Ryan Specialty at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, June 3, 2025, Ryan Specialty Group Holdings Inc. (NYSE:RYAN) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. The company showcased its robust strategic positioning within the specialty insurance market, emphasizing its strong performance and long-term growth strategy. While the outlook remains positive, potential challenges in the property market could affect the second quarter.

Key Takeaways

• Ryan Specialty has maintained a 14-year streak of double-digit organic growth.
• Full-year organic growth is projected at 11% to 13%, with Q2 expected to face challenges.
• The company is focused on M&A, innovation, and talent development as key growth drivers.
• Climate change and social inflation are significant factors influencing the insurance industry.
• Ryan Specialty is committed to maintaining a leverage ratio of 3 to 4 times net leverage.

Financial Results

• Full-year organic growth guidance stands at 11% to 13%.
• Q2 is anticipated to be challenging due to pressures in the property market.
• Margin expansion is expected to increase by over 130 basis points by year-end.
• A 35% margin target is set for 2027, driven by sustainable growth and margin expansion.
• Capital allocation prioritizes M&A, with a willingness to temporarily exceed leverage targets for strategic acquisitions.

Operational Updates

• The company’s "ecosystem of excellence" blends talent, relationships, and innovation.
• Ryan Specialty boasts high retention rates among producers, at 97-98%.
• The company is expanding its total addressable market and leveraging its scale and expertise.
• Delegated authority usage is on the rise, with no carriers predicting a decrease.

Future Outlook

• Ryan Specialty expects continued double-digit organic growth annually.
• M&A remains a top priority with a robust pipeline of deals.
• The company is well-positioned to capitalize on secular growth trends in the industry.

Q&A Highlights

• Weather volatility and its impact on insurance were discussed, with specialized solutions in place.
• The consolidation of retail broker panels is a key growth driver, presenting significant opportunities.
• Ryan Specialty continues to build deep relationships with over 20,000 retail partners.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: Welp welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining the Ryan Specialty presentation. It should be a great great discussion. Those of you who don’t know me, Adam Klauber. I run our insurance insurance practice here.

Lucky enough to have Ryan, you know, join us. Tim Turner, CEO, will lead out, and then we’ll hear the rest of the team, but I’ll just take two seconds. One, for compliance, please see disclosures for anything you need to see on disclosures. But Ryan is a a very unique firm, and it is a leading distribution company and surface there, a leading specialty distribution, but but it’s really much, much deeper than that. It’s really at the nexus and the center.

The insurance industry, which in ways has been, you know, stagnant, is anything but stagnant these days. And there’s a lot of changes both at a macro level at the industry and more at the customer level also. And in a business that doesn’t change real quickly, Ryan is sort of in the middle of everything, really affecting a lot of the change. So it’s a broad statement, but there there there’s a lot of great stuff going on. And with that, Tim, I’ll let you lead up.

Tim Turner, CEO, Ryan Specialty: Well, thank you, Adam, and it’s great to see everyone this morning. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Fifteen years ago, I had the good fortune of meeting Pat Ryan, having helped him execute on his vision of building Ryan’s specialty into the best specialty insurance services firm in our industry. His founding thesis is to provide innovative insurance solutions to brokers, agents, and carriers, and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve grown wholesale brokerage, binding, and underwriting management businesses into an incredible scale and built a strong moat.

We marked our sixth straight year of growing the top line by 20% or more and our fourteenth straight year of double digit organic growth, position this business to take advantage of secular growth trends in our industry, notably four in particular, retail brokers getting substantially bigger through solid organic growth and m and a, retail broker panel consolidation intensifying still in the early innings. Risks are becoming larger and more complex in The United States, impacted by climate change and social inflation, driving the need for specialty in the E and S market. Delegated authority is accelerating clearly, which Miles will dive into in more detail. We’ve thrived through our ability to innovate. Our strategy is aligned around the evolving and growing needs of our clients and our trading partners to continue providing a dynamic value proposition.

We see where the industry is heading. We are innovating. We’re making long term sustainable investments in our business to fortify our competitive position, deepening our industry practice group verticals, adding new products, new segments, new geographies every day, and expanding our TAM into alternative risk and benefits. We’ve executed on a fantastic m and a strategy. Last year, a record for m and a, and we carried that momentum into 2025.

We deployed over 2,400,000,000.0 in capital. Integration is going very well. We’re pleased with the strong levels of collaboration with our new teammates, and we feel very strongly about our ability to offer productivity improvements through better distribution and additional capital support. Our m and a pipeline remains robust, including small, medium, and large deals. We have the capacity and the capability to continue doing larger deals, But we’re highly disciplined, and we only do deals if they fit our three criteria.

As most of you know, it must be a cultural fit, a strategic fit, and accretive to our overall model. We’re able to deliver such strong value to our clients and trading partners because of our incredible talent. We simply have more a players than the competitors do. We are a destination of choice for top talent. We prove that every day.

We’re committed to recruiting, training, and the development of talent. The Ryan University this year will have 300 attendees. We’ll have over a hundred internships this summer. We have a strong culture of innovation and empowerment, resulting in a 98 employee retention of our brokers, top end in our industry. It is the exceptional quality and quantity of our talent that distinguishes Ryan from the rest of the industry.

We have a relentless focus to deliver value for our clients. They are the reason why we’re generating industry leading organic that is sustainable over the long term. And we have robust employee ownership. We are strongly aligned with the shareholders. In closing, we’re positioned for another great year.

While we could see some pressure in q two, which Janice will discuss later, we expect to deliver our fifteenth consecutive year of double digit organic growth. And now I’ll hand it off to Jeremiah for a deeper dive.

Jeremiah Bickham, President, Ryan Specialty: Thank you, Tim. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thrilled to be here. Jeremiah Bickham, president of Ryan Specialty.

I’ll take just a minute to talk about some drivers of our growth. You all are very growth focused investors, so I think that’s an appropriate topic. Basically, since we’ve been public, I think we’ve spent more time focusing on the secular and structural growth drivers that have helped us succeed since our founding, and those are all still very much in play. There’s actually a really nice slide on those growth drivers. I think it’s slide 14 of our investor deck.

But I wanna spend an extra minute today talking about more Ryan specific growth drivers. And what we sometimes refer to as our ecosystem of excellence, which we’ve attempted to graphically represent on slide nine of our investor deck. It’s essentially the idea that we’ve blended talent, unique relationships at scale. And with that, we have an ability to innovate, evolve, stay ahead of the market, and beat our competition. Essentially, we see the needs of the market first, and we’re in a position to capitalize and win better than our competitors.

And we’ve built a brand around solving complex solutions for our clients, and we even have the ability to design solutions beyond traditional insurance products. So this ability to innovate and evolve is underpinned by at least three essential pillars. The first is our entrepreneurial and empowering culture. We talk about this a lot. We truly are a destination of choice for individuals, teams, and M and A.

And one of the reasons is our platform represents growth potential, earnings potential, professional development that’s unrivaled in our industry. We are able to attract, develop, and retain technical, growth minded, competitive practitioners. And as importantly, they stay. As Tim referenced, 97, 90 eight percent retention among our producers is industry leading. The next pillar that fosters this ecosystem of excellence is our unique position of trust.

So for years now, we’ve been able to cultivate deep relationships with leading insurance institutions up and down the value chains on the retail broker side, on in Miles’ business, even relationships with our competitor wholesale brokerage firms, and then up the value chain with carriers. We are a driver of both growth and profitability. We think that our clients view us as a force multiplier for the success. And we believe that this unique status, this position of trust that we enjoy opens doors for us and prides provides us with unique growth opportunities. Last, you put this all together, it’s it’s scale scale and scope of our expertise.

So when you have this unmatched, hard to replicate breadth and depth of specialties at Ryan Specialty, it truly is a competitive moat. And we are focused on growth areas of the market, capturing secular tailwinds and emerging opportunities. We’ve led in the fast growing delegated authority space and delivered consistent profitability to our underwriting partners and deepened that relationship and position of trust that we have. Miles will get into that more in a second. And, of course, as Pat often talks about, we are focused on growing and capturing more of an expanding total addressable market.

The massive flow of business that comes into our platform, the talented individuals that are there to curate outcomes, and all the connectivity that we have to the world’s best risk management institutions really does create an environment that enables and fosters innovation and our ability to evolve and continue winning. So to to crystallize all this, we have what we believe is specialized intellectual capital, data, and unique trading relationships at scale that puts us in a unique position. We’ve built what we think is the best platform in our industry, and it’s curated. It’s populated by the best talent. And we have an incredible relationship of trust and deep relationships with our clients and trading partners, and this provides us unique opportunities and visibility into their needs and the ability to capitalize on these needs.

And we believe that this is, along with all the secular growth drivers that we’ve discussed at length, is gonna be a huge proponent of our ability to win and our continued exceptional growth for years to come. So, hopefully, this spurs some good questions in q and a later. With that, I’ll turn it over to Miles.

Miles Well, Ryan Specialty: Thank you, Jeremiah. Miles, well, I’m I’m gonna discuss the delegated authority branch within Ryan Specialty. Without going back too far, I I’d wanna highlight some of the trends that Pat saw fifteen years ago that he was looking to solve for. There there was a clear acceleration in the risk, in in the marketplace approximately twenty years ago, and I’d link that back. There was classes relate classes of risk related to the the new economy, a digitally connected workforce, cyber, renewable energy, rep and warranty, transactional liabilities.

So new classes that needed solutions. You had an increase in real inflation that was actually compounded by almost a decade of benign cat years, then priced up in a in a period of increased building inputs. We have increases in social seen increases in the frequency of, nuclear verdicts and the severity of those same verdicts are growing exponentially. Geographic changes in density are a factor in The US as more and more folks are moving to the southeast wind exposed areas. Every dollar of insurable value has a higher risk, exposure on it now.

And the outcome was really back to Pat’s original thesis of harnessing specialty distribution and specialty underwriting under the same banner to deliver specialty, solutions across the retail, wholesale, and carrier environment. And that’s where, the MGUs live is is is a fully, delegated outsourced solution to underwriting capacity. Pat had the foresight to let us invest in this practice fifteen years ago. One of RSUM’s first employees was actually a chief actuary. That actually blossomed to a central underwriting team of over 60 actuaries, pricing actuaries, cap modelers, data scientists, a quality assurance team.

And most recently, we’ve been empowered to hire three colleagues with advanced degrees in AI and and process improvement. The output of those hires in the platform that that that Ryan has built has been a a scaled MGU platform that when it sits across from the carrier, it’s speaking the exact same language, rate, changes in frequency, changes in severity. We’re actually able to provide data insights and and action, as faster ideally faster than the carriers can can act enact themselves. Those same benefits that we bring that in the that same investment in the platform that’s a benefit to the carrier has actually triggered us to be an employer of choice. So top talent has a world of options.

Right? The a players can always hang up a shingle, go at their own. We have the benefit of offering them introductions to capital, distribution, technology to bring them to market faster with a higher degree of certainty. Those same tools have actually translated to becoming a clear acquirer of choice in the last eighteen months. Extremely proud of our m and a campaign, helped us round out our capability sets in in several key products that we had deep conviction to, helped us, double our international platform and build build out our leadership and stewardship to continue to drive innovation and growth and acquisitions abroad.

I’d I’d wanna transition that we think this this investment is is replicable and scalable, and it’s actually accelerating in penetration and uptake across the industry. AM Best actually publicly released a study about six months ago where they interviewed a panel of carriers globally on their their insights on delegate underwriting authority. 70% of them went or excuse me. The the first question is, do you do you anticipate an increase or decrease in the utilization of delegate authority in the next twelve months. An amazing 70% predicted an increase in the use of delegated authority to to intermediaries.

Probably what’s even more profound, zero projected a decrease. The next question was, do do you see a increase in the relevance of delegated authority? 52% said yes. 0% predicted decline. The last and this is a this is actually the heart of the sales pitch that we’ve made for fifteen years.

The question of carriers is what of what what kind of utility do you hope to to get by using an MGU? And and in order, access to niche business, diversification of carrier core business, improved cost efficiency, speed to market, access to tech that carriers might not otherwise invest in themselves, and a swifter solutioning of emerging trends. So we we’re glad that our message is now being played back to us so deeply in the marketplace. The US commercial, p and c market, when Ryan was founded, was only serviced about eight or 9% through the delegated authority channel. We’ve seen that, at a sustained accelerated rate double in the last fifteen years, and we see the an an increased uptake as we move forward.

So appreciate the chance to be here. Part of this advantage, before I transition, not only the platform, but we’re we’re measured on the results we’re we’re driving to these carriers. Right? We have a clear fiduciary duty to the underwriting capital we we represent. The success that we’ve delivered in the marketplace over time is actually generating new opportunity and accelerating pace.

So carriers that have supported us on one or two line that have had success are looking to join us on more. And we’ve even seen a new new trend where carriers are looking to participate across our entire portfolio. Right? So we have the benefit of being able to deliver expertise one product at a time. Additionally, because of the breadth and depth of our 250 lines of business, we’ve actually created a portfolio that is creating a, diversified, non correlated market leading results with less, volatility that carriers are actually looking to take on seeing, the transformation of the portfolio is essentially specialty insurance as an asset class now.

So that commitment of capital on our results is is emboldening us and enabling us to continue to to accelerate our growth going forward. So thank you for the time. Janice?

Janice Hamilton, Ryan Specialty: Alright. Thank you, Miles. Good morning, everyone. I’m Janice Hamilton, and really appreciate everyone’s interest today. I’m just gonna quickly recap on what we’ve heard from my colleagues.

So Tim touched on the secular growth factors that impact our our business, and Jeremiah talked about, you know, Ryan Specialty’s ecosystem of excellence, and Miles outlined the delegated authority strategy. Adding to all of these aspects of our growth is our durable business model, and we see that for three main reasons. One is the resiliency of the E and S in the specialty market. The second is the compulsory nature of so many of our products. And the third has been the the investment that we’ve made in building a differentiated platform with specialized talent that Tim and Jeremiah both spoke a lot about.

We’ve laid out a long term strategy that both invest organically and through the execution of our m and a strategy. We expect to deliver annual double digit organic growth for the foreseeable future. And for the full year, our annual guidance is 11% to 13% organic growth, which we feel good about. We do think that q two is going to be a tough quarter for everyone. And from the beginning of our planning process, we anticipated that q two would be the slowest growth quarter and is likely to fall outside of our annual guide range.

So we wouldn’t be surprised if you see that come next quarter. I referred to this on my remarks on our call last quarter, primarily because of the pressures that we’ve seen in the property market and the timing when rates began to decelerate last year in the third quarter. But as as we’ve said for a few years, one quarter does not make a trend. And importantly, the vital signs of our business, like submission growth, new business wins, and retention still remain very strong, and we feel good about our annual guidance range. So we believe that that 13 11% to 13% really provides an outstanding year for 2025.

Turning to capital allocation. Right now, M and A continues to be our top priority. Tim mentioned that we have a robust pipeline for M and A opportunities. We’re pleased to have recently grown our dividend at a modest and sustainable level, and we’re constantly assessing opportunities to maximize shareholder value through evaluating capital allocation. We have a strong free cash flow profile.

We have high levels of recurring revenue, low CapEx needs, and low working capital needs. We also have had the advantage of a heavy variable pay for performance culture. Jeremiah touched on the talent and the the compensation that we have there, which insulates us but does not make us immune from recession. From a leverage perspective, our comfort corridor has historically and continues to be three to four times net leverage on a credit basis. We are willing to go temporarily above that range for an acquisition that meets all of our criteria, but we always delever quickly.

Historically, expecting the annual earnings growth that we have in the free cash flow generation, we expect to delever a full time full turn by the end of this year with the expectation of no additional m and a, which, as Tim said, there is a robust pipeline. Lastly, in terms of margin, we’re very pleased to have another year or expect another year of further margin expansion, upwards of 130 basis points at the top end of our range. This is in excess of the two ten basis points of margin expansion that we experienced in 2024, and we’re off to a great start in the first quarter. For the full year, we expect margin expansion to continue to be driven by contributions from M and A, underlying margin expansion, partially off by offset by some headwinds from fiduciary investment income due to lower rates and also our larger than average investment year, which has been funded by the restructuring program of Accelerate twenty twenty five that we completed in 2024. We’re always focused on making long term investments in the platform, and it’s all about balancing today with that long term investment in the future.

Beyond 2025, we’re on track to hit our 35% margin target in 2027, and we will get there by sustainable annual organic double digit organic growth and steady margin expansion. And with that, I’ll turn it back over to Adam.

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: Great. Well, I’ll ask sorry. I’ll ask one or two questions, and we may have time for one or two. The the weather is causing havoc in and around insurance. So could you talk about, you know, may maybe Tim will wait off with you, one or two ways that, that Ryan is responding, helping clients, helping provide really a safety net through insurance given all the weather volatility?

Sure. As as we all know, global warming is is clearly a a global issue. And in

Tim Turner, CEO, Ryan Specialty: The United States, it’s it’s really affecting these high concentrations of wealth on the coast in the California wildfire region, lots of hot spots around the country, including convective storm, centers. And what we’ve done is a clear illustration of what Pat’s original thesis was. We’re were building brokerage specialty practice group verticals, hundreds of brokers that specialize in catastrophic property, brokering these accounts, and then symmetrically building, underwriting MGUs, programs, and facilities inside those verticals. So we have the ability to broker the solutions and weave in our own underwriting solutions and strengthening our value proposition with our clients. So one way or another or a combination thereof, brokering it and underwriting it, we could bring stronger, more viable solutions to our clients on their catastrophic property risks.

So today, our market share continues to grow while rate deceleration in property is is certainly measurable. We see it. The actual percentage of non admitted property business is growing, so it’s not going back into the standard market. Very important, note. So we’re we’re competing on price.

We’re competing on rate. We’re we’re getting our margins on the underwriting side of

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: it as well. And our performance in property, despite some headwinds, is still very strong. So take high net worth from that. Historically, that was a standard non E and S market. Today, it’s becoming more.

So you essentially created a new business in around high net worth homes. So how quick how many people were in that business vertical for you maybe three, four years ago? How many people today you know, just give us some some idea of how that business has grown, just for for an example. Sure.

Tim Turner, CEO, Ryan Specialty: A great illustration of a of a new vertical that popped up. We were in personal lines. We were writing homes, single family homes, and and trailer parks, and challenging neighborhoods around America. That was a several hundred million dollar premium vertical for us. But what happened is global warming with wildfires and and the hurricane frequency and severity in Florida drove high net worth into the E and S market.

Carriers in California were pulling out of the state left and right, and that business was pouring into the channel. We brokered it at first, got our arms around it, and we built one facility in London, an MGU platform almost immediately a couple years ago, and then formed another joint venture here with a big eight plus 15 carrier, and we’re executing on that strategy. So, ideally, we have two strong MGUs and high net worth, and we have dozens of brokers that are dedicated to that. Same customer base, global brokers, national retail brokers, top 100 regional brokers controlling most of the high net worth business in their personal lines divisions. We’re plugged in there.

We’re a known quantity. We’re a big wholesale trading partner with them already, and now we’re in their high net worth division. And it’s now becoming quick quickly becoming a multibillion dollar segment for us.

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: Great. Great. Jeremiah, you had growth drivers in a market, the E and S market that potentially grows six, seven, eight, nine percent. Could you identify the the two or three areas that’s gonna push you up to that low teens at 11:12, thirteen percent over a long, long time period? You talked about it, but but what are the two, three areas?

And you don’t have to give exact percentages, but maybe, like, this is the highest. This is the mid low. You know, some context.

Jeremiah Bickham, President, Ryan Specialty: Yeah. It it’s important to remember that a lot of the factors that got us here, you know, x rate, x explosive growth in E and S, are still very much alive and well, and we think that there’s waves of acceleration. So, for example, fifteen years ago, retailers decided through a lot of data and analytics that managing a huge tail of dozens or, in some cases, hundreds of wholesale counterparties was expensive, led to to E and Os, and didn’t help them leverage their scale in the market. So they made the decision to go to 15 to 10 to five, and now some of them have as few as two or three preferred wholesalers. And if you think about the people the the firms that started this trend were the largest global retailers.

And if you think about their needs, they’ve got the most intense the biggest and the most intense complicated risks that need a solution. To manage that flow, to be on that shortlist of preferred, you have to have the scale and scope that I referenced earlier. There there’s really only two other firms in the market that have the scale and scope to be on that shortlist, and we think that that desire to work with fewer, bigger, better partners is just gonna keep working its way down the top 100 and that there could be catalysts like, a slowing rate environment or a slowing macro environment that causes the top of the house to focus on driving that strategy deeper in the organization because it is more efficient. It’s a better economic outcome for the retail broker. So we think that there’s a long runway on that.

Furthermore, like, that phenomenon started with just transactional wholesale broking. So when we send a policy to the carrier, they make the decision to bind or not bind. Tim and Miles both talked about cases where we have delegated authority. So binding authority, programs, MGUs. Retailers have not made their short lists for counterparties with delegated authority.

That’s just beginning. And that’s a significant portion of our business. We are in a unique spot, even among the big three, to benefit from that panel consolidation.

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: And the other Can can I stop you there? Yeah. I I think that’s a huge point that you guys are leading the charts there. Right? Yes, sir.

And, you know, there’s only one or two others that could probably do it, but you guys are far ahead. And that’s you know, if you could give some scope that you deal with 20,000 brokers, 20 I’m giving you the data, but give give some what scope that could be because that that’s a pretty fundamental change to how the business works. Right?

Jeremiah Bickham, President, Ryan Specialty: Yeah. I mean, again, I think it’ll start at the top like the wholesale broker panel consolidation did. But, yeah, we’ve got over 20,000 retail relationships. For the the smallest one, it’ll take a while for that strategy to make its way all the way down. But, you know, as the the top twenty, thirty, and 50 are utilizing this, we think we that we saw this opportunity and we’re investing in it earlier.

And this goes back to what I’m talking about or what I mentioned in my prepared remarks where we have this unique position, this unique scale. We have visibility into where the market’s going and what the needs of our clients are. We started investing heavily in binding authority acquisitions in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. We think our competitors have since figured them out and are trying to catch up. But because of that position that we’re in, we had the opportunity to invest and put ourselves in the position to have a huge head start when those market trends occur, and we think that we’re at the the dawn

Adam Klauber, Runs insurance practice: of that right now. Great. With that, I’d like to thank the team. Appreciate it.

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