Trevor Baldwin
Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceedwith your question
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our third quarter earnings call. I'm joined this afternoon by Brad Hale, our Chief Financial Officer; Kris Wiebeck, our Chief Strategy Officer; and Bonnie Bishop, Executive Director of Investor Relations. The robust underlying health, momentum and operating leverage in our business was evident in this quarter's results as we generated, organic growth of 19% and approximately 480 basis points of margin accretion versus the third quarter of 2022 on the back of continued execution, growing contribution from prior investments and ongoing efforts to drive greater free cash flow from the business. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.29, up 61% from the third quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA grew 53% to $64 million resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 21% for the quarter and free cash flow from operations grew by 29% to $76 million for the year-to-date period, despite a $36 million increase in cash paid for interest year-over-year. Additionally, as a result of the growth in adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, leverage now sits at approximately 4.8 times, representing meaningful progress over the last 12 months toward our goal of rapidly reducing leverage. From an operating segment perspective and insurance advisory solutions, we generated organic growth of 11%. In the quarter, we saw increased client sensitivity to the significant insurance rate increases they have faced over the last two years, and we've experienced softer new business from project-related work, and interest rate sensitive areas like construction, and mergers, and acquisitions. In other sectors, where we have a significant presence, such as healthcare we are seeing far less impact and overall solid new business trends continue to drive outsized organic growth for our IS platform relative to our peers. In August, we added a fourth center of excellence to our IS platform. Our new international center of excellence leverages our deep expertise to provide risk advisory and insurance solutions to clients with international operations and those exploring international expansion. The addition of this important capability enhances, our overall value proposition to multinational businesses, and along with increased levels of specialization from the launch of other centers of excellence and industry practice groups, meaningfully expands the aperture of opportunities our risk advisors can confidently pursue. Underwriting capacity and technology solutions grew 25% organically during the quarter with strong performance from the MGA of the future platform, which grew 29% and achieved record new business for the renters product line in July, typically, the seasonally strongest month of the year. Homeowners also continues to exceed expectations with premium from our E&S and non-builder admitted products up over 200% from the third quarter of 2022. We also launched two new products during the quarter, high net worth home and commercial property, both of which are starting to gain momentum. The significant investments we have made in UCTS over the past 24 months are continuing to drive further diversification and new revenue streams into the MGA, which we expect will drive durable and profitable growth long into the future. MainStreet Insurance Solutions delivered organic growth of 29%, driven by strong results in both the legacy MainStreet business and Westwood. Despite some pressure in the housing market due to mortgage rates, new home sales have been resilient and we continue to see strong attachment and insurance rate pull through Westwood. Additionally the MainStreet team has shown tremendous growth and navigating very challenging, personal lines markets in large states such as Florida, Texas and California where the personal lines insurance space continues to see significant rate increases. We continue to be focused on delevering our balance sheet and on expanding margin across the business. To support those goals and enabled by the completion of our partnership integration work, we've began executing on organizational alignment and cost savings initiatives aimed at rationalizing and simplifying our growth services support structure to more fully align with our distinct go to market models and enable more nimble and effective client execution. We expect that these initiatives will provide greater operational efficiency and accelerate margin expansion and free cash flow growth beginning in 2024, and more fully into 2025. On October 17th, we announced the launch of Juniper Re, our new reinsurance broking platform. Juniper Re is a natural complement to our retail brokerage and MGA business and helps round out our capabilities as a full service broker. Juniper Re will be led by reinsurance broking veteran, Jeff Irvin who has more than 25 years of global reinsurance broking experience. Reinsurance brokerage is a capability we have long had on our strategic roadmap because of its superior financial returns, an integral position in the insurance ecosystem and we jumped at the opportunity to launch this with a seasoned leader and team. We expect Juniper Re will begin contributing to revenue as early as the first quarter of 2024. Lastly, we announced in our 10-Q that Chris Wiebeck, our Chief Strategy Officer and former Chief Financial Officer and John Valentine, Our Chief Partnership Officer will be retiring at the end of this year. Chris will step down from our Board as part of his retirement. Their retirements align with a strategic roadmap that has been in place for a long period of time, and included achieving our first set of post-IPO goals related to the scale and maturity of our business. Chris and John have made enormous contributions to BRP and have mentored scores of colleagues who are now key contributors. On behalf of BRP, I'd like to thank Chris and John for their tireless work through the years and building BRP from a small, Tampa-based agency to the national firm that it is today. In summary and as this quarter's results once again proved out, BRP remains a diversified well-balanced business that is built to perform and deliver industry-leading growth to the various economics and industry rate cycles. As you saw this quarter, our business has meaningful operating leverage and as we continue to earn into the past investments, and maintain our committed focus on targeted expense efficiency actions, we expect margins will continue to expand meaningfully over time. I'd like to thank our colleagues for their tenacious efforts to deliver innovative solutions for our clients helping them navigate a challenging insurance marketplace. I also want to thank our clients for their continued trust and confidence in us. With that, I will turn it over to Brad, who will detail our financial results.