce our volatility of our earnings. We will demonstrate that today as well. At the end of the day, when I came to Horace Mann, I asked three questions. Do we have the products to be relevant to educators? Is our distribution broad enough? Is our reach broad enough? Can an educator access us any way they choose in this environment? Is our infrastructure modern?
From a product standpoint, we now have, whether we built the product, whether we acquired the product, or whether we partnered with a third party, we built the products we needed to be relevant to this space. There is nothing else we need to do from a product standpoint. We have what we need to significantly grow in this space. I think you'll feel that when we unpack those specifics for you. It isn't just the fact that we have those product lines. This is an example of within P&C, both from an auto and a homeowner's perspective, we have coverages tailored to the unique needs of educators. We create an environment where every educator will start and want to be with Horace Mann. We will talk about our plans to reach even more of those educators. I think that speaks to the retention power of our company.
You can see we tailor what we do to those educator needs, not only from a product perspective, but we like to say we understand the issues facing educators and we solve them. Here are some examples. Think about student loans and how many educators have large student loan debt. We work to help those educators understand that student loan debt. We help them get access to the state and federal programs to reduce that student loan debt. When we're working with them, the conversation goes along the lines of, if we can help you get some of that debt forgiven, can we start a 403(b)? Can we talk to you about your life insurance needs? That is how those solutions weave in. It's not just a product sale. It goes much farther beyond that in our affinity marketing. DonorsChoose is another good example.
You know, you've seen those Walmart and Target bags go into classrooms every year at the beginning of the year. Those teachers many times are buying their own supplies. If we can help them get access to crowdfunding and other programs to get those supplies paid for, and in some ways we also put our charitable giving towards those things, then they can take that $1,000, start that 403(b), and maybe begin to start their financial planning for the future as well. All that work to this point has led to a really solid foundation that we feel it is the time for us to be talking very loudly about sustainable, profitable growth. We now service a million of those educator clients, and we think the opportunity doesn't end there. We have about a million of the 8 million or so public K through 12 educators.
You see that when you broaden that to the much broader educator space, the universe is closer to 14 million. When Steve and Steve come up here, I should just say the Steves, and make it easier. When the guys come up here, they're going to talk about three very clear levers to drive that profitable growth. The whole organization is organized and focused on these three levers. The first lever is from our position of strength, and that is do more of what we do today. We cover about half of the school locations in the country. In those locations with exclusive agents, as well as some of our direct capabilities, we feel we have tremendous momentum. The first lever is really about do what you're doing today faster, stronger, and build on the momentum we have today.
The second lever is simply do it in more places. We will talk about ways in which we feel we can enter new districts, and we can do it quicker, and we can get to scale much faster in some of those districts. You will hear about that. The third lever is really a test and learn agenda. Be very thoughtful to determine where we have a right to win in others who serve the community. We will talk about how we decide that, how we are going to learn. You will see a very thoughtful approach to that last third lever. All of this very briefly, and Ryan will cover the details, but it is really important to say, so what? How has that led to our financial results? We had very strong earnings in 2024.
We were on pace and on our plan to set that foundation, if you will, for the financials, very close to that 10% double-digit ROE that we said was really table stakes. We know it will be higher. We will show you how it will be higher. You can see under 100 combined, and you can see decent growth in the business. That also translated and pulled through to the first quarter of 2025. Record first quarter for the company. Those are pretty staggering percentages. Above that 10% ROE threshold that we set, solid earnings diversification from our ballast business, if you will, in Life and Retirement, and strong earnings diversification with Supplemental and Group Benefits, and a very good solid combined ratio that reflects the profit improvement that not only we, but the industry needed to get back into the P&C environment.
You can see the earnings power of this company when we have the ballast earnings of Life and Retirement, the earnings diversification move with Supplemental and Group Benefits, and P&C back to more of a historic profitability threshold for Horace Mann, it really does translate to some pretty strong earnings numbers. We've got a very strong leadership team. You see some new faces. I'm very excited about this group leading us into the future as we embark on that sustainable, profitable growth edict, if you will. That's a good word that we have as a company. We do understand, though, that we're not doing this in a vacuum. There are a lot of macro environmental issues that swirl around us, if you will, and we're all aware of these.
We'll probably touch on the majority of these in Q&A so I can get you thinking about what you might want to ask us. From an economic standpoint, I think it's back to that 80 years. Again, Horace Mann has seen almost every economic cycle, if you can imagine, and not only survived, but thrived during those. Some of it is because we believe our niche, our educators, are somewhat insulated, not immune, but somewhat insulated to those economic realities, if you will. From a tariff perspective, we believe tariffs are manageable. We know it's fluid. We saw that over the last couple of days. It'll continue to be fluid, but we are very conservative in our loss picks. We also were very thoughtful about how we thought about rate in various environments.
We think we're very well positioned from a tariff perspective, and we can talk about that a little bit as well. We've all read about the Department of Education. We have been a company for probably almost half our existence without a Department of Education. It really only got fully up and running in the early 1980s. Whether our educators are regulated, if you will, by the federal government or the state government, we feel very ready to work with educators. We're about the educator. You got to remember that. We have very strong state and local relationships. In some ways, we will be able to use those relationships as this transition takes place. As it relates to GenAI, you'll hear a lot about that today. We're prepared. We're ready on two fronts.
On the macro front, as we think about customer service, claims, underwriting, but also on the everyday work that we do where everyone across the organization is looking and deploying ways in which we can use AI to improve our efficiency. Ryan will talk to you about some of our expense goals, and AI is a part of some of that as well. In closing, before I introduce Steve, we are operating from a position of strength. We think this is a great time to be talking about what the next leg of our journey looks like and how we are excited about our future. We have a clear competitive advantage in the education space as well as others who serve the community. You will hear a lot about that. We are confident. We are confident that we can drive sustained, market-leading, profitable growth for years to come.
With that, I am going to introduce Steve McAnena, our Chief Operating Officer. Steve's been with us for just two years now, and we're really excited to have him. I'm looking forward to the rest of the day. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Just a sound check. Can you hear me okay? Awesome. Marita said, "I've been here two years, and I'll tell you it's been the best 10 years of my life." For the next 90 minutes or so, what we're going to talk about is what I'll call the tenets of our growth strategy. We'll talk about the initiatives that support the growth strategy. We'll also talk about our expense and capital plans. Really, we'll sort of try to bring that together to talk about how we're going to deliver the target returns. Ryan will come up and do that.
I think thematically, what might be more important is you're going to hear over and over, "We're doing really well. We have a good foundation. We're pretty strong. And we can do better." I think that's really important for everyone to hear. I'm going to dive into some details. Before that, I thought it'd be helpful just to pull back and give you a brief overview and a reminder of each of our business segments. I'll start with P&C. P&C, we have over $700 million in premium. Auto property splits about 60/40. In 2024, we posted an underwriting profit. We're on track, as Marita said, to deliver and maintain target profitability with auto expected to be in the mid-90s and property around 90. The products are sold primarily, but not entirely, through exclusive agents in 2024.
I think you've heard us talk about this in the earnings call. We actually grew the number of agents. Their production improved, and their income went up. They're in a really good spot. That is really important to me because despite the challenges we went through as an industry, particularly in P&C, we came out the other side with a really strong foundation, really good agency force, healthy, resilient, and they're absolutely eager to grow. I guess the last thing I'd say, and I'm not going to drain the slide, is we have a number of initiatives underway in P&C. For me, they're all important, but one sort of stands out above the others. It is really about reducing earnings volatility. We're doing that through contract changes. We talked about roof schedules, and we can probably talk about that at the Q&A.
We're also introducing new underwriting tools, specifically a new wildfire score and a new risk aggregation score, both of which, by the way, were approved by California. They'll be implemented sometime in July. At 30,000 feet, I look at P&C and say, "Rock solid and getting better." When I think about life and retirement, I think about this as the value that life and retirement brings to stakeholders. One stakeholder for us is the customer. We've all seen the statistics. We know that when we sort of look at the statistics, we know that half of American adults do not have a life insurance policy. We also know that two-thirds of consumers do not have adequate savings for retirement. These products really serve a need for consumers. From an agent perspective, that's kind of fascinating.
Our agents that sell life and retirement sell 3X agents that do not. From their perspective, these are good products to have. I would say the last stakeholder is for everyone in this room. Life and retirement provides really steady earnings, which in turn creates earnings diversification, which in turn creates reduction in earnings volatility. Ryan is going to go deep on that in his presentation. For me, when I sort of pull back and look at this, I say life and retirement is really win, win, win for all the stakeholders. I would say one other point that I wanted to make on this page was retirement really serves as a true differentiator for us in the marketplace. I have been here two years. From my perspective, retirement really serves as the tip of the spear for our agents, both accessing schools, but also engaging with individual consumers.
You could really say that in many ways, retirement is the catalyst behind our business. In terms of initiatives, again, I won't drain it. To me, two broad buckets. One is ease and simplification. That work ranges from what I would say process modernization and also reimagining our underwriting. The second one is points of distribution. Pretty simple. More agents, more inside salespeople selling, and things like digital enrollment for retirement. These are good, simple products. They address the needs of stakeholders and provide steady, consistent earnings for us. The last segment I'll talk about is supplemental and group benefits. I'll start with supplemental on the left-hand side of the slide. We sell primarily through benefit specialists, and they do an awesome job of accessing the schools and creating awareness among the educators.
As you can see, we have really strong sales and multiple quarters in a row of really growing our new business. The returns for this business are excellent for us and for the industry. As we go forward and we think about initiatives, I would say there are three broad categories. One, we are increasing the points of distribution, so more people selling. The second is we are simplifying the sales process. Think of that as straight-through processing. The third is expanding our geographic reach. In short, what I would say for individual supplemental is we are growing that line of business. If I move to group benefits on the right-hand side of the slide, it really rounds out our product breadth and really offers growth potential and earnings power. Like supplemental, I would say the agenda is fairly simple.
Increase activity with both new and existing brokers while at the same time advancing our underwriting and product capabilities. The focus for today, we've got a packed agenda. The focus today is really going to be around growth plans for individual consumer products. Group is obviously very different than those businesses. It is really for that reason, but also for time constraint reasons, that we will not be deep diving into group. Instead, we will cover group at a future venue when we can give it adequate time and attention and focus. I think before I dive into the growth agenda, the last comment I wanted to make here was on earnings. We absolutely know that supplemental and group provides growth potential and also really strong earnings. For me, and Ryan's going to show the data, it is kind of fascinating.
The diversification, the earnings diversification and the reduction in volatility, our earnings volatility that comes about by having supplemental and group is incredible. Ryan will get into that data with you. For me, there is a whole bunch of reasons why I think individual supplemental and group are terrific businesses. One of the big ones is the diversification power they provide. Hopefully that provided you with a little bit of context and reminder as to who we are and the type of business we have. If we kind of pull back and we think about the direction, future of Horace Mann, it is pretty simple. Be the leading financial service provider for educators in the US. The question really becomes, how do we do that? How do we win? I will go through a couple of examples. One way is by providing distinctive service to our educators.
Our service teams care incredibly deeply about our educators. The proof, as they say, is actually in the numbers. Retention is very, very strong, even despite the significant rate increases that we took over the last couple of years. The rate increases were significant. The last two years, I think we took auto and property up together around 40%. Massive numbers. Even though our retention is strong, we think it is strong because we care about our customers, but not just in an insurance sense. I think Teacher Appreciation Month and Steve Chauby is going to talk about that. It is a really good example of what that means. I think the last point I would make on this slide is educators really value and appreciate choice, but at the same time, they absolutely love our agents.
If you've ever met one of our agents, you know exactly why they love them. Another way we win is by providing a full suite of products. Our offerings give educators the option of one-stop shopping to really try to protect them at every single stage of their lives. I've mentioned this a few times, but it bears repeating. The product breadth that I just spoke about also creates earnings diversification, which in turn creates reduction in earnings volatility. Again, Ryan will talk about that in some depth. I think the last thing I'd like to say is we win because of strong and evolving distribution capabilities.
Whether it is our long-standing exclusive agents, our benefit specialists, inside sales, or even third-party partnerships, Horace Mann is really trying hard to seamlessly engage with customers and allow them to do business with us where, when, and how they want. Marita referenced this earlier, and I am going to stick with growth to sort of close out my remarks up here. I want to set the stage for Steve Chauby , who is going to come up and go deep on some of this stuff. When we talk about tenets of our growth strategy, I think about things in three segments and three specific markets. The first segment is really our current footprint. Marita described this well. It is really the places where we play today. We estimate the size to be around 3 million households.
We have about 1 million of those today, which leaves us with a net opportunity of 2. We try to do some analysis using J.D. Power's data to sort of estimate, given the size of the market potential, realistically, what might we expect in a given year in terms of new business production. I consider these numbers sort of directional and gauges. They're not absolutes, but it sort of gives us a sense of relative sizing of the opportunity in front of us. To me, whether it's I've got to go back. Whether it's adding agents, whether it's improving our lead gen capabilities, or all the stuff you see on the right-hand side of the slide, I think we're doing really, really well today.
For frame of reference, our new business production was somewhere in the middle of that range, by the way, even though it is sort of directional. We asked ourselves when we looked at this, we said, "Okay, we have a lot of work to do in front of us, a lot of opportunity. Can we do better? Is this enough? Is this going to be enough to generate sustained profitable growth?" Our answer as we looked at that was, "Yeah, probably for a couple of years, we think we can generate decent new business growth just with this segment." We pulled back and said, "Is that going to be enough?" Our answer was no. That takes us to our second segment. These are the markets where we have educator households, but we are not actively accessing them.
When you look at the numbers, they're directional. They're not perfect, but it's a massive growth opportunity for us. We sort of pulled back and said, "Okay, big growth opportunity. We have the right to win in this space. What are we going to do about it?" I'd say two broad things, and Steve will go much deeper than me. The first is we're going to use what works. What that really means is we're going to leverage the same tactics in segment one and bring those into segment two. All the things that are working successfully, we'll just port that over. We think that's a smart thing to do. The second, which is equally important, is we need speed and we need scale.
You're going to hear Steve talk about this, but we've launched a new approach, a new go-to-market approach to really quickly activate and scale in markets and sort of taking the things we do today and making them a little better. Early days, Steve has some interesting information to share with you, and I think you'll enjoy hearing that. Again, we kind of sort of looked at this and said, "Okay, is that going to be enough?" We love the opportunity. We think that's great. Our aspirations are pretty high. We pushed ourselves and asked, "What else can we do? Is there more in front of us, more opportunity?" That really brings us to our third segment. I wanted to be careful, and Marita covered it really well. This is an exploration agenda. We're exploring here. We're testing and learning.
We really want to go after segments where we think our brand, product, distribution is really going to resonate with a customer base. To be clear, and Steve will go very deep on this to sort of explain the different segments we are going after and how we are thinking about things. This is not something, this is not a major pivot. This is not a shift. This is not a strategic change of direction. In the near term, this is 100% about testing and learning. I kind of characterized it as thoughtful, non-disruptive strategic exploration. That is really what this boils down to. Like I said, Steve will come up and bring this to life.
I'll sort of pull back and just sort of close out my section and say that whether it's our target market, our ability to get in front of educators, marketing skills, points of distribution, product breadth, we believe pretty firmly with conviction that our foundation is pretty strong. What we've achieved to date is quite good, and we think we can do a lot better. We're obsessed with furthering our business, and we're doing that each and every day. We're pretty excited about the opportunity in front of us, and I think you're going to really enjoy Steve's presentation. Thanks for your time and your engagement. It's my pleasure now to invite Steve Chauby to join me up here on stage. He's going to walk through and bring to life some of the things we talked about to drive sustained profitable growth at Horace Mann. Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you. All right. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you. Steve, thanks for the warm introduction. Thank you all for being here today, both here live and also here virtually. As Steve mentioned, I'm Steve Chauby. I lead our sales and marketing organization. I'm very, very excited to share with you today the things that we're doing to facilitate accelerated growth. What I hope you walk away with are three things, understanding three main things. One, we truly are unique and special. We're different in the marketplace. I want you to understand what are our uniquenesses. More importantly, secondly, how do we use those to create and sustain a competitive advantage across the organization? Then third, how do those advantages help us accelerate profitable growth? Sound good? Good. Let me jump into the first one.
How we get access to our target market is so important. Most organizations are able to access their market when they're at home and when they're throughout the community. One advantage we have is that we're able to access our market while they're at work, which is where a teacher spends a third of their time. We have agents that are out there greeting teachers when they come into the school, in the teacher's lounge, and in the lunchroom. Because of that, we're able to be there when the educator needs our service and when they want to be consulted. In addition, given that we have this tremendous access, we're able to get out into the marketplace and market through signage and other marketing material across the school. Again, we're able to get to someone at work, at home, and throughout the community.
The second advantage we have is how we engage. You'll hear this concept, integrated omnichannel capabilities. What does that mean? We have access through local agents. We have access through call centers. We have access through digital and through partnerships. If you look at other organizations out there in the marketplace, they may only pick one of these verticals. They may say, "We're only going to distribute through direct. We're only going to distribute through agents." If you look at what's happening right now, a lot of companies are moving towards this model where they're giving the consumer choice. It's all about the consumer. The consumer wants to interact. Horace Mann already has that. We already provide this sort of seamless integration across channels. We do not force the educator to pick one particular vertical. They can pick one. They can also seamlessly transition through many.
Let me make that real for you. We clearly offer auto insurance. It is one of our core products. There are four main stages to the auto insurance journey: research, shopping, which would be getting a quote, purchasing, and then servicing. Those are the four main steps of the process. When it comes to research, you see that it is heavily influenced in the digital aspect of our business. A lot of teachers, given that they are highly educated, the average age is around 42, and they are very tech-savvy. 80% use social media. The instinct is, "Let's go to the website and figure out, is Horace Mann the right fit for us?" We have got a wonderful website. If you have not checked it out, please do. When it comes to shopping, when it comes to get a quote, you go back to that model of choice that Steve mentioned.
You say, "A quarter or a third want to shop through digital, a quarter or a third want to shop through the agent, and the rest want to shop through the call center." We provide that choice and that optionality, allowing them to flow easily from research from the website to one of the other channels. Now, when it comes to purchasing, when someone wants to purchase a policy, you see the agent channel takes a more heavier influence. Why is that? You may ask, "Well, an auto insurance policy costs north of $2,500 a year." That's a big expenditure for a teacher and, quite frankly, many people out there across the world or across the U.S. They want peace of mind before purchasing that policy. They want to say, "Did I get all the discounts that I'm eligible for? Did I select the right coverages?
Before I give you my money, do I feel confident that I'm giving it to the right spot? That is where the agent really plays a big part. When it comes to servicing, it is pretty simple in our business. People want it fast, simple, and easy. That is typically what digital and direct provide. We clearly have those capabilities. Marita mentioned we are a multi-line carrier, right? Let us look at this from the life and retirement angle. This probably is no surprise. You see more of that orange color, more of that agent influence, both at research and shopping, very much in purchasing. When it comes to servicing, again, it really goes back to direct and digital with, we have all of these capabilities already built here at Horace Mann, a competitive advantage that we have amongst other people out there in the industry.
The thing you do not see here is when someone moves from online to call center to agent, back to call center, back to we allow them to seamlessly flow through, creating an exceptional experience that you can see in our customer satisfaction results and also with customer sentiment. The second benefit is we provide this integrated omnichannel experience to allow people to seamlessly flow through the process. This third one we do not talk about a lot, but I think we should. It is one of my favorites. We have great relationships with these schools and with these school districts. This is evidenced by 45,000-plus what we call payroll integrations between the school and our payroll system. For someone to pay an insurance policy or to take a retirement deposit, there is a direct integration from their paycheck to our payment system. They do not have to do anything.
What does this do? It creates confidence and trust. The school is basically promoting us, for lack of better words, given who we are and given that systematic integration that we already have with that organization. It also makes it easy for the educator to do business with us. All they need to do is say, "Yes, sign up." Then automatically that payment is withdrawn from that paycheck into our policy system. Very easy. For us as Horace Mann, what we typically see is higher persistency and higher retention of those people that choose payroll. To me, this is a win-win-win. It is a win for the school and the school district. It is a win for the consumer, the educator, and it is a win for us as Horace Mann, given greater retention and greater participation. You see the participation rates here to the right.
A school can have more than one payroll slot. They may have one for retirement or one for life or one for P&C. As a school has more than one payroll slot, you see participation even increase more widely. Really powerful thing here. There are a lot of companies that look at this and say, "I would love to replicate that, but it's not easy." Over 80 years, or as Marita said, over 80 years, we've built this capability out. We have over 45% of schools enrolled with this direct payroll integration capability. The fourth and fifth competitive advantage I wanted to highlight falls in the tools and services category.
Earlier this year, from a tool perspective, you might have seen that we announced the launch of Catalyst, which is our homegrown, in-house-built CRM, customer relationship management system that uses AI, third-party data, and predictive models to allow us to get to prospects and clients at the right time with the right message at scale. Given this is an in-house-built CRM, we are able to do it much more cheaply. We're able to customize it much more quickly. We don't have the third-party licensing costs that a lot of companies need to pay into in order to run their CRM. When we rolled this out to all the agents that Steve mentioned, the agent enthusiasm, agent sentiment increased substantially.
In addition to that, agents are telling us, "I see now more leads than I ever have seen, and I need to hire more sub-agents in order to work all these leads." As an insurance organization, as a financial service organization, that's beautiful, right? Because a lot of these agents will pay their own sub-producers, and that's more points of distribution for us, for them to work all of the leads that we're generating. On the right-hand side, you see this element of unique value-added services. Marita mentioned this with Student Loan Solutions. For anyone that knows the P&C marketing space, you know it's quite crowded. Companies spend billions and billions of dollars to market every year for P&C. We play in that space a little bit, but clearly we're not spending that level of money. What we need to do is we need to be smarter.
Student Loan Solutions and services like this allow us to attract our target market at a lower cost of acquisition to then allow us to cross-sell other lines of business. Making that real, the average college graduate with an education degree has above $30,000 in student loan debt. When you graduate, you do not quite know what to do with that. You sort of just pay your bills. We have this great, wonderful solution where we can advertise debt consolidation, student loan payment reduction, and we get a great response rate from those educators. When we get them, and to Marita's point, whenever they save money, what better way to invest in that, to invest in yourself, is to deposit some money into a 403(b).
It's a great way for us to get someone in at a lower cost of acquisition and cross-sell them our other lines of business. It's a beautiful thing to market. Let me just summarize for you the competitive advantages that I just highlighted. First, we're different because we have greater market access. We're able to get to our target market while they're at work, which is a third of the time that other companies don't have the luxury of doing. We have signage blasted throughout the school, and we're there whenever the teacher's busy schedule permits. Second, we have this concept of integrated omnichannel. Again, we don't force the consumer through the channel of our choice. We let them choose where they want to go.
With that, they're allowed to seamlessly flow through, whether it be digital to call center to local agent, without making that a friction-full environment. Third, we have this beautiful thing called payroll integration or payroll relationships. There, we're able to automatically withdraw payment for our policies directly from their paycheck. Good for the school, good for the teacher, good for our organization. Fourth, we have these cutting-edge tools. I gave you the example of Catalyst. We have more than Catalyst, but Catalyst is one example of how we can use technology, in-house-built solutions, and get out to our prospects and clients at scale. Lastly, I just mentioned marketing hooks.
Again, you'll hear some of our brand messaging, which I think is quite powerful, but we're being smarter in the way that we spend our dollars, given that we don't spend as much as some of those other bigger companies. Okay, let me pivot a bit and talk about how do those five advantages show up in the way and leverage that we have for growth. This table reflects just a sample of the leverage that we have. Let me just talk about a few. Given that we have a local agent distribution model as one of our levers, one easy way for us to grow, which has been a tried-and-true method, is that we've hired more agents. That's worked for us. It's easy for us to go out and find more agents and add more agents, put them in the spots that we want.
The reality with that is, while it's good, it takes time for an agent to be fully proficient. I hire an agent today. It may take them a year or two to get through training, build their customer base, and really accelerate the flow. It is a very tried-and-true, successful model for us that will continue to be a great lever for us to pull. Let me go on the other side, which is a more scalable model, but less mature in our organization, but evolving. That is what I call increasing marketing or increasing our advertising. We have a beautiful brand message. Anyone that you talk to will say, "Horace Mann is there for educators." We believe that educators give so much to the students and communities in which they live and work, but they often do not get much back. They deserve so much.
I think everyone in this room would agree with that. You all know teachers. You've all been exposed to teachers. And Horace Mann is there to provide quality products and services at affordable prices tailored to their needs to allow them to live financially secure lives. Sounds like a mouthful, but when you really think about the sentiment and you think about the teachers, they truly deserve more, and that's what we're here for. Our marketing and our advertising, while it's been through local agents to date, less corporate marketing, you're continuing to see more and more of that show up. I can point to another one here, which is just, I don't know, I can point to partnerships, I guess.
You'll hear a bit about partnerships in a couple of slides, but we have some very established partnerships with local, national, and state education associations that allow us great access to the market that we're targeting. In addition to those, we have many more partnerships that we're going after, and I'll speak to some of those in a second. The next question you might ask me is, "Okay, great. You talked about growth differentiators, growth leverage, but what is your growth philosophy? What should you expect us to do year after year after year?" The answer is pretty simple. We believe profit is a prerequisite for growth. Growth is a prerequisite for success, especially long-term success. I think you in this room would agree with that. You need to be a growing company to be a relevant company. I'll say that again.
Profit is a prerequisite for, I'm sorry, profit is a prerequisite for growth. Growth is a prerequisite for success, especially long-term success. We aim for a 10-15% annual new business policy count growth rate year after year after year at target returns. I'll say that again. We aim for between a 10-15% annual new business policy growth rate year after year at target returns. That's our philosophy. Why is that good? One, it shows that we can run a more predictable model, which typically becomes a lower-cost model. We can do that without the whiplash of high investment for growth, and then you do not do any. We are on a pretty consistent and stable growth trend. In addition, we believe that increases investor confidence to demonstrate that we can consistently deliver results year after year after year.
That's simple growth philosophy, 10-15% profitable growth year after year after year. Now, how do we actually practically do that? Steve and Marita each hit the market segments that we're targeting in the different ways that we would go after those. I'm going to give you a little bit more detail, and I think the most important part with the first segment is that everything we do here is applicable to the second segment and the third segment. Everything here, you pick up and you drop to segment two and segment three. Pay attention to this one. I mentioned that we can add more agents to increase growth. That's the way we've grown in the past. You can see here our agents are happy. They stick around, and we know exactly where we want to put them.
If you look at that top left-hand chart, we index our agent satisfaction. We look at this on a quarterly basis. We look at it relative to the industry. We look at it to competitors that sort of play in similar spaces, and we consistently rank higher. I mentioned things like Catalyst that we rolled out. We are investing in our agents. If you look at some of the news happening out there across other organizations, we're going the opposite way. We're investing more in agents, more in lead generation to help them fuel their businesses. The really interesting thing here for anyone that follows sales organizations is if you look at the agent tenure mix, we have a very good representative mix across each tenure bucket within the five-year categories. What I have typically seen for sales organizations is it looks more like a barbell.
You have very many people in that less-than-five-year category and very many people in that 15-plus. Lots of rookies and lots of veterans. You might say, "Why is that?" Because the variable cost of adding a sales rep for most organizations, it's variable. It's quite low. They tend to hire hundreds to net just a few. That's why you see the barbell. Only the strong survive might be a term that you've heard before. With our model, that doesn't make sense. As I mentioned before, our agents are at the schools. They're in the cafeterias. They're in the teacher's lounge. If we had that sort of hire and just hope that they stick, that would not be good for our reputation. It would not be good for the school. We're very thoughtful in who we hire, who we bring in, and where we place them.
When you look at sort of, I would say we're very precise as we think about agent acceleration. But it's a lever that will continue to be a favorable lever for us. Now, on the flip side, a more scalable lever for us that can give you immediate gratification is spending more in marketing. What you see to the left is our past and present marketing dollars. Clearly, there are no numbers on these charts. I'll give you a sense that past amount on corporate marketing, so true advertising spend, direct-to-consumer type marketing, that was less than $5 million in the past. Very few dollars to market to a broad audience because we used our agents as the way that we would get our brand and name out there. We put basically triple over the past year or so, not quite even a year.
You can see the corresponding increase in awareness. We went from less than 5% of people knowing us across the teacher space to about 20%. You might look at that and say, "It's really hard to move awareness that much in that short period of time." You can talk to any marketer. I wouldn't believe it either unless I saw it here. The beauty is we have this niche market of 8 million people. For me to get a million people, if you will, to know who we are within a year, it was not that hard. We just did some marketing. We have a little more budget. We did it in a thoughtful way. We used those marketing hooks that I mentioned. Now 20% of educators know who we are. That number will continue to grow just by optimizing the spend that we have.
I'm showing you a couple of ads here to the right. These are digital ads. We do a ton of user testing. We've got an educator-focused panel, educator-focused group. Before we put out any content, we go through a robust, "Does this resonate with you or not?" What you find here is that teachers respond to people that look like them, so teachers in the classroom, students that are learning, and anything that brings them back to sort of the teaching profession, which you see here is sort of the chalkboard. I go back to the brand message, which really hits home for me. The fact that we market that educators give so much to the students and communities in which they live and work, but they don't get much back. That's what we're here for. That sort of membership qualification is so powerful.
As long as people find out who we are, we tend to not have a challenge getting them to quote and shop with us. Here's the proof. Some of the data points I mentioned before that people tend to go to the website to check us out and research before they actually begin to quote and purchase. Look, corresponding website increases with just a little bit of marketing spend increase and a little bit of optimization. We've increased from 2024 to 2025 by over 40% website traffic. You look at online-originated quotes. Not everyone that goes to the website will want to continue the process online. Look, you can see that corresponding increase in online quote starts. And then company-generated leads.
Those educators that have not decided to quote online may decide to deflect offline, go to a local agent when they see them in the teacher's lounge, or pick up the phone and call the call center. You see a corresponding increase there as well. If you said to me, "Is the marketing spend working?" Yes, you see unadulterated awareness increase, one. Two, you see top of the funnel increase as well. The last sort of marketing element that I want to highlight that both Steve and Marita mentioned is that we have the opportunity to celebrate milestone events with teachers that resonate with them. A teacher's schedule is pretty predictable. They have back-to-school. They have in-service days. They have state assessments. There is also Teacher Appreciation Month. Right now, we're in the midst of celebrating Teacher Appreciation Month.
If I go back, nationally celebrated, there's a Teacher Appreciation Day that was on May 6th of last week. Most organizations outside of our space tend to say there's one day we celebrate teachers, and people give away free things for them to show their gratitude. Those organizations in the teaching space used to say, "Hey, we'll celebrate it for a week because we want to be more grateful for teachers than just one day." We said we had so much success celebrating teachers for a week that we expanded it to a month. We said, "Hey, let's use the same amount of spend. Let's expand it to a month and see what results we get." We did that in 2024. We ended up getting 2X the number of website visits and the number of quotes that we did previously.
Same amount of spend in that month just by extending the same campaign for a month saw tremendous top-of-the-funnel traffic. This year, we're doing it again. Same month, a little bit of an iteration. Off of that base that was already 2X higher, we're seeing a 30% increase off of that. Finding these sort of moments that matter, these milestone moments that we have the right to celebrate with them are very, very powerful in marketing levers that we have that not a lot of companies have given our niche. All right. Enough about marketing. Let me talk more about cross-sell. Cross-sell is a great lever we have to pull given who we are and what we do. What I want to draw your attention to is the font in the orange color right here.
We do an excellent job cross-selling our P&C lines of business. That's our most mature business, P&C. Three out of every four P&C clients are multi-line. You can look at other companies out there. I've not seen one quite as good as that. Now, where we have a big opportunity, which to Steve's point, we can get better on certain things, is that we've got a lot of mono-line, supplemental, retirement, and life-only customers. Now, I look at that as opportunity that we can go out and sell multiple lines of business to people that we already have a relationship with. Now, you might ask, "How are we going to do that?" First, at point of sale, we can do better at bundling. Right now, it's a multi-step process in order for someone to purchase multiple policies. We can make that process more seamless. Second, during life events.
We know when people have babies, when they get married, when they move homes, when they change jobs. Before, we left it up to the agents to go out and sort of self-diagnose when that happens. Now we have Catalyst. We have third-party data. We're feeding that in. We're at scale, reaching out with promotional offers, having the agent follow up, having the call center follow up to get people in the moment when it matters, when selling that multiple line of business makes the most sense. Lastly, we do a great job with annual policy reviews. You might look at other companies, and their philosophy is, "Hey, just don't talk to the customer unless the customer talks to you." Given our multi-line approach and how consultative we are, we get a ton of value from this, and the consumer really appreciates it.
So underpinning all of that is we continue to make the cross-sell process easier, and we're also looking at incentives both for the agent and for the client to make sure it's enticing for them to purchase multiple lines of business with us. That's cross-sell. The last growth lever in this category I want to highlight is strategic partnerships. I sort of mentioned this in that sort of array of growth levers at the beginning. We have some very mature associations at the state level, local level, and national level that give us access to co-market, co-sponsor, have local events, and get access to email lists. We're out marketing with these associations to get quotes, drive awareness, and get in front of this group of educators. Now, what is newer for us, I would say, is a focus on corporate partnerships.
These take all different shapes and sizes. The one I want to highlight today, we announced this on Friday, but we have a strategic partnership with Crayola. I think everyone in this room has used Crayola to some extent. Everyone knows that name. If you think of it, what do you think of? Education, trust. Why not attach our brand to a brand like Crayola? We had our first conversation with them at the end of last year, and we just had so many synergies. We were both so excited about this strategic partnership. I do not have time today to go through each dimension, but what I will tell you is one of their pinnacle events that is part of our partnership is what they call Crayola Creativity Week.
They get in front of almost a million educators that right now we do not actually access, that we are able to increase awareness, market to them, drive interest. Again, it looks very much like teacher appreciation, where we are going to see the same type of success, if not better. Attaching our name to a brand like Crayola, really great. Now, we are talking to 25-plus partnerships like Crayola that span across service providers, financial institutions, consumer goods that have an affiliation with teaching and education that will help us similar to how the Crayola partnership will help us. Sound good? All right. That is a mouthful. Everything I just said were ways that we are and that we will further penetrate that segment one, markets that we have access to, but we do not have full participation. The second dimension, these are what we will call greenfield territories.
They're areas where we know there's educators, but we don't have a local presence, and we don't have a ton of brand awareness. Everything I just mentioned helps this boat rise as well. In addition to that, we have a variation of the EA model that we believe is more scalable that will allow us to get into these territories more quickly and expand our market presence much more aggressively. Let me tell you about this B2B to C company-led model approach. The best way I can describe it for you is the EA today has four main responsibilities. An EA is responsible for building school relationships, going out and conducting onsite events and workshops. They're out there doing the individual consultation and quoting. Lastly, they're doing the servicing of the book. That's a lot for one person.
If you think about that, you're basically a generalist, right? You need to be great at everything. Therefore, you don't really pay attention to each one to be a master expert in each of these. This model moves us from the generalist to a specialist. What you can see here is we say, instead of having a traditional EA, we're going to hire a bunch of individuals that are great at B2B building school relationships that we call an account executive. Your sole responsibility is to go out there into those greenfield territories, find more schools, create the relationships, get a marketing plan, get that payroll slot, and get it ready for someone to come in and work. We have a couple of these throughout the community throughout the US right now. One account executive in one quarter can set over 20 schools themselves.
Now, an EA themselves is setting just a few in the same quarter period. You can see sort of because the EA is diversifying their time across four dimensions, the account executive can just focus on one. They can get much more traction than what the EAs are getting today. Second, we have this role called the regional agent or virtual advisor. That is the person that is going to be the specialist in going out and creating the workshops, creating the brand awareness, and getting the interest in for the quote activity. You can see digital and direct can help, again, with servicing and then creating the individual consultation. We have this built. It is out there in market. We have it in a few markets. The goal here is to scale this quite quickly to get to those other territories that we are not in.
That's the B2B to C company-led approach. This is what it looks like. This is just a visual representation in case that was not clear. In the EA model, you see that they are basically responsible for everything. In the company-led B2B to C, you create a new position, the account executive. You have got regional and virtual agents. You continue to utilize the capabilities we have already built with digital and direct. All right. Let me talk about the third segment, the one that is probably most, I would say most interesting, but the one that is sort of out there a bit, which is how are we exploring adjacent markets where we have the right to win? The educator market, 8 million households. We have plenty of opportunity there. Are there adjacent markets that we can get into that make sense for our business?
The way I think about it is, if there is, we have some great products and services we should be marketing to those people as well. We have an assessment framework that we've been using that looks at a few things. First, is the market large enough that we should put the effort behind it? You see a couple of examples here. Second, does it keep us in this mindset of serving those who serve the community? We do not want to venture too far out of what we're great at. Is there another segment out there where it's either education and/or those who serve? Third, do we have the right to winners? Are value props strong enough such that whenever we go out to market, that this segment and this demographic would want to come to us and shop with us?
Do we have or can we build the right products and services? Same thing with sales and distribution. Do we have or can we build the right distribution? You see there are no really clear winners here, albeit if you take something like homeschool teachers, I'll just give you this one. That market is about 1 million, but it has doubled since 2020. You can think about it since COVID. A lot of teachers maybe moved home, did some work virtually, got comfortable with that. Same thing with parents and others. That market has doubled, and it continues to grow. Most of the teachers in this segment were K-12 teachers that just said, "I'm not going to be in school. I'd rather do it virtually or at someone's home." That profile looks a lot like the K-12 educator, right?
A million people adding to our 8 million increases our market size by another 10% plus. The things we would need to do to enter this market, it's actually quite easy. If you look at our filings with the Department of Insurance, we have a very clear definition of who applies and who does not apply. Right now, we are going out to a handful of states and saying, "If we iterated that definition and we went and tried to get our products in front of this market, would they be interested in purchasing them?" So far, based upon all the research and studies that we have done, this looks very promising to us. It does not require any investment, just the filing. We have got the distribution. We have got the products. We have got the services.
When I think about market expansion, this is a great example of it does not take much just to broaden the definition of who our target market is because we already have the products and services available. Now, you might look at some of these other ones and say, "The alumni segment's quite big, and it does not quite align to those who serve." You could make sort of the leap of faith to say, "Yeah, but they're educated. They might not be educators, but they're educated." That market in totality might be a little bit too much. Are there segments within the alumni space that make more sense for us? Are there education-based colleges that we can partner with and appeal to them given our value prop and market? You look at this. These are examples of things we're assessing.
This does not mean we are going after all of these. The homeschool teachers, the one that is probably the furthest down the line, but it just goes to show what does adjacent market assessment look like. Okay? Let me wrap it a bit with the slide that Steve showed. What I would like to do is sort of pull back and say my confidence level of achieving that 10-15% annual new business policy count growth at target profitability is not unreasonable at all. In fact, we are doing it today to a large extent. If you believe all the tactics that I just mentioned, go back to that first segment. I even pull back a bit.
If you believe the differentiators of having greater access to the teacher at school, if you believe that the omnichannel distribution and people flowing seamlessly through the channel of choice, if you believe payroll slots are a big differentiator, if you think our technology and ways to reach out are beneficial, and if you believe the marketing hooks that I referenced help us acquire business at a lower cost of acquisition, then that 45-90, that segment one, you should have no problem believing that. You sort of unpack that with, "What about the partnerships that we just brought on board? What about the B2B company model approach?" Those, to me, are all gravy on top of what we're already doing. I feel really confident about what we have ahead of us. I've been here since 2024. I know this space quite well.
I mean, we've got a beautiful, beautiful value proposition here. It's not just words on paper. Honestly, it's not that we do believe educators deserve more, and we're here for that. I love coming to work every day. I think we've got a great level of momentum behind us. I'm just excited to be part of it. Thank you all for being here. Let's take a 15-minute break. We'll get back here, and then Ryan Greenier will come up and talk to us about financials. Thank you.
Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. I appreciate everyone coming out today to hear from us. I think Steve and Steve did a nice job laying out the growth agenda, if you will, that we have in front of us.
My job today is to connect it to financial metrics and be able to show you how we will measure our path forward. You know, there's, of course, it's the finance section, right? So there's going to be some busy slides, but four key takeaways for you that I hope you walk away with. One, you've heard it repeatedly. We're operating from a position of strength. You know, we have a conservatively positioned balance sheet, and we've come off a year of record earnings and had a record first quarter. When I think about the multi-line business model, I'm going to unpack for you our earnings volatility and what that looks like. And Steve alluded to the power of the individual supplemental and group benefits.
You know, before we did that acquisition, our volatility compared to the P&C peers that we've selected and put in the deck for you was about mid-pack. You add that, and it gets us to one of the lowest public peer sets for a personalized focus carrier. I think that's important. Finally, we have accelerating growth momentum. We have it today, and I think Steve and Steve shared a lot of good ideas, things that are actionable today that we're doing, as well as aspirational. We believe that that will deliver on the earnings per share growth and ROE goals that we're laying out for you for the next three years. Finally, as we execute against that, we will continue to set record earnings. We will drive that ROE higher, and it should expand multiples.
Marita touched on this, but I do want to just spend one minute pointing out that when our multi-line strategy is delivering targeted returns or close to targeted returns across our businesses, it's a powerful earnings model. Record $3.40, nearly a 10% ROE. I'm going to stop on life and retirement for a minute because that segment, we use the word ballast a lot internally. It is consistent, it is steady, it is predictable, and it's enjoyed a fair amount of net investment income expansion over the last couple of years. In addition to that, individual supplemental and group benefits are low capital, light, and high margin businesses. That's going to be important when we talk about operating leverage.
Finally, while our P&C expense or our P&C combined ratio was not at our targets last year, it was close, and it reflects the 15-point improvement, the profitability initiatives that we've worked so hard to deliver. As a reminder, we're targeting mid-90s for auto and around 90 for property. We got there in the first quarter. If I think about a longer-term track record, what has Horace Mann delivered over the past, say, 15 years? We've delivered a solid cumulative annual growth rate in terms of book value growth plus accumulated dividends, 8%. We've also delivered 17 consecutive years of dividend increases. Our current yield is 3.4%. It's meaningfully above many peers, and we believe that is a compelling value proposition to investors. We're committed to that dividend. We've done a good job managing capital in terms of share repurchase.
Over $130 million of shares repurchased since we started the authorization, and impressively, pretty close to book value. I think it's a good testament to an appropriate opportunistic approach to our stewardship of shareholder capital. We've done this with a very conservative balance sheet and without taking excessive investment risk. If I pivot a little bit here to where we are today, first quarter, we reported last week another record quarter, strong results. You can see that we were above 10% on an annualized basis for our core return on equity. That's a five-point improvement, and we're clearly on track for 2025. Our P&C combined ratio was strong, and you're seeing 10.5 and 10.5 point, that's hard to say, improvement there.
What is nice about this slide, and it is not a typo, it is the exact same number, 8.4% twice last year, this year, but that top-line growth momentum is continuing. We are seeing that, and it is not just rate-driven. We are seeing early signs of strong sales. This sets us up for a really strong 2025. Another year of record earnings with our guidance range of $385-$415. 10% plus ROE, Marita alluded to that as sort of the floor, but I am going to talk about a higher number shortly. We are introducing another metric today to make it easier to understand the capital generation ability of our businesses. Our mix of life, retirement, individual, supplemental, and group businesses, as well as our P&C businesses in total, generate today a strong free cash flow generation of at least 75%.
What this is, put simply, is it's essentially the amount of capital our businesses create and is available to upstream to the holding company divided by our operating earnings. For life retirement analysts, this is common in the space. For those of you who are a little bit more P&C-centric, we're trying to unpack and make it simple so it's clear so you can understand the capital generation ability of the combined businesses. We believe that as we grow the capital light, individual supplemental, and group businesses, this will continue to improve from here, but this is already a respectable result. We talked about earnings volatility. We hear it a lot. We hear a lot that your P&C business, your property book has a fair amount of catastrophe volatility to it. You need to remember our P&C book is just personal lines.
When you compare us against other commercial lines peers, they have businesses that still are somewhat correlated to weather. Our true ballast, if you will, or earnings diversifier is life, retirement, individual supplemental, and group. They're not weather-correlated. As we continue to grow those businesses, we'll reduce our earnings volatility over time. The chart's a little busy, but I think it's important. I'll point out the comps on the page are the same peers that are in the back of the deck. We'll talk about how we selected them in a little bit. What I wanted to show here was we modeled the last earnings over the last five years.
We showed you if we did not purchase NTA and Madison National, the two carriers that brought our individual supplemental and group businesses to us, we would have had a mid-pack, if you will, earnings volatility compared to the personal lines peer set we selected. After that purchase over that five-year period, we moved to the lowest. It illustrates the power of the multi-line model. We are really sitting in between carriers that are personal lines on the left. Okay, got to make sure I got that right. It is hard to do that up here. The life, retirement, and what I call protection-oriented comps, those would be the individual supplemental and group businesses. We have been talking at length about our efforts to improve profitability in the property book. Those efforts will continue. We have taken over 50% rate over the last couple of years.
The non-rate actions that Steve alluded to or spoke about earlier were meaningful. Underwriting changes like roof schedules, portfolio optimization tools to help us better target where to grow and manage concentration risks. Those are all important tools in our arsenal that we continue to roll out and we will continue to see the benefit of. The other obvious thing, I wonder if anybody counted how many times we said growth, but growing all of the businesses is also going to help with the property volatility. I'm going to pivot quickly to the investment portfolio. We're proud of the fact that we've grown net investment income by 32% over the past five years, and we haven't done that by risking up. About $5 billion of the portfolio supports life and retirement liabilities.
When we looked at that portfolio, we had opportunities to reposition the portfolio to move it closer to a typical life retirement asset mix. This meant adding allocations to commercial mortgage loans and limited partnership funds, which we've done, as well as increasing exposure to less liquid private assets. We balanced that by reducing public high yield, public equities. Today we have a well-diversified portfolio that continues to put up higher new money yields compared to what's rolling off the portfolio. Look, we've benefited from higher interest rates, clearly. We've had 13 consecutive quarters where the new money yield has exceeded the portfolio yield. Last quarter, Q1, it was about a 50 basis point delta. That will continue to earn in. We have a duration of seven years, so it provides a little bit of a tailwind going into what may be a choppy interest rate environment.
Let me pivot now and let's talk about where we're going because I think this is what most of you all care about. How do I measure success? What does it look like? We're giving you two pretty simple goals over the next three years. We believe that the 10-15% new business growth that Steve McAnena talked about can generate a 10+% earnings CAGR, as well as move the ROE up to 12-13%. It's not just growth. That's one important lever. There are two others. We're focused on expense optimization. I'm going to spend a little bit of time here and talk to you about what we are driving for, as well as operating leverage.
We've said conservative multiple times about our balance sheet, but we have more than enough capital on that balance sheet to support our growth aspirations from where we sit today. The growth lever. I want to be clear. We are targeting growth in all of our businesses. That 10-15% new business growth overall, coupled with net investment income growth from higher AUM, is going to lead to high single-digit revenue growth for the top line. That, in turn, when supported by expenses, will help drive the 10+% earnings per share CAGR. We put expenses right after growth for an obvious reason. We have the ability to scale all of our businesses, and we have a fair amount of fixed expense leverage, I'd argue more than many other carriers.
We feel comfortable putting out a 1-1.5% corporate expense reduction target to move our corporate expense ratio down, which in turn will benefit P&C. We feel comfortable because about half of that is related to fixed expense leverage. As we grow, we will get that. We've done a good job managing expenses. Marita has talked for years about investing in the business, modernizing technology, investing in people. We've increased our advertising spend, but we've done it without blowing up the P&C expense ratio. It's still sitting at that 27-28% that we said we would target. These targeted efforts on top of the scale initiatives will drive that down farther. What are they? What are we focused on? A couple of things. If I think about technology opportunities, we're in the midst of a Guidewire P&C admin system implementation. That's a hard word.
We're migrating to the cloud. That shift, along with additional state rollouts, will allow us to get off the mainframe in a couple of years. That has real cost savings from an IT cost perspective. In addition to that, we're combining systems. We rolled out Workday. It's a financial tool that we use in finance. We combine multiple ledgers. We are integrating our planning system with it. It's AI-enabled. It can do a lot of really interesting things. Importantly, it's going to allow us to sunset multiple other redundant systems and have one system, a corporate backbone that's actually integrated into HR as well. This is going to allow us to get meaningful expense synergies. Marita talked about AI. We're really focused on claims, customer care, and underwriting.
We think that not only is there operating expense leverage with AI, but importantly, we're seeing use cases where we get a better customer, agent, and employee experience. Our employees are embracing generative AI. We've rolled it out across the enterprise. What we're seeing is we're seeing obvious use cases, like coding, for example, that you're getting some efficiencies out of. We're seeing it in other areas where folks are using it to synthesize information, focus on driving at a more higher value outcome, if you will. Think about reconciliations. Instead of doing the reconciliation, you can solve for what falls out. We also are using it to develop new tools. Steve talked about Catalyst. That tool has been widely embraced by agents. It's a cost-effective way to give them a unique CRM system.
We took the same underpinnings that we built with Catalyst and created a new roadside assistance experience for our customers. What this does today is the customer, if they need roadside assistance, can select their own vendor, call a local tow truck or whatever they need, easily and quickly upload the receipt right there, get reimbursed like that. Very little human interaction, but a distinctive customer experience. We think that's a good example of a way to leverage the power of something we already built and roll it out with other use cases across the enterprise. The combination of scale plus these targeted, thoughtful efforts are going to drive that expense ratio lower. The additional leverage, and this gets at the balance, the additional lever is operating leverage, and this gets at the balance sheet. There's some pretty conservative stats up there on the page.
I'll reiterate again, we have more than enough capital on our balance sheet to support our growth aspirations across the businesses. Our P&C book is running at a 1.77 premium surplus ratio. Many of our peers are running in the mid-twos. We have the same geographic spread across the U.S., and we believe that as we grow P&C over time, this will drift up closer to the peer median. In addition to that, we have opportunity on the non-P&C side of the business. So these would be our life, retirement, individual supplemental, and group liabilities. We're running at a 446. That's above even our conservative targets that we have put out there. Many of our life peers have RBC targets in the 375-400 range, and those are similarly rated, pretty conservative approach. What's different is we have an opportunity to further diversify our liability profile.
Today, we still have a lot of fixed annuities, and those are capital intensive. They're an important product. We do well with spread business from a net investment income perspective. As we grow other uncorrelated risk, think mortality, morbidity with individual supplemental and disability on our group product line, we will be able to have a better mix of liabilities, but importantly, a larger share of capital light efficient products, which will move that RBC ratio down again over time. All of this will also, the growth initiatives will also create more of a steady capital generation on an annual basis, which turns to how do we think about capital, how do we prioritize, and what are we targeting? Today, our dividend capacity is about $150 million for our insurance companies. We're committed to a 40% dividend payout ratio.
We would expect the dividend to continue to grow as earnings grow. If I look down the uses of capital in the chart, that leaves about 30-35% of deployable capital that will grow over time as our annual capital generation abilities grow. If I look at what we've done with that, I think the proof of how we think about excess capital management is in some of the actions we've done to date. We've done two strategic M&A transactions that have transformed our business. They added important products that our educator customer base needs, and they broadened our distribution, but they also lowered earnings volatility. When you think about that lens, I talked about fixed expense leverage, we have an opportunity to grow scale on all of our businesses, and we'll continue to think about organic, that's our preference, but inorganic opportunities as well.
Additionally, we have a strong track record when it comes to repurchases. We announced another $50 million authorization this morning, and part of that is twofold. One, we're actively in the market. We started strong this year. We've done $7 million a share repurchases on a year-to-date basis, right around $40. Two, we're running out of room. With that $50 million authorization, we'll have $69 million available to us. We're confident in our path forward. That's key. We clearly see a path towards continued record earnings and accelerating capital generation. You can see what we've done share repurchases by year. Clearly, we've used the word opportunistic a lot to talk about our approach, and you can see we've done that. The 1.03 times book value is a testament, I think, to how we think about being very thoughtful about shareholder capital deployment.
As we accelerate our earnings momentum and improve our ROEs, it's going to be hard to keep that track record because we would expect our multiples to increase. Given that, the implied return, and that's kind of how we think about buyback, when your earnings are accelerating at a pretty quick clip at that 10% plus, will allow us to target a higher multiple and still achieve a solid return. I'm going to pivot and turn to the valuation because we get a lot of questions here. If you just give me one minute. I think this comes up in every investor meeting when we're talking with new investors, and it even comes up with those of you who know us well. How do we value you? You're really the only multi-line carrier in the public space that truly is more than a collection of businesses.
You're centered around a target market. You're delivering products, and you're delivering not only the products, but your distribution is arranged and aligned with how that customer set wants to buy. That clearly is a competitive advantage, but it's very difficult to put a value on that. We think there are three proof points that illustrate that we are good at that, and it should have value. One, our ability to leverage that niche market. We've been doing it for 80 years. I think Steve's creative marketing approaches and the way to attack the educators where we don't currently have a presence are innovative and different, but they speak to that core market. Two, we have industry-leading retention and persistency.
We have seen that through various market cycles, whether it is persistency through the financial crisis with our 403(b) book, it was stable, or it is on the auto side through various rate cycles. It still both remain high. Finally, we have industry-leading cross-sell abilities. We have proven it. We showed you some stats on that. Those are three things that I cannot give you a financial model for. What we tried to do is we tried to give you a financial model or a frame, if you will, for how we think about our three businesses in a vacuum. We looked for public comps that had shared characteristics, attributes similar to us. There are companies that are far larger than us on this page, and there are some our size or even a little smaller.
What we wanted to do was pick out a few things that we think align across the space. For P&C, a multi-channel distribution, a national or a broad geographic footprint were important. For life and retirement, we were looking for companies focused on middle-income Americans. Our product set is pretty simple, but that's what our customers buy. We also wanted companies where retirement, they manufacture it, and it's a core strategy, as well as life insurance, manufactured in-house and is a core strategy. Finally, I'm using the term protection for individual supplemental and group because it's shorter and that's a mouthful. We were looking for capital light carriers that are focused on low-claim products similar to our individual supplemental and group offerings. We think this is a fair characteristic.
There are some companies on here that have historically done extremely well and have been rewarded with high multiples. There are other carriers on here that are in a situation where perhaps investors aren't quite as confident in them. We wanted to present a fair list and use those ranges to set up the model for you. The implied sum of the parts valuation, so this is taking the three businesses in a vacuum and adding them up. It implies that the share price should be 10%-20% higher than today, and that's without any of those things that I said are hard to place a value on of why we're good, why we win in the K through 12 market, and without some things I'm going to get to in a minute. Let me break this down for you.
The math behind this, if you look at the line 2026 estimated analyst consensus, we updated our core earnings definition last quarter, last week, to better reflect industry treatment for intangible asset amortization related to M&A activity, as well as market risk benefits on annuities. Most of our peers, nearly all of our peers exclude those, so we now do the same. Not all of our analysts have updated 2026 yet. What we did is we adjusted the 2026 model averages for that change in earnings, and we took our corporate and other segment, which is holding company interest expense, and we just divided it equally by the three segments. That is the sort of adjustments we made to set the earnings level. To be clear, this is not guidance. I'm not guiding to this, but I'm giving you the average and adjusting it.
The multiple comps we selected are close to the median or average of the range, with the exception of life and retirement. We're at the top end of the range here, but that's intentional. Our life and retirement business, the variable annuities we write have no living benefits. So our earnings profile is consistent, steady, predictable, and we don't have the hedging realized gain loss noise that goes through numbers and candidly could be quite large for some carriers there. We believe that that steady, consistent, predictable earnings stream is worth a multiple on the high end of the life and retirement peer set. Then finally, you can see supplemental, roll it all together, and you get that 10-20% increase from where we sit today. There's three more things, though, that current valuation I don't think fully contemplates. One, we have that strong dividend yield.
It's sustainable, 17 years of history. It's above the peer set payout dividend yield. Two, we're targeting top-line revenue growth. That's above the peer set. Importantly, bottom-line growth, that's nearly double. I think these are the three key items for folks to take away and highlight. When I think about the two proof points, an ROE goal of 12-13%, an earnings CAGR of 10% plus over the next three years, we believe based on the sales plan, if you will, that we laid out and the assumptions, which Steve and Steve explained, are pretty conservative. This is achievable. We're confident in this. We think this is a set of compelling financial metrics, and we're, like I said, confident in where we stand today. Those were my prepared remarks.
At this time, Marita is going to come back to the podium, and Steve and Steve are going to join me up at the table. We will proceed to, after closing remarks, to the Q&A portion.
Okay. Great. Thanks, Ryan. Am I on? I'm on. Hopefully this morning, we did from the beginning what we said we would do. We're operating from a position of strength. When I think about our PDI strategy, building products that are relevant for educators, including the solutions that we laid out for you, check the box. We have what we need to be relevant in this space, and we're going to learn how we can take this relevance and expand it to some natural adjacencies over time, thoughtfully, carefully, as the Steves much earlier laid out.
As it relates to infrastructure, the I, we've modernized our infrastructure and spent a fair amount of investment over the last decade working on that. We did it thoughtfully. We didn't say to you, we're going to spend X hundreds of millions of dollars and take the P&C expense ratio from 27 to 30 while we did it. We told you in P&C we would be to that 27, 28, and that's where we have kept ourselves while we've done tons of investment in this business. Guidewire, cloud in P&C, LifePro in life and annuity using Workday in our internal corporate function, specifically finance, HR. We are preparing the foundation and readying the foundation for the growth that we knew if we did all the right things would come.
You could argue that maybe there was a little pause, as we've talked about before, as the industry got P&C profitable again. We all know the reasons for that. We are on track. We have set a very solid foundation. In the second piece, I hope with the D, we've laid out that we are taking a real competitive advantage with a strong exclusive agency plant that has been doing this well in a multi-generational way and augmented that. We have that at the center of what we do. It's very unique, but now we've taken all the modern tools and everything that we've built to be able to clearly create that true omnichannel distribution so educators can start their journey with us any way they choose. If they need a trusted advisor at the point of sale, they're going to find it.
We all know that in this world, there will be a day when people want to talk to people again, when people want to engage and have real engagement and be able to have the best of both of those things, I think is part of our secret sauce. Lastly, Ryan got up and showed how all this flows through our financials. I get that we're different. I get that when you try to compare us to P&C peers, you might lose the benefit of the other things that we do. When you try to compare us to life peers, you're thinking about property and what property means. Hopefully, the sum of the parts and how that translates to our financials and the valuation model that he laid out is clear.
When you get a chance to read it again and absorb it, you'll see what we see, which is a pretty exciting future in growth and how that translates to our profitability and shareholder return. Hopefully, I have paused enough for Rachel to assemble our Q&A, and we'll jump right into the Q&A. Rachel? Wow, those lights are bright.
Wonderful. Okay. Make sure I'm on. Yeah. All right. We're going to begin the Q&A session with a question that we received virtually. Following that, we'll open it up to live questions in the room. If you would like to ask a question, please just raise your hand, and someone will bring a microphone to you. Our first question, can you talk more about the third-party partnerships? What are they? How much value do they create today, and how much will they contribute tomorrow?
Yeah, thanks whoever online asked that question. When I think about it, I think we've demonstrated over the years that our relevance in this space is really important to us. We've partnered with people that understand who educators are and have a joint purpose and mission, and that's worked really well for us. I'm really excited about the new partnership with Crayola and their creativity brand. It really fit well with who we are. Maybe, Steve, you can add a little color, pun intended. Sorry. Had to do it as it relates to the new Crayola relationship.
Okay. I can do that. Before I talk about Crayola, I think it is important to talk about the first part, which is how big is it today and how big could it be in the future.
I would look at strategic partnerships and say it's an emerging capability for us. We have 175-plus local, national, and state association partnerships. Those are good, but I would say we primarily have used those for local access and some direct-to-consumer marketing. The Crayola partnership is one of the newer ones. We do have a team going out and finding more partners like Crayola. Before I talk about Crayola, I think it is important to just pull back and say partnerships can come in many sizes, shapes, and forms. One sponsorship is an easy one to go partner with, but we've not found a ton of success in by itself a sponsorship. When you get sponsorship in addition to email, co-marketing agreements, virtual events, on-site access, that's truly the type of partner we want.
We have a pretty robust process that when a new partnership comes in the door, we assess it for sort of business and strategic fit to make sure that they have the same passion as we do for the educator community. To pivot to Crayola, I'm super excited about it. Again, we talked to them in Q4 of last year. We sort of came together and said, "There's so many synergies of what we're both trying to do collectively. Let's team up and do that better together." I talked about sort of the pinnacle event just briefly on stage, which is their Crayola Creativity Week. I equate that similar to our back-to-school and teacher appreciation events. That is a week long of events, but they're getting exposure to a million-ish educators across the U.S. and go back to that market that we don't yet have access to.
I guarantee 60-70% of those people are people that we've not had the opportunity to quote yet. I'm excited about that. I'm just excited to bring what Crayola has to our membership as well. They're sort of a mutually beneficial agreement where teachers need products, and we do it today through DonorsChoose and other capabilities. To have a partner like that, they can help us provide more services to those educators, it's even better. More specifically, small part today, but potentially be a very large part in the future.
I think Steve said it well. The only thing I'd bolt on to that is there's another aspect. If you think about what he talked about in terms of growing the business, one of the things we're doing is we're adding more agents.
Partnerships is a terrific value proposition for agents when we're talking to new people. Being a part of the ecosystem that Horace Mann creates creates a lot of value and, frankly, attracts agents to sort of our business model.
I think you guys say that well. When you think about the partnerships we've had in the past, whether it's DonorsChoose for decades, whether it's Tuition IO over the last three, four years in the student loan solution space, using these partnerships to have a reason, to Steve's point, Steve Mack, to engage, to have a conversation, to give your agent something other than product, which is what we are. We're an educator company, not just a product purveyor, if you will. These tools, these entry points tend to be extremely helpful in the sales process.
Can take questions from the room.
Question on the high single-digit revenue growth over the next three years. Do you expect this to be boosted by higher rates on P&C, and which segments do you expect to grow at the fastest clip? More qualitatively, what are the markets or products you see that are good near-term opportunities? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Wilma, for the question. I think as most of the time, it's a combination. There's not one answer, and I'll let Steve McAnena jump in on that. I think it is a combination of continued rate, although those are steadying out a bit, as we all know, as well as the growth that I think we unpacked. I think Ryan said it well.
When you think about sustained profitable growth, I think those are the three words we probably said 27 times today, and that is what we're focused on, but it's probably in reality a combination of both. Steve?
Yeah, it's a good question. When we pulled back and were preparing for this, and I'll try to answer your question directly, when we looked at rate and the rate opportunity over time, or rate expectations, I should say, we sort of looked at loss trends. Our expectation is that on the auto side, loss trends are going to be in the mid to low single digits and property in the mid to high single digits. We're at a point now where we're in a maintenance mode, and we're taking our rates up commensurate with that. You can kind of get your head around those numbers.
I'd say if you looked at the market, you're going to see much of the same thing. Your second point, you're going to have to repeat to me because you rattled off a bunch, but the third point was around markets and products. I think Ryan said it the best. It was, we want to be very clear. We want to grow all of our businesses subject to the constraint that we're achieving or have line of sight to target profitability. What was your second question, Wilma? You said something about fastest.
Oh, yeah, I was asking which segments do you expect to grow at the fastest clip.
Our expectation, and we may have different views depending on the day of the week. Marita has a different view from me. I'd say our expectation is we would see similar growth across all segments.
We set a target pretty deliberately of 10-15% new business growth on a CAGR. That was by design. We sort of did that because we did not want to run into the economic realities of our business. The more new business you write, you tend to have profit crunch. We thought doing this steadily made a lot of sense. I think also 10-15% put us in a position where we can have the operations support that. If you go for explosive growth in any one area, the operations sometimes crack. We have been around the block a few times, and we understand that. We are taking a more deliberate, sustained profitable growth approach. The answer to the fastest question to me is we are going to try to grow all businesses at roughly the same clip.
Yeah, and I think that's right from a plan perspective, but we all know that plan and reality in any given quarter, especially when you have a culmination of businesses like we do, can sometimes be very different. Think about we often get the question, what will the mix look like three years out or five years out? When you're done, what's your goal? It's a hard question for us because of the influences in each one of those businesses. Take the size of the P&C business. Even if we're growing individual supplemental at double the pace, I mean, we're doubling that business. With all the rate increases we've seen in P&C, there's no way we would make a dent at the percentage of what P&C was to the business, right? We're in an increasing rate environment, although that's settling out a little bit.
That just continues to make our P&C business on a percentage basis bigger and bigger and bigger. Retirement is a big part of what we do. When you go all the way down and you look at group supplemental, there will be a quarter where you'll get a case or two of good size, and that number will look huge. Then maybe another quarter where that longer sales cycle, something did not come through, and you might be relatively flat. Those businesses are very small. Good earnings diversification, you saw it in Ryan's numbers, but it's going to take a while for those businesses to be a more meaningful percentage of the whole, especially in this type of P&C environment. Although auto is leveling out, you saw what a lot of companies are talking about as it relates to tariffs.
We didn't decrease our rates to drive new business growth, and therefore we don't have to do that. We may stay flat, may just get inflation as Steve talks about, but feel really good about where we are, where we're priced, how the businesses are performing. As we push, it's hard to talk about what the end result will be as far as mix, but make no mistake, Steve's right. We're pushing on all those levers to drive those businesses, but we have a couple that are pretty small.
Wilma, just to Marie just said something, and it reminded me I probably should have answered and ended with all else equal. Tariffs is a question mark.
Just to sort of talk about that for a second, I think you've seen industry and individual carriers sort of opine on what the impact of tariffs is going to be. Marie used the word manageable earlier. We think it's manageable based on what we think we know today. Everyone in this room knows that they can change like that. Based on what we know, we're looking at loss trends being slightly elevated above what we would think the norm is, a handful of points, which would lead to more rate, particularly on the auto side. The good news is that because of what we went through the last couple of years, we were good at making filings. We got really, really good at making filings after we went through that cycle. We positioned ourselves pretty well to be able to navigate that.
On the home side, if anything bleeds in, for the most part, we think that's going to be caught in the inflation guard mechanism. The filings aren't going to be as important as it relates to the impact of tariffs. Things can change, but that's sort of the caveat or star next to my answer because if tariffs stick and they have an impact significantly different than what I said, that could impact the amount of rate, and you can sort of follow that and flow that through your models.
John Barnidge, Piper Sandler, thanks for the opportunity. My question is on adjacent markets as well. Are you bringing the entire product portfolio to bear in those adjacent markets, and how do you manage the differing risk characteristics? I can't help but think police and firemen drive to work at different times and teachers, as an example.
Yeah, it's a great question. When you look at the chart and what we laid out as far as their attributes are right to win, it's a really thoughtful discussion. Exactly the way you asked the question is exactly the way you've thought through it. John, you've heard me talk about this before. When you think about firefighters, and for those of you who aren't aware, the logo was on Steve Chauby 's slide. We have the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters with our acquisition of supplemental products and do a fair amount in the firefighter space. We brought a lot of firefighters into the Horace Mann family, if you will. I remember thinking about how do you feel about firefighters and thinking about not only the times in which they drive, but the speed in which they drive, the vehicles in which they drive.
How do you feel about that? Mark DeRosier spent a lot of time with me about pricing and linking price to risk and the ability to get the appropriate price and making sure you have the right price track. That is exactly why a company like ours would not jump right into, okay, let's extend this and write auto for firefighters. It does not mean it cannot be done responsibly. It does not mean it cannot be done appropriately, like I said, linking the price to the risk. It is not something we just jumped in and did. We believe that when we think about the total value proposition and the way we approach educators, there are probably some segments that really are natural adjacencies. There is no surprise that homeschooling would be on that list.
When you think about not only is their commute short, it's probably a little shorter than even our educators. There was a little joke in there. When you think about auto, you could probably get your head around that. Same responsibility factor, same services, same solution providing, maybe a similar homeowner attribute, same need for retirement, probably the same need for life insurance supplemental. You think about it the same way. You look at yourself and say, okay, it's kind of small, but maybe a really good place to start as we think about natural adjacencies. The real question is, because we have good, trusted third-party partners, if we found a segment that made tons of sense for us, but for the auto, or not yet for the auto, we can leverage a third-party carrier for that.
I mean, today we have a good relationship with Chubb on higher valued homes. We have a good relationship with Progressive for non-standard auto and other toys, if you will. We have a way in which we can use the Horace Mann General Agency, not exhaustively, but it is a great way when there is a particular attribute in a product where we say, we will do most of them, but for this particular product, we can leverage somebody who may be better at it than we are, that maybe we do not want to take that risk or we do not yet have the pricing attributes in something like auto to apply. That is how we would think through it. It is a big part of the unpacking of that Harvey Ball chart that you saw. Answer your question? Yeah, thanks. You are welcome.
I think, Marie, if I can just.
Yeah, absolutely.
Hold something on to that. You asked the question, John, specifically about risk and pricing for different types of risks. Absolutely, we need to sort of, depending on which segment, if any, we decide to sort of lean into, we would need to sort of update all of our pricing models. Mark and team currently are actually going through the process of doing that work. Irrespective of what we do, we know we need to refresh our models and sort of deploy that. I'd say the thinking and the mindset that you raised extends beyond just pricing risk. Because if you sort of go through the criteria we had, which was sort of an abridged version, distribution is another one. You might look and say, oh, I think you can actually price for that given what you currently have.
How are you going to actually reach out to that group holistically? Is it going to be one by one, or can you do things to market to people as a group? I think Steve and I tried to really make the point and hammer home the point that this is less about near-term results. In fact, it's not about near-term results. It's entirely about learning. We're going to go in here. We may learn some things that say, yeah, we should lean in and do it. We may learn some things that suggest maybe we should pick up the phone and talk to this other company and establish a partnership because we don't think we can do it, but maybe they can, and we can help them do A, B, and C, whatever that topic is.
We love the idea of sort of stepping towards something, getting some learnings, testing, keeping it simple, and then coming back and saying, all right, now let's pressure test our strategy and our thinking as we go forward. In some cases, we're going to come back and say, it doesn't work. We're going to cross it out. In other cases, we may come up with entirely different ideas than ones we sort of hypothesized before we stepped into it. It's a great question.
Ryan brought up a really good point in that the numbers that we put in front of you today as far as what we believe our growth opportunity is and the valuation model that he unpacked, we don't need three to get there. We don't need that third lever to get there. We don't even need that much from that second lever to get there.
What we wanted to do is we wanted to demonstrate with what we have today, we feel very confident. We had a record number of agents added to our value proposition last year and on pace in the first quarter. We have momentum. We have our agents more productive than they've been. Our current value proposition is very strong, and we feel good about that momentum in this year and beyond. You start to look at how you bring more of that to more places and a lot of work in that second lever of how we'll do that, already have some of that infrastructure set up, feel good that that will have some traction.
Make no mistake, that third lever is really the future and where we think we can go and learning a ton that can be applied to one and two, even if we do not even do three. It is not dependent on making the numbers that we talked about today, but it is part of how we think about the long-term strategy of the company in making sure that we are around for the next 80 years.
Take our next.
Yes, hi. Thank you. My first question is about the cross-selling. On your pie chart for the mix of business, 29% is the two-plus lines of cross-sell. Can you maybe specify how much of that 29% is P&C, whereas auto and property bundle versus a different combination of P&C and life and retirement or supplemental?
Do you guys want to go ahead and unpack the cross-sell? Go ahead.
Does that work?
Yeah. Go for it. Is that me?
All right. Yeah. We'll point to each other. I can do it. Yeah. I think let me start. I think I said on that slide, one thing to keep in mind is that we have a large P&C book, and three out of four clients of ours, members of ours, have multiple lines of P&C. We have done a really good job in that segment. The other books of business, I say they are less mature only because we purchased some of those books, and we continue to learn from those purchases. Of that 29%, I am going to ballpark here, Steve, but as I look at the makeup of our total book of business, maybe half of that is P&C.
The broad majority of that, and then you look at the rest, and I would say the number of members or clients are probably cut pretty evenly across the other lines of business. Ballpark?
Yep. Yep. You have to remember, and Steve Chauby said it, we had a pretty large infusion of monoline supplemental customers. In our business, there is natural cross-sell. Everybody talks about bundling home with auto. Our numbers are industry-leading in that regard, no doubt about it. Everybody gets that. The real unnatural cross-sell is how do you take an individual supplemental customer that we gained through acquisition and introduce them to everything Horace Mann? You can ask, do you want fries with that? Can I quote your auto? When was the last time somebody looked at your life insurance needs?
What we found is even in that work, there are some natural cross-sell things that come up and are clear. What we found was we were getting a fair amount of new life sales, some of which were cross-sold, some of which were new monoline from our individual supplemental agents. They were a big part of our life sales momentum. You see signs of that cross-sell ability happening. The issue is how do you make that more natural and how do you draw programs around taking that and cross-selling?
A lot of the things that Steve Chauby talked about as far as awareness, collateral material, having a tool like Catalyst available so our agents can really see who are all the customers who are monoline, who is cross-sold, a real CRM system, it is almost dependent to be able to have that, to be able to say, okay, what is my sales activity? How am I going to do it? How am I going to attack this? Catalyst is certainly helpful in unpacking that. To me, it is like that top of the funnel. The more educator households we have, the more they see these tools, they see this collateral material, they see the engagement. We can push content, the more that drives the cross-sell and makes it more natural than it might be in the broad industry or the broad market, if that makes any sense.
Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. I think just to sort of circle back, the way Steve has sort of framed up the opportunity for cross-sell, it is really improve our awareness. Think of like the website, have good, strong incentives to drive the behaviors we want for our staff and for agents. Marie hit the nail on the head. It is ease. If we can make things easier, an agent's job is not easy. I think rolling out Catalyst and having tools that they can use to sort of organize marketing campaigns, structured ways to reach out to people, having sophistication to rank order the leads from warm to cold is going to be a game changer for our agency, for us. Early days, as Steve said, we got really good positive feedback.
I think as we go forward, I look at the 29% and say, that's opportunity. We can do this. I think now we have the tools and the right people here to be able to drive that. It's great.
We'll get better at unpacking those proof points, if you will, for you. Think about in 2024, we had more agents in the life business than ever before. I mean, we are increasing the amount of salespeople, whether they are exclusive agents, whether they're benefit specialists, whether they're people in our contact center, more licensed salespeople asking the question. When you do that and you have more people aware of your brand and more people connecting with you, you begin to see that traction really across the board.
Thank you. Just a quick follow-up on the omnichannel.
With the context that you plan on doubling the size of the agent staff, how would you adjust the omnichannel to target the adjacent market?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, again, a combination. I think when Steve talks about doubling the agency plan, I think you got to think about it in those three levers that we laid out. It's really about doing what we've done for 80 years, bigger, stronger, faster. We know that we can recruit more agents than we've ever recruited before because we've proven that and feel really good about that traction. There's a lot of disruption in the exclusive agency world, and it has allowed us to attract agents to this value proposition. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it doesn't take a fair amount of time to get an agent, get them up to speed, retain them.
We do it better than most, but it's hard to get somebody through that funnel. We've proven that we're pretty good at it, and we will continue to do that. When you think about that, and then you add it to ways in which we can incubate those territories faster, we call it setting a school, getting that school aware of who we are, bringing everything that we do to bear, doing that, not just relying on a local agent to do that by themselves. We always ask, why can't we take the whole power of this company and all the people around the table here to start that relationship in a school district rather than relying on a single exclusive agent that's either going to make it through that pipeline or not? If we can do both, doesn't that give us critical mass?
In the end, you may plant an exclusive agent in that territory that you opened, or you may not. That gives us more opportunity than when you're just thinking about when people asked me, what's the distribution strategy of Horace Mann? The answer I got back was, we have exclusive agents. I said, that's not a strategy. That's your current state of affairs. Over the last several years, we've expanded that to really understand that teacher preferences are different. How they start a relationship we know isn't how they end it. Allowing them to start it in many different ways will allow us to end it and cross-sell it when it gets a little more complicated and they need a trusted advisor at the point of sale. It isn't about any one.
I do think when you say omnichannel and we say omnichannel, it's that whole ecosystem, if that answers your question.
It does. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thanks.
Mike Sramsky from BMO. A couple of questions on the operating leverage. You laid out a number of items that are kind of forward-looking about changes in terms of conditions, undeductibles, and diversification, et cetera. But some of them are also backward-looking. You show that your volatility profile is about a third lower due to the acquisitions you've made. So I'm just curious, how do we think about the governor and you changing those ratios, which are there's a pretty wide delta on the RBC and premiums to equity surplus ratio over time? Is there a third party like AM Best that is kind of the governor, or is it internal and then kind of related?
Given your excitement about the future, is there any thought about trying to front-load some of those levers in terms of maybe a buyback or whatnot to buy at a cheaper valuation than what you feel your stock might?
There was a lot there, Ryan, and I think you could answer his question by saying, yes, yes, and yes. Go ahead.
Yeah. No, there is a lot there. Let me pick off how I think about our opportunity to improve operating leverage. We have historically sat in a very conservative position. Look, part of that scale with the rating agencies, I mean, there is a component of if you're a smaller company, and if you do not have a really well-diversified liability profile, it becomes more difficult to target a lower RBC. There are a couple of things, though, that make us different. Our statutory entities are not stacked.
They all sit side by side. When I think about capital fungibility and the ability to move capital between entities, that's a powerful tool. The multi-line earnings model inherently creates this diversification of earnings where it's highly unlikely you're going to have every segment performing perfectly, just like it's highly unlikely you're going to have every segment in a position where they're not returning an appropriate amount of capital. The conversations we've had with the rating agencies, particularly on the non-life, I'm sorry, the non-P&C businesses, so the life, retirement, supplemental, and health, there's a fair amount of interest and excitement in our ability to better diversify that profile. I think that is one of our bigger levers of being able to move that down. The P&C premium to surplus lever, we've been at meaningfully higher levels before at a similar insurance financial strength rating in A.
For us, growth there, if you think about our geographic footprint, we're not a regional writer. We're not coastal. As we show more sophistication and more stability in the P&C results with the tools that we talked about, that creates opportunity. I want to be clear. We don't have a new lower capital target. It's going to take growth to get us there. Even at my current conservative targets, I have excess capital. We said we target on the non-life entities 400 on a pooled basis. I don't have the slide up in front of me, but I think it was a 446. That will grow throughout the year. If you think about the opportunity to connect to the second part of your question, I was intentional in the comments around multiples.
We've been opportunistic in the share repurchase in the past. We will continue to be opportunistic. You saw us press the gas pedal during periods of market volatility because we had enough capital. We were having a strong quarter. I do think that with our enhanced confidence in the accelerated earnings momentum that allows you to buy back at higher multiples, it's the math. Your payback period, if you're growing earnings at a faster clip, allows you to go slightly above where we purchased in the past. I hope that answers your question. As a reminder, we had another buyback authorization this morning, which shows you the support from the board in that type of approach.
Yeah. You made me think of something else in your question.
When I think about the first quarter, we're really pushing hard to have you all think about us in the sum of the parts. Think about us as a customer-focused company, not individual businesses within your model. It really did surprise us, if you will, with a record first quarter and a good, strong, solid first quarter for some of the headlines to be Horace Mann beats on earnings, but, oh, by the way, their mortality was a little higher than our expectation. Because to Ryan's point, in any given quarter, there might be a segment of our business that doesn't perform exactly quarter over quarter because we're relatively small the way our projections or your models might anticipate.
For us, looking at the first quarter, the amount of new educators we brought to our value proposition, the record earnings in the quarter and coming in pretty darn close to what we said we would do and feeling really good about the momentum, we were a little surprised that that might be the headline, if you will. We know it's hard, but for us, it really is about the sum of the parts.
Do we have any other questions in the room?
Thank you. This is kind of a follow-up on the RBC question. As I look at the comparable companies for diversified life and retirement, Principal, Corbridge, and C&O, they've all established Bermuda platforms of some level that have allowed them to operate in a more capital-light framework. Where do you sit within those as a strategic priority for the company? Thank you.
Did you plant that question, Ryan?
No, I didn't plant that question. John, I know those type of transactions are commonplace today. I think they are an important tool in the arsenal of improving ROEs for what is still a capital-intensive business if you keep it all on shore. The scale of our liabilities, the fixed annuity liabilities in traditional life, is large enough to consider a platform like that. We've done a reinsurance transaction in the past in 2019 when we essentially reinsured a high guarantee legacy block, 4.5% minimum guarantee. Interest rate environment was very different then, meaning low. That book of business was not really where we wanted our ROEs. We swapped that basically for the individual supplemental business through an M&A transaction, importantly a strategic transaction to build out the product, improve distribution.
Financially, it was a home run from a redistribution of capital. I think that's a good example of how we think about things holistically. Yeah, there's Bermuda, there's Cayman, there's backbook, there's flow, there's all sorts of options to consider. That's not lost on us.
We have, I mean, think about it. When we think about uses and sources of capital, spending time longer term on what those sources might be, having a clear view of what the uses are and the priority around those uses, and then lining up the timing. We had contemplated a reinsurance transaction, much like Ryan described long before we were ready and able to execute the NTA transaction. The beauty was having that uses and sources timing be right on. We do know how we think about sources of capital and capital accumulation.
We have a very longer-term strategic thought process on the uses of that capital as well. Thought about, contemplated.
Perfect. We're going to take our last question from the virtual queue.
Oh, wait. Oh, yeah.
Okay. Yep. Missed that.
Hey, Dan Lipkunov with Dowling & Partners. Thanks for the presentation. The question about GenAI and specifically within underwriting, can you give a little bit more color? Does that influence the real-time underwriting decisions, or is it just about the backend model development or any, if you can elaborate?
Yeah. I mean, I may be a little different than some, but I think about GenAI across the board as a tool. It doesn't change the principles of the business. You still have to understand risk. You still have to price risk appropriately and link those two things.
We've thought about GenAI in two ways, and I think we've probably talked about that a lot today. There are the macro cases, and you mention it. They are underwriting. They are customer service. They are claim. There are certainly ways in those businesses where you can employ GenAI on a more macro basis. Then there's the individual pieces where you can use that tool in many components of those things, as well as other things like what we did with Catalyst. What I'm most excited about is I think we did it the right way. We engaged our people. We had them understand the tool so that from the ground up, people could determine, "How do I use AI to make this process more efficient?" As you can imagine, we started with some of the smaller pieces, which led to much bigger applications and uses.
A lot of people, and I have heard other people answer this question at Investor Day on first quarter earnings calls where they talk about GenAI as a scale advantage. We actually believe that GenAI does not only have the potential, but it is democratizing data. Everyone can use it. Even smaller companies can use it to improve their efficiency and their operations. I do not think it is just scale. I think in some ways, it allows us to get efficient, to get faster, and to employ these tools across the board. To answer your question, yes, I do believe GenAI will change many of the components of the underwriting process, potentially components of the rating and pricing process. I think we all have to keep in mind that it is a tool, and it does not change the basic principles of the business.
In my mind, because our folks have embraced it, when we think about customer care and we think about claim, those are the two areas in the industry and we're no exception where you have the highest turnover rate. It's not about firing a bunch of people. It allows you to maybe not have your next hiring class be as big as you get more efficient. If you're thoughtful, I think you can use these tools quite well. I think we've been thoughtful, and I think we're using the tools well. I don't know if anybody has anything to add to that, or did I? That was perfect. I got it all in there. Good. Perfect. I'll go with perfect.
Thanks. One more on the auto retention and take down a little bit again in Q1.
Just wondering how you're thinking about it for the rest of the year. I know you talked about implementing some additional rate in California, 14%, I think. Are you seeing any incremental pressure there as well from that?
Yeah. I'm going to let Steve give you the details, but I'll start with we have industry-leading retention, and the drop that we saw was almost spot on with what we would have expected and what our elasticity curves would suggest in this type of frothy environment. Steve, do you have anything to add to that?
Sure. What I would say is our retention as we sit here today is almost exactly where we thought it would be. Let me back up. I think Steve Chauby said this a couple of times. Profit is a prerequisite for growth. We made very conscious decisions.
We saw our combined ratios tick up along with the rest of the industry. The most efficient lever to address profitability is taking rate. We took rate in line with what we thought we needed. We sort of looked off to the side. We have pretty good elasticity models. We asked the question, given the amount of rate flowing through, what do we think consumers' reactions are going to be? That sort of helped us define our own internal expectations. What do we think is going to happen? I would say when you look at the auto retention, it has gone down, but it has gone down almost exactly the same clip we thought it was going to go down. We actually feel, quote, good about the actions we took to restore profitability. We understand that there is a consequence for that.
We have and had retention programs in place to try to save customers. But sort of if you stimulate people to shop, in a lot of cases, if they shop long enough and hard enough, they could probably find a cheaper price somewhere else. What's happening is completely aligned with what we expected.
Happy that we had the correlated increase in new business because of the shopping to go along with it. Net-net as this levels out, we would expect that we can return to at least more normal retention numbers for us, even though the current ones are pretty strong.
That's right.
Thanks for your question.
Okay. Now we'll pivot to our last virtual queue question. What gives you confidence in the long-term goals that you outlined today, and how should we think about tracking progress towards those goals?
I think I've said it at least 10 times. We've been doing this for 80 years. We have a strong track record. I think the key thing for us is focused. We're focused on sustained profitable growth. We have the right products to do that. We have new and enhanced marketing capabilities to do that. We've got the right team focused on it. We couldn't be more excited about our future and where we're taking this company. I appreciate everyone's attention today. I know this is a lot to sit in a room and pay attention to talking heads up here, but we do appreciate all of you following our story and being here today. We're excited to be a bunch of finance geeks at Finance Disney World. Please watch us ring the bell tomorrow. We're excited about that as well.
Thank you all for coming today.