The $587 Million Insurance Network That Lets Local Owners Keep the Keys

In 1952, Dixie Leavitt opened an insurance agency in Cedar City, Utah, with one insurer appointment and no clients. The origin story has the clean arithmetic of a fable. By the end of the decade, there were thousands of customers across southwestern Utah and southern Nevada. Then came a second number that mattered more: 60/40.

In 1959, Dixie and his brother Bert incorporated a Las Vegas agency. Dixie held 60 percent; Bert held 40. The split became a template for building with operators instead of merely employing them. Today, Leavitt Group is still privately held and family-owned, and many of the agencies in its network are jointly owned with the local principals who run them. It is less a row of identical storefronts than a federation with a very busy engine room.

That engine room supplies the things a neighborhood brokerage struggles to buy alone: insurer relationships, placement muscle, finance, compliance, claims expertise, technology, training, recruiting, marketing, and a route through succession. Local owners keep a stake, a voice, and the relationships on which an agency depends. Leavitt gets scale without making every office wear the same haircut.

The product behind the policies

For customers, Leavitt Group looks like an independent insurance brokerage. It helps companies insure property, vehicles, people, liability, and specialized operating risks. It advises employers on health plans, enrollment, wellness, retirement services, and compliance. It places home, auto, life, flood, umbrella, and recreation coverage for families. Its specialist agencies also build programs for industries where a generic policy can miss the point.

The commercial pitch begins with what the company calls the total cost of risk. An adviser identifies exposures, examines loss history, works on prevention, brings underwriters into the conversation, weighs retention against transfer, and keeps evaluating the program. The problem is not simply finding a lower premium. A cheap policy can become expensive when exclusions, claims friction, downtime, safety failures, or unmanaged losses arrive.

Employers face another tangle. Benefits plans must be affordable, understandable, compliant, and useful enough to retain employees. Leavitt's offering stretches from plan design and underwriting support to communications, online enrollment, COBRA, ERISA guidance, and wellness. Individuals get the independent-agent proposition: more than one carrier, a person to compare the fine print, and someone local when a claim turns a contract into a conversation.

“If you float together in the same boat, neither is apt to shoot it full of holes.”R. Royal “Bob” King, a maxim used in Leavitt Group's governing principles

A consolidation bargain with two signatures

The more unusual customer is the agency owner. Independent brokers often reach a fork that has little to do with insurance knowledge. They need capital to recruit producers or acquire a neighbor. Carrier negotiations reward volume. Cybersecurity and compliance keep getting heavier. A founder wants to retire, but the agency's value lives in relationships that can evaporate under a careless handoff.

Leavitt offers co-ownership as the answer. The local leader does not vanish on closing day. The parent shares ownership, provides infrastructure, and helps build a succession path. The agency can maintain its community presence and operating culture while tapping the resources of a national group. This is both the differentiator and the acquisition filter: the deal works only if the operator wants partnership, not a ceremonial title.

The business model follows the familiar economics of brokerage: commissions and fees for placing and servicing insurance and benefit programs. Growth comes from producers inside existing agencies, new offices, and affiliation transactions. The ownership structure changes the sales pitch. Public brokers answer to shareholders, while many private-equity-backed platforms promise speed and capital. Leavitt can credibly talk about patient decisions because it is private. It can talk about autonomy because local principals retain equity.

Scale, without the call-center voice

The company reported $587 million in consolidated revenue and $4.8 billion in placed premiums for 2025. It cites Insurance Journal's August 2025 ranking, which placed it 18th among independent property and casualty brokerages in the United States. By August 2026, it described a network of more than 80 agencies and 290 locations across 31 states. Those figures put it in the national brokerage market beside firms such as Acrisure, HUB, USI, Brown & Brown, AssuredPartners, Lockton, Gallagher, Aon, and WTW.

Yet size is useful only when it travels to the edge. A larger premium book can improve access to carriers and underwriters. Central claims and loss-control specialists can handle cases too complex for a small shop. An on-staff ERISA attorney and shared enrollment technology can turn employee benefits from occasional advice into a deeper service. Producer schools and agency training spread expertise without asking every office to invent a curriculum.

The weak point is also visible. A federation asks headquarters to standardize enough to create leverage, but not so much that local co-owners become branch managers in disguise. Systems need integration. Brand architecture gets messy. Customers may meet a Leavitt-named office, a legacy name, or an affiliated specialist. The model depends on alignment, a word the company repeats in its seven governing principles for good reason.

In market terms, Leavitt occupies a useful middle ground. A buyer who wants the fastest direct quote can skip the broker and purchase from a carrier or online marketplace. A global corporation can hire one of the world's largest brokers for multinational placement and capital-markets services. Leavitt is built for the wide territory between them: regional companies with complicated exposures, employers that need hands-on benefits administration, families that value advice, and agency founders who want scale without a clean break from their business.

What can a customer actually do with that network? A manufacturer can assemble property, liability, fleet, workers' compensation, safety, and claims support around one risk plan. A growing employer can redesign health benefits and enrollment while getting help with compliance. A household can compare several carriers rather than accept one company's menu. An agency owner can use centralized accounting, carrier management, recruiting, and technology, then spend more time selling and advising. None of this is novel in isolation. The point is the bundle, delivered through an owner who still has local consequences.

The next test is benefits

Recent deals show where Leavitt wants more weight. In February 2026, it announced majority co-ownership of FBMC Benefits Management, a Tallahassee agency and third-party administrator with a reported $30 million in revenue. FBMC's chief executive stayed in place, and its leaders became agency co-owners. In May, Leavitt partnered with Maria Ahlers to acquire RPS Benefits by Design, which became Leavitt Strategic Benefits. The combination added five offices in four states and carried the group into Kansas.

The pattern matters more than the names. Benefits consulting provides recurring employer relationships, compliance work, technology, and services that are harder to reduce to a price quote. It also balances the property and casualty book. Leavitt is not abandoning its original model as it pursues larger operations. It is trying to prove that the same co-ownership logic can absorb a sophisticated benefits administrator.

The quiet technology is ownership

Leavitt Group's seven stated principles include honesty, serving stakeholders, aligning interests, profitable growth, adaptation, enjoyment, and civil communication. They sound soft until one notices that ownership is a mechanism for several of them. A local partner with equity feels both the benefit and cost of a decision. A private parent can wait longer for returns. A succession plan gives employees and clients more continuity than an abrupt sale.

Culture claims deserve evidence. Leavitt was named a Utah Business Best Company to Work For for the sixth time in 2025, in the category for employers with more than 2,500 people. The company said at least 95 percent of surveyed employees were satisfied or very satisfied with service quality, workplace respect, and coworker relationships. Business Insurance also named it a Best Place to Work in Insurance for a second consecutive year. Awards cannot describe every office in a decentralized group, but repeated employee surveys are more informative than a framed value statement.

The company that began with no clients now reports more than 3,000 employees across its agencies. Its achievement is not just accumulation. It has turned a family arrangement into a method for buying, supporting, and perpetuating other families' businesses. The policy paperwork may be the revenue engine. The clever part is still that old split: give the person nearest the customer a reason to keep acting like an owner.