What exit buyers ask for: revenue by agency and by producer

Abe Harbid, 25 October 2026

For several years the job of a PE-backed brokerage platform was to buy agencies. The numbers now point to a different job: getting ready to be bought.

Fewer deals, more pressure to exit

OPTIS Partners counted 439 insurance agency acquisitions in the first three quarters of 2026, down 19% from 539 a year earlier, and 600 deals in the twelve months to September, the lowest trailing total since the second quarter of 2018. Tim Cunningham, OPTIS’s managing partner, said PE-backed platforms face pressure to prioritize deleveraging, integration and exits over sheer volume [1].

A platform that bought heavily from 2019 to 2021 now has to show a buyer what it owns, agency by agency.

What diligence asks for

Alvarez and Marsal, writing about wealth and insurance roll-ups, say buyers at exit routinely ask for real-time EBITDA by business unit, and that platforms running three or more disparate core systems face reporting bottlenecks and slower integration [2]. For a brokerage, a business unit is usually an acquired agency or a hub, and the revenue line under it is commission.

Producing that view means answering, for every agency the platform bought:

• What commission revenue did it bring in, by carrier and by month, reconciled to the carrier statements?
• Which of that revenue is renewal, which is new business, and which producer wrote it?
• How has retention moved since the deal closed?
• How much growth is organic, as opposed to revenue that arrived with the next acquisition?

Why it is hard to produce

Each acquired agency arrived with its own management system or spreadsheets, its own producer codes, and its own codes for the same carriers. Until those agree with the platform’s, every answer above is assembled by hand, and it has to be assembled again each time someone asks.

Alvarez and Marsal also note that consolidating reporting can give visibility in as little as a quarter, while full system integration takes well over a year [2]. A platform does not have to finish every conversion to give a buyer one reconciled view. It has to get every agency’s data into one format and keep it matched to the statements.

Questions to ask before the sale process starts

• If a buyer asked tomorrow for commission revenue by agency and producer, reconciled to carrier statements, how long would it take to produce?
• Which agencies are still on their own systems, and when was their data last brought into the platform’s numbers?
• How many commission lines each month are matched by hand?
• Can the platform show organic growth by agency without a spreadsheet built for the occasion?

The acquisition-onboarding engine is built for this: each acquired agency’s exports converted into the platform’s format, commission statements reconciled against the book, and every agency on one dashboard. How the reconciliation works, or start with a two-week diagnostic on one recent acquisition.