In this conversation, Andy Neary and James discuss the steep decline in organic growth among insurance agencies, citing data that public brokers’ organic growth fell from 9.6% in Q4 2024 to 3.4% by the end of 2025. They attribute the slowdown to a hard market, a softening property sector, and a shift in producer behavior—producers are spending most of their time managing renewals rather than hunting new business. The discussion highlights chronic underinvestment in support and middle‑office staff, which leaves producers overloaded with account‑management duties. Both speakers note that agencies are now far behind their new‑business organic targets, prompting a renewed focus on re‑energizing new‑business hunting. Andy mentions that this problem inspired him to build a business aimed at providing a solution to the organic growth challenge.
Chapters
a lot of agencies struggle with organic growth these days. Yeah. Hence why M&A becomes such an appealing growth mechanism. Do you guys see that at Marshberry? You guys seeing the similar things? I just feel like organic growth is harder to come by these days than it used to be.
Yeah, well, you think about it, they all lived through 4 years of a hard market where everyone grew 10% by just renewing their accounts, or they were actually shrinking in the background. And you know this from your clients, So our data suggests the same thing. We're seeing organic growth rates come down. If you look at the— just as a data point, the public brokers Q4 of 2024 organic growth rate was 9.6%. So it's the big guys, right?
And that's including renewal, renewed business, right?
Organic. Yeah. Yes. Including renewed business. Not— that's not sales. That's not new business.
That's just growth overall.
Their organic growth rate at the end of 2025 was 3.4%.
So 9 point what?
9.6 to 3.4. Wow. So that explains why you feel the pressure in their stock value, right? So what the public brokers are feeling, all our clients are feeling too. It's just the market on the property side is softening and we are seeing in our data that organic growth is coming down. And what people, you know, if you're an agency owner, you're growing 10% a year, but you really weren't growing. It was just the market exposure. The water's out and you're naked. And so that's the, that's the industry at large right now. And so there's been a lot of articles talking about this, that where's organic growth? How do you drive organic growth? And it's become a challenge. I think the hard market didn't help because it was harder to keep your clients because they were angry at you because your premiums are going up. But you got the same time at the end of the year, like, well, we grew. And so your producers are kind of focused on that. And we do have a chronic problem of agencies underinvesting in support staff and, um, sort of that middle office roles to enable the producer to be a relationship individual. And when you overpay producers on renewals, you make them a shepherd over a flock of renewals. Like you're not really incentivizing where they need to be, which is at the tip of the spear and not back in the office, you know, being the greatest account executive. And so it is, it is a challenge right now.
Yeah, I agree. I think there's, there's definitely a pandemic of producers acting like glorified account managers. They're spending way too much time on the client side. And I have had several conversations with agency executives in the last year, to your point, where they used to be our organic growth just on renewing business, 7-8%. This year we're only looking at 2%. Right. And it's, it's really making them go, oh, we've got to get people hunting again. And I'm hearing numbers from some of the bigger firms, you know, being behind on their new business organic goals by 7 and 8 figures.
Yep. No, we're seeing the same thing on the bigger firms. And we probably have some of the same overlap, right? And it's the same thing.
It is. I would say it's a very, very good question to be asking in 2026, which is how do you grow organically? Honestly, it's why one of the reasons I built this business, James, I feel like we have a solution for it, but it is our battle cry. It's like nobody knows how to grow organically right now.
