In December 2019, a Nebraska insurance brokerage joined HUB International. The announcement contained the usual transaction furniture: regional coverage, executive appointments, a description of the business. Then came an unusually revealing detail. John P. Nelson, SilverStone Group’s chairman, had known HUB co-founder Richard Gulliver for twenty-five years. His son, chief executive John H. Nelson, said that relationship had been critical to the board’s decision.
A quarter-century is a leisurely sales cycle. It is also a useful place to begin with Gulliver, usually called Rick. His working life connects the small brokerage owner, answering for a business with his own name on it, to the executive assembling a network of other people’s businesses. The distance between those jobs is considerable. The need to be trusted survives the journey.
Gulliver began in January 1977, opening a one-person insurance operation in Leamington, Ontario. By the time HUB announced his move to vice chairman, effective January 2017, the firm credited him with directing more than 350 acquisitions representing over $1 billion in revenue. The original Leamington operation was still part of HUB. An enterprise could change its dimensions without entirely losing its starting address.
A family bet becomes a business
His father owned a small brokerage in nearby Wheatley. In an early account of his career, Gulliver recalled his father doubting that he could succeed as a broker. He accepted the challenge, built his own operation and eventually bought his father’s business. Family skepticism, in this instance, turned out to be a rather productive form of encouragement.
The story is appealing because the stakes began at a human scale. Before the acquisitions department and the corporate titles, there was a son trying to establish that he could do the work. Later, when he asked independent owners to join a larger organization, he had already occupied the chair on their side of the conversation.
Partnerships followed. He became involved in Trivest Insurance Network and was instrumental in creating Insurance Network Solutions in 1995, serving as its president. The difficulty he identified in that arrangement was structural: many brokers owned a common company, rather than a common company owning the brokerages. The distinction mattered to the next stage of expansion.
In 1997, Gulliver and Brian Jeffrey of Knox Vicars McLean joined forces to create an independent brokerage called The Hub Group Inc. The larger HUB enterprise formed in 1998. These were successive steps, with different partners and arrangements, rather than a single ceremonial moment when a finished institution suddenly appeared.
Leamington, Ontario
Independent firms combine
Continued M&A leadership
A public company, still learning its geography
The 1998 report carried a short letter signed by Rick Gulliver as president. Dated May 10, 1999, it welcomed shareholders following a C$50 million initial public offering that February. Trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange gave the company access to capital markets. The stated immediate task was to consolidate independent insurance brokerages in selected Canadian regions.
That letter has the compactness of an organization with work waiting outside the meeting room. It thanked shareholders, partners and employees, described the financing milestone and pointed toward further development. Capital had become available. There was now a way to fund the ambition.
The accounting detail also reveals what combining independent firms involved. Before the November 1998 merger, the constituent businesses had operated autonomously. The new arrangements introduced base management compensation and profit-sharing tied to the operating subsidiary’s profitability. Ownership and incentives had to be fitted together; the new company needed more than a common letterhead.
Expansion soon crossed the border. The acquisition of Chicago’s Mack & Parker in 1999 brought Martin Hughes into the organization and provided a base for the American operation. Gulliver’s Canadian beginnings and Hughes’s Chicago business became parts of the same developing network. The map was widening, and the leadership was widening with it.
The reason for the name
By January 2004, Gulliver was explaining HUB in terms of regional operating centers. “Our approach has been to develop regional powerhouses,” he said. The name described an organizational choice: establish a substantial local center, then bring additional agencies into that regional operation.
The corporate organization could supply capital, financial support, technology and other shared functions. Local businesses contributed operating knowledge and relationships. Gulliver also emphasized the value of acquiring specialist expertise that colleagues elsewhere could use. A purchase could add something to the network beyond another patch of territory.
It is easy to draw circles and connecting lines. It is harder to decide who gets to make a decision on Monday morning. The practical appeal of this arrangement was that a regional business could belong to something larger while continuing to do work close to its customers. The organizational chart had to accommodate both.
For an owner considering a sale, that proposition addresses an awkward question: what happens to the business after the signature? Gulliver’s model offered a role for the people already running it. Its persuasiveness depended on whether those people believed that access to a larger organization would help them do their jobs.
The president who concentrated on buying
In January 2004, HUB made Gulliver’s assignment more explicit. He would retain the presidency and dedicate all his time to acquisitions, working with mergers and acquisitions director Michael Sabanos. Bruce Guthart took over the chief operating officer responsibilities. A broad executive job had become a focused one.
The company was growing quickly enough to require that division of labor. Through the first nine months of 2003, revenue had risen 33 percent against the comparable previous period. Keeping the existing organization running and identifying the next businesses to join it were becoming separate demands on management attention.
The 2003 annual report shows that this appetite had limits. HUB had spent considerable time on a large prospective transaction, then walked away following due diligence. It also described sellers seeking prices above the multiples HUB considered appropriate. Even an acquisition-led company needed the capacity to leave a deal unfinished.
By 2011, the organization Gulliver helped lead had a much larger operational footprint. Its reported 2009 workforce numbered 4,510, and its property-and-casualty and other revenues together totaled $657 million. He was listed as president alongside chairman and chief executive Hughes. Those figures describe a company, rather than a personal scorecard, but they show the scale of the institution around his work.
“Collaboration between operating centers has become a strong part of our culture.”Richard Gulliver, 2004
A signature with money behind it
Gulliver’s participation was financial as well as managerial. A February 2007 rollover commitment filed during HUB’s take-private transaction identified him as president and recorded a commitment of $9,058,640. The document specified shares to be rolled into the acquiring structure, subject to the transaction’s terms.
That is a narrow, concrete fact about a particular agreement. It demonstrates that his connection to the company extended beyond a salary and title. The executive overseeing acquisitions was also committing an ownership interest to the business’s next arrangement. In an industry built partly by persuading owners to exchange independence for participation, that detail belongs in the picture.
When HUB announced its leadership changes in September 2016, Marc Cohen was chosen to succeed Gulliver as president. Larry Lineker became executive vice president, and Gulliver became vice chairman. All three appointments took effect on January 1, 2017. Gulliver would continue leading mergers and acquisitions.
The transition preserved the work while changing the title. Cohen’s remit included growth and productivity; Lineker’s included innovation in response to customer and workforce demands. Gulliver remained attached to the activity on which he had already concentrated for years. Succession here involved redistributing responsibilities within a team that knew the organization.
Twenty-five years before the handshake
The SilverStone transaction offers a later view of that work. After seventy-five years as an independent broker, its leadership wanted to remain privately held and retain meaningful ownership. Its 225 associates and 48 shareholders had reasons to examine the terms carefully. Joining HUB created a new regional operation, HUB Great Plains.
The younger Nelson’s explanation linked those practical requirements to his father’s long relationship with Gulliver. The decision involved ownership, additional capabilities and confidence in the people across the table. A personal connection could not supply every answer, but it helped make the answers credible.
There is a temptation to read a career in acquisitions as a sequence of closing dates. This episode suggests another calendar running beside it: the years in which people get to know one another before a transaction is even available. For Gulliver, that relationship had begun long before the announcement acquired its polished corporate wording.
Another kind of participation
His public LinkedIn profile now describes him as HUB’s retired co-founder and lists Jupiter, Florida, as his location. It also records service as a founding board member of the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation’s Midwest division from 2013 to 2016. His professional biography notes the foundation’s 2013 Trailblazer Award for dedication to local nonprofits.
He attended the University of Western Ontario and earned the Chartered Insurance Professional designation through the Insurance Institute of Canada. Education and professional training sit alongside the small-business beginning in his career. The owner who started alone continued into a profession organized around qualifications, institutions and durable working relationships.
Gulliver has also served as chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award USA. The organization currently lists him among its board members emeritus. In his own description of that involvement, he set out an ambition to expand youth participation and extend the program’s infrastructure into communities where it was needed.
The thread connecting these activities is participation: bringing owners into a shared enterprise, committing his own interest to it, and supporting organizations that create openings for others. It began with one person in Leamington. Decades later, the most revealing detail in a substantial deal was still the length of time two people had known each other.