Brown & Brown: UK Expansion & GRP Acquisition

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Regarding GRP, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of that business from your perspective? What are they good at, and where might they not excel?

They were very good at acquiring brokers and turning them into more profitable entities. For instance, they might take a broker with a £2 million GWP account that was only earning 18 points on average, and they were excellent at increasing that to 25 points, making it more profitable. A broker might not be charging admin fees, but they were diligent with their admin fees. They excelled at transforming a broker's profit from one figure to another.

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Regarding GRP, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of that business from your perspective? What are they good at, and where might they not excel?

They also had strong relationships with insurers. When you presented new business from GRP, insurers were always willing to support you. However, they struggled with integration. Acquiring many businesses means dealing with different management structures and systems, and everyone does things slightly differently. For example, in my role at GRP, I worked across six or seven different offices, each doing things in their own way on different systems. Building a pipeline was challenging because of this.

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So what changed when Brown & Brown took over? You alluded to some things already with your comments about integration and so forth, but let's tackle that by itself. When Brown & Brown took over, what were the changes?

The big thing was the integration piece. Brown & Brown made a significant investment to get everyone onto the same platform, ensuring consistent numbers across the business. They were in the process of changing names. For example, one of the offices I used to sit in, local to me, was called Alan & Thomas. I drove past it the other day, and it now has Brown & Brown outside of it. They're going through a name change process to promote the Brown & Brown brand. While they are a global broker, they probably weren't that well known, and there was a big push on the brand and integration.

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