Windsor insurance brokerage adds partner, plans growth

WINDSOR — Renaissance Insurance Group LLC has added industry veteran T. Scott Kennedy as a partner.

Kennedy was most recently president and CEO of Phoenix-based The Mahoney Group. He’s also worked for McGriff in San Diego and was president and chief operating officer of CCIG in Greenwood Village.

Founding partners and majority owners Jay Helzer and Ryan Hicks started Renaissance in 2001. It’s grown each year since, including by 10% in each of the last five years, Kennedy said.

“We want to at least double that growth curve,” he said. “Most of our business is within a hundred miles of Windsor. We’re going to be a regional company with a national footprint.”

Renaissance works in commercial, agriculture and personal lines of insurance. Kennedy’s mandate is to grow each of the 15 specialty insurance areas the company covers now and add a few new ones, such as transportation and employee benefits.

Generally, the company also plans to “add risk management and claims staff over the next two years” as well as client executives. Renaissance employs 23, including eight brokers, five of whom are partners.

“We’re always going to be hiring,” he said.

Another focus: insurance for high-net-worth clients, a client base in which Kennedy has prior experience.

Adding and expanding types of insurance and areas of service will be coupled with additional offices and a deeper dive into insurance technology.

“Insurance as an industry is not very tech savvy,” he said, noting private equity investments in startups to close that gap in, for example, marketing. “A lot of agents aren’t paying attention to it, and we plan to.”

He’s marked out Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming as targets for a Renaissance office, and “maybe to New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.” The company will also, “write a lot more business in Denver.”

Northern Colorado will become a hub, he said, with organic growth supplemented by acquisition.

“A regional agency with national reach,” he reiterated. Renaissance is seen, he said, “as a nice, reliable, transparent, honest, homegrown, independent” agency, so we need to “get out there with nonprofits and chambers of commerce, be more recognized” and tell that story.

He said the agency is staffed by people who grew up in Northern Colorado and its “platform will prove to be a solid foundation to exponentially grow our firm.”

He said he helped CCIG grow from 16 workers to more than 100 in 15 years, with revenue increasing 650%. He was twice named a COO of the year by the Denver Business Journal and has crafted leadership-development programs at companies.

“We’ve built cultures, found the right people,” at previous agencies, he said.

Kennedy invested in Renaissance as part of being named partner. Renaissance added longtime company brokers Scott Runyan and Erich Ehrlich as partners in 2019.

In 2019, it joined Texas-based Combined Agents of America, a consortium of 70 independent insurance brokerages in eight states. The group combines premiums from members to bring insurance companies larger volume commitments, and to generate vendor discounts and other incentives.

Trade publication Insurance Journal this year ranked CAA the eighth-largest such partnership nationally with $169 million in aggregate property and casualty revenue.

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