, the 215 people who now work at Graham Co. are selling the Philadelphia-based business-insurance agency to national broker Marsh & McLennan Agency.
The millions won’t be split evenly. Staffers, including Graham, who’s still the board chairman, are assigned shares prorated based on their responsibilities and years of service. But no one executive owns as much as 10%, according to Mitchell and Ken Ewell, 65, Graham’s president and chief operating officer.
Kurtz became enthusiastic about worker ownership when the Employee Stock Ownership Plan was set up in 2017. She has enjoyed watching the estimated value of her shares grow modestly since then. The sale price is a 63% advance over the $230 million offer Graham says he turned down from another firm in 2017, opting instead to sell his company to his colleagues. During the same period, revenues rose 36% to $73.5 million, from $54 million.
Graham, founded by Bill Graham’s father in 1960, focuses on business insurance and employee benefits for real estate, manufacturing, transport, health care, nonprofit and professional services companies, and surety bonds for construction, for 1,000 clients, many of them midsized employers such as Select Medical/NovaCare and Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages. The firm also has offices in New York and Washington.
Rivals such as Aon, Arthur J. Gallagher, Hub, and Willis have also been building national agent networks, Trem said.