Insurance agency deal activity is thriving and our team’s experience is deep.
For more than a decade, baby boomers who spent a career building their insurance agency have taken greater advantage of the opportunity to monetize their investment by selling their agency. The market is brisk, the multiples are high, and selling an agency can provide a good opportunity to build wealth while continuing to work in a meaningful and lucrative way. While there are a number of similarities between selling an insurance agency and selling other kinds of businesses, there are sufficient unique features of selling an agency such that sellers should engage counsel that is specifically experienced in this arena.
Effective Non-Piracy Agreements Protect Your Business
By Gary Miller and Matt Veech, BoyarMiller
Experience
BoyarMiller has decades of experience helping agents and owners of insurance agencies build and maintain the value of their businesses, especially in times of transition or sale.
Our senior deal team members have a long history in representing and selling agencies. We work alongside members of the merger and acquisition practice to build additional proficiency specific to the sale of insurance agencies. Recently, BoyarMiller’s insurance agency M&A team has handled transactions as small as a single owner as the primary producer to agencies with multiple offices, ten or more shareholders and numerous producers.
Our team assists agencies negotiating the sale documents and addressing the distinctive considerations of selling an agency such as:
- Unique and significant earnouts and related post-closing payment opportunities
- Equity of the acquirer as a portion of the purchase price
- Non-piracy and non-competition elements, including insurance agent non-compete agreements
- M&A referral bonuses
Relationships
We maintain excellent relationships with several top national investment bankers specializing in insurance agency acquisitions, and we work closely with the investment bankers and our clients to successfully complete the transaction.
We recognize the need for speed (minimizing the period the agency is in a period of transition) and for patiently explaining all aspects of the transaction to the sellers. We recognize that our clients have typically never been through this process before and it is among the most significant transactions of their careers. For over 30 years, representing insurance agencies in connection with their perpetuation, owner agreements, insurance agency mergers, and insurance agency sales has been an important part of our practice.
BoyarMiller is well positioned to handle the sale of an insurance agency in any of the fifty states. By partnering with the selling agency’s existing corporate counsel as it relates to any local issues, BoyarMiller can effectively provide insurance agency-specific knowledge across the United States.
