AssuredPartners Brand Guidelines: A 2011 Lake Mary Broker, Now Part of Gallagher

A broker built to buy brokers.

AssuredPartners was created in 2011 as a vehicle for buying insurance agencies. The Chicago private-equity firm GTCR formed it under what it called its “Leaders Strategy,” partnering with two long-time brokerage executives, Jim Henderson and Tom Riley, Private Equity Wire reported in October 2015; the two had more than 50 years of combined experience and had built a national broker through acquisitions before. Business Insurance described them in 2019 as former executives of Brown & Brown, the Florida broker. The new firm made its home in Lake Mary, Florida.

The model was growth by acquisition. By October 2015, Private Equity Wire reported, AssuredPartners had completed 112 acquisitions since its formation, and it had offices in more than 30 states, the District of Columbia and London, offering property and casualty and employee-benefits brokerage to businesses and individuals.

That month GTCR closed the sale of the company to Apax Partners; Reinsurance News later identified the buyer as the Apax VIII fund, advised by the private-equity firm, and noted that GTCR had owned the broker from its formation until that sale. BofA Merrill Lynch was lead financial adviser to AssuredPartners and GTCR on the 2015 deal, with Kirkland & Ellis as legal counsel, Private Equity Wire reported. Under Apax the pace continued: a joint statement quoted by Business Insurance in February 2019 said the brokerage had made a further 124 acquisitions since 2015. The most significant was the 2017 purchase of Keenan & Associates, a broker and third-party administrator, which significantly expanded the services side of the business, the magazine reported.

From Apax back to GTCR, then to Gallagher.

In February 2019 Apax agreed to sell AssuredPartners back to an investor group led by GTCR, its original backer. Business Insurance and Reinsurance News both reported the agreement on 21 February 2019; Apax and the management team were to keep a minority investment, and Business Insurance said the deal was expected to close in the second quarter of that year. English Wikipedia’s GTCR article says GTCR did reacquire a majority stake through that 2019 recapitalisation. Henderson said in the joint statement that the firm was “delighted to be renewing this successful partnership” with Apax while welcoming back the GTCR team.

By then the firm’s acquisitions had moved beyond general agencies. Business Insurance reported in 2019 that AssuredPartners was increasingly buying specialist brokers, such as firms focused on public entities, commercial transportation, aviation and senior living. In later years Henderson became executive chairman and Randy Larsen chief executive, the roles in which Insurance Business named them in December 2024.

On 9 December 2024, Insurance Business reported, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. signed a definitive agreement to acquire AssuredPartners in an all-cash transaction. At that point the firm had about 400 offices across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland and about 10,900 colleagues, and offered commercial property and casualty, specialty, employee-benefits and personal-lines insurance. Gallagher’s chairman and chief executive, J. Patrick Gallagher Jr., said his company had held the “fast-growing AssuredPartners franchise” in high regard since its founding in 2011. Larsen called the sale a significant milestone for the business. The deal was expected to close in the first quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals.

It took longer. On 19 August 2025 Insurance Business reported that Gallagher had completed its takeover, describing the combination as a merger of two entrepreneurial cultures. Gallagher said the deal added depth in practice groups including transportation, energy, healthcare, government contractors and public entities, created opportunities for its wholesale, reinsurance and claims-management divisions, and added scale in the UK and Ireland. In connection with the closing, the magazine reported, Gallagher’s board compensation committee approved equity awards in Gallagher stock for 572 former AssuredPartners employees who had joined the company, part vesting at once and the rest over the following five years.

How brokers present themselves.

An insurance broker has no product to photograph. It sells advice and access: it places cover with insurers on a client’s behalf, and it is paid for judgement and relationships rather than for anything a customer can hold. So brokers present themselves largely through people and expertise. Their websites lean on portraits of client advisers and specialist teams, and on named leaders who speak for the firm in the trade press.

Expertise is shown through publishing. Brokers issue risk-management reports, market outlooks and webinars on subjects such as cyber exposure, property values or employee benefits, and many organise their sites around industry practices, from construction and aviation to healthcare and sport, and around capabilities such as casualty, financial lines or private client. Howden’s US website, for example, is laid out by industries and capabilities in this way.

Scale is shown through maps and counts. Office networks spread across countries are a common feature, and so are round numbers of locations and people: Brown & Brown’s website gives a count of more than 700 locations and about 23,000 people. In a sector that has grown through consolidation, acquisitions announcements are a regular part of a broker’s news page, and the dates of agreement and completion are often months apart.

The rest of the presentation is about belonging. Brokers sponsor sport, the arts and community causes, run charitable foundations, and give recruiting pages much of the weight, because the people are the offer. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it now and from when — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Now Gallagher.

AssuredPartners no longer operates as an independent company. Since August 2025 it has been part of Gallagher, and the AssuredPartners website now opens with a plain notice: “AssuredPartners is now Gallagher.” The site keeps information about the legacy AssuredPartners small-business and personal-insurance offerings — business property, casualty and management-liability cover on one side, home, auto, flood and renters insurance on the other — and directs visitors to Gallagher’s own site for wider risk-management needs.

AssuredPartners itself had been assembled from agencies bought one by one — 112 by October 2015 and a further 124 by February 2019, by the counts quoted above — and on the website the AssuredPartners name now points visitors to the new owner. The Lake Mary firm’s path ran from formation by GTCR in 2011, to Apax in 2015, to the return to GTCR in 2019, and to Gallagher in 2025: four owners’ names in under fifteen years.

For a design guide, AssuredPartners shows how a brand built for a buy-and-build strategy is folded into its buyer, with a short notice and a redirect taking the place of the old identity. Compare it with Gallagher, which now owns it, and Brown & Brown, where its founders worked before 2011. For this guide we use a lake green, a deep pine and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AssuredPartners’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.