Ryan Specialty Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:RYAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeremiah Bickham: Rob, great question. And just to set the table. We’ve demonstrated that our platform can scale. So we’re up 500 basis points since year-end 2019. And if you were to ask any of us in this room a couple of years ago, we would tell you that where we are today, where we finished 2022 is actually a little bit ahead of schedule in terms of a margin basis. And what we said since then is that most years — not all years, but most years, we can show you scaling on a reported basis. And last year, one thing we were very upfront about and very happy to follow through on is that we’re targeting to onboard the biggest production class ever, and we did that. And with that comes a run rate impact in 2023. We’re also, as Tim said in his remarks, going to continue making strategic production hires this year.

And these investments have the highest ROI of any investment we can make. So we know that it’s the right decision for our long-term growth prospects. And so we feel really good about sticking to this game plan. Further, Accelerate 2025, the program that Pat and I have both touched on now, will bring a step change to our margin by 2025, and it will also unlock enhanced annual scaling thereafter. So taking another step back, we feel really good about where we are today in terms of margin, and we believe that we’re making the right investments that will continue to enable top line growth and margin growth for the long term.

Rob Cox: Appreciate that. And just next, on the organic guide and the different businesses you have, maybe you could talk about how you think the three businesses could perform relative to the consolidated guide? And how you feel about the capital backing you have on the underwriting management side of the business?

Pat Ryan: Miles, why don’t you take the capital?

Miles Wuller: Yes. I think we’ve shared in past meetings that — our growth is not constrained by capital. We’re well supported by our carrier partners are — we’ve got a great string of delivering underwriting profit to the community and that’s allowing them to help support new products, incremental capacity to current lines. And then maybe to the heart of your question, what is going to prompt some continued growth is, we’re pleased to share we’re coming into the year with incremental property capacity and capability, again, reflective of our great results across the platform. So we believe that we continue to build new facilities and add capacity to existing as a source of ongoing growth.

Pat Ryan: I’ll take the first part of the question. We — following up on what Miles said, we have experienced and we expect to continue to experience significant organic growth in delegated authority underwriting, managing underwriting. I’ve every reason to believe that the open market wholesale brokerage will have very, very strong growth. As we’ve said, we started our Alternative Risk vertical, and they’ve had good organic growth, and we look forward to a significant organic growth there. And as you know, we’ve been working on the launching of the benefit strategy. These numbers are not in the forecast because we haven’t executed yet. But when we execute on the benefit strategy, it will be a higher growth rate than normal in the industry with higher margins than the normal in the industry.

Operator: The next question is from Weston Bloomer of UBS.

Weston Bloomer: My first question on $35 million in sales in 2025, should we expect any of the sales to come in 2023 or 2024? Or when should we kind of start to see that ramp up? Is it after you taking the charges? Or how should we think about that?