Penta Capital backed Peter Cullum, the industry leading serial insurance entrepreneur, along with a strong team led by David Margrett and Stephen Ross in late 2013, to carry out a buy-and-build in UK insurance broking and MGA’s (capital light underwriting).

A novel approach to buy-and-builds was undertaken, using an owner/driver model across GRP’s subsidiary businesses with ultimate rewards tied to individual business performance. The effect was to drive a focus on sales, margins, the achievement of synergies such that the group significantly outperformed its peer group.

By 2020, we had acquired 60 businesses, and had become a leading independent insurance broker in the UK. The scale, stability and growth in profitability led to a very strong partial exit, with Penta delivering 3.3x money for our investors.

Following the 2020 transaction Penta maintained a minority equity interest as the GRP group continued to grow to become one of the top three independent brokers in the UK with GWP under influence of £1.8bn.

In 2022 GRP was sold to Brown & Brown, a US publicly traded insurance broker, which delivered a further significant return to investors.