For more than 10 years now, The Hilb Group has fashioned itself into one of the Richmond region’s fastest-growing companies by acquiring small, independent insurance agencies in multiple states.
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t slowed that growth trajectory for the Henrico County-based insurance brokerage.
“We had our biggest M&A [mergers and acquisitions] year ever in 2020, basically doing all of our deals remotely,” said Richard “Ricky” Spiro, The Hilb Group’s CEO.
The Hilb Group was founded in 2009 with a strategy to grow by tapping into private equity funding to buy independent insurance agencies around the nation, many of them small agencies with just a handful of owners and staff. It did its first deal in 2010.
There are more than 35,000 such independent agencies in the United States, but the industry has been in a consolidation mode for years, Spiro said.
“It is a fragmented industry,” he said. “As the world has changed in the last 10 years, a lot of smaller agencies are seeing they can do better as part of a larger organization than they can on their own.”
“Our strategy has been relatively simple and consistent,” Spiro said. “We want to build a great company that is based on what I would call sustainable growth.”
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