A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your agency for — whether the cash flow still holds once a market producer commission on your own book and a sales-manager's pay are charged against it, how sticky your renewal book really is, how concentrated you are in one carrier, and the book-transfer risk they price. Preview costs nothing.
Enter two numbers for an instant Insurance Agencies ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
If you personally write and service most of the book, a buyer isn't acquiring an agency — they're acquiring your relationships. They charge a market producer commission on your personally-produced book and a replacement sales-manager salary, which deflates the EBITDA they'll actually pay on, and they price the risk that clients follow you out the door. An owner-producer agency typically gets carried with earnouts or retention holdbacks tied to how much of the book stays after close.
Renewal commission is the recurring engine of an agency — but only if the book actually renews. If retention is well under 90%, accounts re-shop every year, or the relationships rest on the owner rather than the agency, a buyer treats the commission stream as harder to repeat and prices it below a sticky, multi-line, high-retention book. Retention is the single biggest factor in where an agency lands in its valuation range.
Buyers underwrite carrier concentration the way they'd underwrite supplier concentration anywhere. If a single carrier holds an outsized share of your premium, a buyer prices the risk that one appetite change, rate action, or non-renewal of your appointment resets your commission and contingent income — and they check whether the appointments even transfer, since carrier consent is a real gate at close.
Without producer non-solicits, a departing producer can walk with their book — a buyer's biggest leakage fear. And because an agency carries errors-and-omissions exposure, a buyer looks for current E&O coverage, a tail policy through close, and a clean claims history. Gaps in restrictive covenants or E&O are diligence items that get negotiated straight off the price.
Each lever is sized for a typical independent agency, ~$1.5m commission + fee revenue, ~25% owner-and-producer-normalized ebitda — about $375K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Driving retention toward 90%+, rounding out accounts to multiple lines, and capturing contingent/profit-sharing income builds the sticky, recurring renewal base buyers actually pay for. It is the highest-leverage revenue play in the trade, because a high-retention renewal book is exactly what moves an agency toward the top of its size band.
adds about 0.4–0.8× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Developing producers who own transferable books, and putting a sales and operations manager over new business and servicing, is what crosses an agency from 'buying the owner's relationships' to 'buying a business.' Producers beyond the owner are the single biggest lever on the multiple — they let a buyer price on EBITDA instead of an owner-dependent discount.
adds about 0.5–1.0× to your multiple · usually takes 18–36 months
Spreading premium across multiple carrier appointments, securing direct appointments where volume justifies them, and making sure no single account or producer carries an outsized share lowers the concentration risks a buyer underwrites. A diversified, niche-focused book reads as defensible rather than dependent on one carrier or one relationship.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Documenting a market producer commission on your own book plus a sales-manager salary, splitting commission into renewal vs new and by carrier, and keeping a clean add-back trail protects the price. Every buyer runs a quality-of-earnings pass, and a defensible owner-comp normalization is what prevents a mid-diligence re-trade.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 3–6 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade insurance agencies on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Insurance Agencies benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~75% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~92% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~25% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 10% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~10% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 4.5–11.0× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Insurance-agency M&A is one of the hottest small-business roll-up markets going, and there are two distinct buyer pools. Individual buyers and small agencies acquire owner-operator books at SDE- or revenue-based prices (agencies are commonly quoted around 1.8–2.4x revenue as a cross-check). PE-backed consolidators and platform brokers — the Acrisure, Hub International, The Baldwin Group, Arthur J. Gallagher, and Brown & Brown tier — acquire scaled, high-retention, producer-leveraged agencies at much higher normalized-EBITDA multiples, often with rollover equity and an earnout tied to book persistence. The market is still highly fragmented, which is what fuels the consolidation. The memo maps which pool would look at an agency your size and how each structures the deal.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Insurance Agencies businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 4.5× to 11.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 7.0×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
It depends on size and buyer pool, and there are genuinely two markets. A small owner-operator agency sold to an individual buyer is priced on SDE (roughly 3.0–4.3x) or as a multiple of revenue (~1.8–2.4x), because the owner is the lead producer — so you first charge a market producer commission on the owner's own book and a sales-manager salary before computing the figure. A larger, producer-leveraged agency that a consolidator would acquire is priced on normalized EBITDA, which steps up with size and retention. Every figure traces back to your books and your renewal data, never a generic rule-of-thumb.
Because that is the PE-backed platform multiple — paid on normalized EBITDA for scaled, clean, high-retention agencies (often $1M+ of EBITDA) that run on producers rather than the owner. A small owner-operator agency does not trade there; sub-$1M-EBITDA Main-Street agencies trade closer to 4–6x EBITDA, or on SDE. The multiple steps up with size, retention, carrier diversification, and the agency's ability to run without you — which is exactly what crosses it from the Main-Street market into the platform-bid market.
Retention above 90% and a renewal-heavy book, producers beyond the owner with signed non-solicits so the book transfers, carrier diversification with transferable appointments, a niche or specialty concentration, clean agency-management-system data, current E&O coverage, and a documented producer-comp normalization. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.