CAC’s Lynch and Rice: Leadership transition paves way for new generation of talent

By James Thaler

May 22 - (The Insurer) – CAC Group vice chairman Mike Rice has said that the intermediary’s recent wave of promotions are part of a long-anticipated succession planning strategy that sets it up for the next stage of growth a little over five years after CAC Specialty’s founding.

Rice served as CAC Group's inaugural CEO until being succeeded by Erin Lynch earlier this year, after helping launch the business and growing it to nearly $300 million revenues, largely by pursuing an organic growth strategy.

CAC Specialty was launched as the specialty arm of longstanding Birmingham, Alabama-based agency Cobbs Allen, before the two firms were merged together in 2023 to form CAC Group.

Since then CAC Group has become a top 30 US brokerage with nearly 600 staff. According to Rice, the company’s recent leadership succession to a new generation of talent had been the plan all along since CAC Specialty’s inception.

In addition to Lynch’s promotion, The Insurer exclusively reported earlier this month that Andrea Ash and Colin Daly have been promoted to chief operating and commercial officer, respectively, and have joined the executive committee, alongside a slew of other promotions.

“The leadership team that's here is keeping the seats warm for the next group of leaders,” Rice said, commenting on the senior management promotions.

“And we built this phenomenal bench of talented individuals that are just pushing, pushing, pushing at the senior leadership,” he added.

“When you have somebody like Erin who's ready to be the next CEO, and you've had a stated goal that you're keeping that seat warm, there comes an inflection point where you want to install somebody into that role,” Rice said.

Lynch said she has “very big shoes to fill,” while noting that CAC has “always been a destination for top talent.”

“That has been a key focus of ours from the beginning. That we get the right people in the door, and we're going to have an easy time creating a really successful company,” she commented.

“And that's been the story for six years. And I also think we've never been shy about making bold moves,” Lynch explained.

“It's something that makes us really successful. It's key to our culture. We want to be hearing from our younger talent. We want to continue to challenge ourselves in the way that we're innovating and scaling the business,” she continued.

“And so, this seems natural to us, because it's who we are as a company, and we're excited about the next chapter,” Lynch said.

Lynch described “key areas” such as financial lines, transactional liability, and middle market agency business as the company’s “foundation," where it plans to continue to “invest in and scale.”

“We've said from the beginning that we want to be a long-term specialty broker, and we're going to continue to invest around property and casualty,” she commented, saying that CAC is also doubling down its focus on specific industry verticals.

“We have a really successful natural resources team. We have extraordinary talent around private equity,” she divulged.

“We expect to do more in our healthcare practice, real estate, and construction. So, I think this team is charged with really helping us scale those parts of the business in this next chapter,” Lynch elaborated.

Rice disclosed that transactional liability and financial lines made up 75% of the company’s new business in the first three years of CAC Specialty’s operations, with that figure now down to less than 50% in 2025.

“So, we're not done investing in all the things that we invested in originally. We're slowly rounding those things out, but we are a specialty broker through and through, along with an agency broker that's out of Birmingham that's as good as it gets,” he explained.

Lynch disclosed that CAC has historically added around 100 new staff per year on average during its brief history, which she said “requires a tremendous amount of focus and diligence from a lot of people on the team to make sure that we're successful.”

In terms of geographic presence, Rice noted that about 75% to 80% of where the intermediary sees opportunity to work with Fortune 1000 firms and other potential clients revolves around 25 cities or so, and that CAC currently has a presence in 27 cities.

“And those 25 cities that we originally identified, we're in every single one of them,” he commented.

Rice argued that the success that Lynch had in previously running CAC’s natural resources team could be replicated across other industry verticals.

“You look at what Erin's done. (She) took a business that was a $4 million business for us, and four years later, it's grown 90% in staff, and it finished this past year at $40-plus million. There's a lot more growth there,” he explained.

“So we're not going to ignore the things that we've already invested in. Erin is going to take them to a new level,” he added.

With more retailers looking to recapture business that has become increasingly entrenched in the wholesale channel, Rice said he had been taught by industry legend Pat Ryan to “never say never to anything”, but it would be unlikely for CAC to build out a wholesale arm.

“We are not wholesalers. We are retailers. There are some very good wholesalers in the marketplace. We utilize them, and we intend to continue to utilize wholesalers to do what they do best, to augment our business, to make it better for our clients” he commented.

“And so, there's no immediate plans to go into wholesale,” he added, though he left the door open for the potential to build out proprietary programs within the firm.

“Do we want to do things like MGAs and things of that sort? Yes, if we can do something that's going to create a product that is useful to our clients, and an MGA is a way to do it because we have the talent that can help underwrite it for a set of carriers, we'd absolutely consider an MGA.”

However, Lynch noted that CAC has “so much more room to grow” in its core business.

“We have so much business that we see opportunity for growth in (our) core areas that we really want to stay focused on that,” she concluded.

Watch the full interview with CAC Group CEO Erin Lynch and vice chair Mike Rice to hear more on:

• The recent wave of promotions and transition to a generation of leaders

• CAC Group’s plans to double down investments on product lines and industry verticals

• How the brokerage thinks about organic vs inorganic opportunities for next growth phase

• The importance of maintaining its employee-first culture fueling its organic strategy

• The rationale behind the company’s consideration of taking outside equity investment

• And more…