Bid winner.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: SPONSORED SECTION: CASH CROP - Cover story

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Steve DeCarlo, an accountant with a jocular personality, turned a sputtering insurance brokerage into a market leader valued at more than $2 billion. A little shove from Eliot Spitzer didn't hurt.

In late 2001, Steve DeCarlo thought his new company had a shot at buying Birmingham, Ala.-based wholesale insurance brokerage Cooney Rikard & Curtin Inc. For years, he'd developed friendships and done business with the company known as CRC, then the largest independent wholesaler in the U.S. But BB&T Financial Corp.'s top insurance executive also was bidding.

"Wade Reece came in with what appeared to be money," DeCarlo says with a laugh. "Our offer was, 'Trust us, we're good guys.'" CRC opted for the benjamins and sent DeCarlo packing. "Our lesson was that talking might not be enough. You actually have to have a check and a good balance sheet to grow."

DeCarlo has rarely been caught short ever since. Since 2002, AmWINS Group Inc. has acquired 37 companies to build the largest broker of wholesale property and casualty insurance in the U.S., according to the trade publication Business Insurance. The Charlotte-based company employs 3,600 people in 15 countries, including 200 in the Queen City. "We never thought we'd be at $100 million in revenue, but now we're eight or nine times that," he says. A recapitalization last year set the company's value at more than $2.3 billion, split evenly among a big Canadian pension fund, a New York private-equity group and about 440 employees.

"Steve and his team completely redefined the role, power and scope of the wholesale segment of the insurance market," says Brian Golson, managing partner of Parthenon Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based private-equity company that owned a majority of AmWINS from 2005 to 2012. "It's extraordinarily rare to be able to so fundamentally change such an established industry."

Only a handful of people have had as much impact on the business-insurance market as DeCarlo, adds Ken Crerar, CEO of the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association. "He's a straight-shooting, smart-as-hell guy who is incredibly well-respected by people in the business."

AmWINS started in 2000 when DeCarlo was recruited to run Americana Financial, a New York Citybased insurance brokerage that had annual revenue of $20 million, a staff of 110 and monthly losses averaging $800,000. "The previous management team had raised $25 million and wanted to be the dotcom of the insurance business," he says. Like lots of other startups in that era, they overspent on operations and seven acquisitions. DeCarlo slashed overhead, dismissed all but a couple of employees, sold five companies and changed the name to American Wholesale Insurance Group Inc., or Am WINS. Within months, the business was profitable. He recruited Scott Purviance, a CPA he'd known for several years, to join as chief financial officer in July 2001.

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DeCarlo and Purviance saw an opportunity to build a company that takes a middleman role between property-casualty agents, who work directly with local businesses, and insurance companies that...