Goosehead Insurance, Inc. (GSHD) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Goosehead Insurance second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Maddie Middleton, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today may include forward-looking statements which are based on expectations, estimates, and projections of management as of today. Forward-looking statements in our discussions are subject to various assumptions, risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, reliance should not be placed on them. We refer you all to our recent SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of risks and uncertainties that could impact future operating results and financial condition of Goosehead. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except to the extent required by applicable law. I would also like to point out that during this call, we will discuss certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with GAAP. Management uses these non-GAAP financial measures in planning, monitoring, and evaluating our performance. We consider these non-GAAP financial measures to be useful metrics for management and investors to facilitate operating performance comparisons from period to period, by including potential differences caused by variations in capital structure, tax position, depreciation, amortization, and certain other items that we believe are not representative of our core business. For more information regarding the use of non-GAAP financial measures including reconciliations of these measures to the most recent comparable GAAP financial measures, we refer you to today's earnings release. In addition, this call is being webcast, and an archived version will be made available shortly after the call ends on the Investor Relations portion of the company's website at goosehead.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mark Miller.

Thanks, Maddie, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2026 earnings call. Before I walk through the quarter, I want to start with a little perspective. Four years ago when I joined the management team, we were navigating a business that had significant untapped potential but also had some real challenges. Since that time, we have fundamentally transformed this organization. We restructured our corporate and franchise agent forces, raising the bar on quality and productivity across both networks. We grew our corporate footprint to more than 12 offices across the country. We launched and expanded ASP, our internal staffing support program, for our franchise owners. We launched our enterprise, sales, and partnership businesses from scratch. And they are now unlocking access to millions of new potential clients. We built a world-class technology team that delivered the United States' first true end-to-end choice shopping platform for personal lines insurance. We increased total written premiums from approximately $2 billion in 2022 to well over $4 billion today. We rightsized our cost structure while preserving our capacity to grow. We grew adjusted EBITDA from under $40 million in 2022 to over $130 million in our last four quarters, and expanded our margin meaningfully through the hardest product market in 50 years. We did all this while returning significant capital to our shareholders, and maintaining a conservative balance sheet. The business we have today is stronger, more diversified, and more capable. With the company and the industry in such a strong position, I would like to share something personal. After a 40-year professional career, I have decided that the time is right for me to retire. At the end of this year, I will hand over the CEO position to Mark Jones Jr., and remain a member of the board of directors and help in any way I can. My decision was made easier knowing we have an exceptional leader in Mark Jones Jr. He has been a member of the management team for nearly ten years, and closely tied to the business since its founding. He knows this business like no one else. He has the trust of our agents, our carriers, and our shareholders. And he has the hunger, the skill set, and the vision to take Goosehead to heights that will continue to set the standard for what excellence looks like in our industry. I am very confident in him and in this team. I love this company, and I believe deeply in what we are building, and I will remain fully engaged and focused on execution through the end of the year. I will do everything in my power to set this organization up for its next chapter. Now let me turn to our current operational performance. We delivered strong second quarter results that reflect continued execution against our strategic plan and broad-based momentum across the business. Total written premiums grew 14%, accelerating off the first quarter to $1.36 billion. Policies in force grew 15% year over year and client retention, our most impactful driver of top and bottom line performance, improved to 86% representing its highest level since the hard market began. We are encouraged by this continued sequential improvement in client retention rate, and see no structural limitation to meeting or exceeding our prior high of 89% in the future. Total revenues grew 21% to $113 million with core revenues up 10% to $95 million over the prior year period. As a reminder, in the second quarter of 2025, we recovered $4 million of previously unpaid renewal commissions and royalty fees. When adjusting for that year-over-year variance, core revenues grew 16% and total revenues grew 26% in the second quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $38 million representing a 34% margin for the quarter. We have spent a considerable amount of time recently discussing our technology enhancements and new developments related to our Digital Agent 2.0, the country's first choice shopping platform. We remain as enthusiastic as ever around the progress we are making in the significant future opportunity ahead of us. But I want to focus the discussion today on the strategy, consistency, and compounding nature of our core business. The largest portion of our business, our franchise network, is now healthier than ever. Our franchise strategy remains focused on placing the right agency owners in the right geographies and arming them with the support they need to maximize their productivity and profitability. A core pillar of that strategy is generating franchises with more producers. Our agency staffing program, which we stood up in 2023, has done exactly that. Since that program's inception, we have helped our agency owners place hundreds of producers into their operations. And now that strategy is bearing real fruit. Franchise producers are at the highest level in history at nearly 2.2 thousand with an average of 2.4 producers per franchise, which is resulting in our franchises generating more income per location than ever. The average payment that we send to a franchise on a monthly basis has increased more than 35% year over year and is now over $28 thousand. This powerful and durable income stream allows them to reinvest back into their businesses to further reinforce the growth flywheel. At the beginning of the year, we discussed the expanding footprint of our corporate offices. These new locations were selected strategically to align with attractive product markets, high rates of homeownership, and strong recruiting pipelines from local universities. Our five recent office launches across the country are scaling rapidly, averaging nearly 20 agents each and delivering strong new business production. Over the quarter, several of these new offices were among the top overall offices in our corporate network. These offices allow us to tap into previously underserved markets, build a more diversified client base, and most importantly, they will produce the next generation of future franchise owners. We will continue to drive outsized market share gains with this powerful capacity that is both unique to Goosehead and extremely difficult to replicate. Our enterprise sales business continues to grow at a rapid pace and our pipeline of new potential partners to fuel continued growth is expanding. As we implement our embedded insurance offering with our current and future partners, the third leg of our distribution stool will continue to grow at an accelerated pace. The backdrop for all of our agents across the sales network is now a dramatically improved product environment which is resulting in improving bind and package rates. As we highlighted over the past several quarters, everything in our business operates more efficiently in a stable product environment. This is where we thrive. We have navigated a historically hard market over the last several years, and we are now poised to take advantage of a much healthier personal lines product market. Client retention continues to improve, the burden on our service function continues to abate, and we remain aligned with our carrier partners in our mutual pursuit of profitable growth. We have built a firm foundation for the next phase of growth and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done. Mark and John asked me to take this position four years ago. I knew it was a special opportunity. I had been with Goosehead on its board for four years, and I had been a client for 15 before that. I knew the business. I knew the culture. Most importantly, I knew Mark's vision. I did not fully appreciate until I was inside just how truly extraordinary the people at every level are in the organization. The agents who wake up every day and go find new referral partners, the franchise owners who are building businesses that are generating life changing income, the service team members who help our clients navigate some of the most stressful moments in their lives, the technology team who built something that the industry said could not be built, and the rest of our teammates who strive for excellence every day. I am grateful to all of them. And I am proud of what we have accomplished together. We came through a once-in-a-generation hard market stronger than we entered. We built new capabilities that will define the next decade of this business. We consistently expanded our market share and more than tripled adjusted EBITDA. We returned hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders, and we did it without compromising who we are: a company that puts the client at the center of its universe. The company is in exceptional position today and it gives me great confidence that now is the right time for the transition. Our leadership team is deep and experienced, and Mark Jones Jr. is one of the best operators I have encountered in my career. I plan to spend the rest of the year making sure every initiative is properly sourced and set up for success. And then I will hand the baton with tremendous pride, full confidence, and continued support wherever needed for my position on the board. Thank you to this team. Thank you to our agents and franchise partners. Thank you to our carrier partners. And thank you to our shareholders for the trust you have placed in us. It has been the biggest privilege of my professional career. With that, let me turn the call over to our President and COO, Mark Jones Jr.

Thanks, Mark. And good afternoon to everyone on the call. First and foremost, I feel incredibly honored to have been able to work directly with Mark Miller for the last number of years. Mark brings deep care and commitment not only to the work that we do, but to our teammates, franchisees, carrier partners, and shareholders. He has been an incredible example for everyone here at Goosehead and positioned the company to create value well beyond his tenure as CEO. On behalf of everyone at Goosehead, thank you for your leadership, your partnership, and your unwavering commitment to this organization. I am grateful to have worked alongside you and look forward to continuing that partnership as you remain on the board. I am deeply grateful to our board of directors, our shareholders, and our executive team for their support and the confidence they placed in me to lead this organization into the next chapter. Our strategy is not changing. We remain laser-focused on our objective: to become the largest distributor of personal lines insurance in our founders' lifetime. Our pathway to achieving that is fundamentally rooted in our highly differentiated human capital advantage. Our best-in-class sales agents, our white-glove service team, our technology organization rivaling the best in Silicon Valley, our professionals across all of our operating teams. Because of the work that Mark K. Miller has done to build such a strong foundation and leadership team, this next chapter will focus on speed of execution, simplification, and rapid decision making. I look forward to continuing my relationship with the investing community and keeping you all up to date on the exciting things we are doing at Goosehead as we continue to disrupt the industry and raise the bar in the years ahead. As Mark Miller mentioned, this quarter's results speak to the consistency and durability of our business. Our model focused solely on personal lines and organic growth is highly differentiated in insurance distribution, and our results compete with some of the most successful businesses in any sector. Since our IPO in 2018, we have grown our total revenue at a 29% compound annual growth rate and adjusted EBITDA at a 34% compound annual growth rate when comparing full year 2018 results to the trailing four quarters ended June 30, 2026. All of this while returning hundreds of millions to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. I am so proud of our team for building such an amazing business, one that looks like no other organization out there. As Mark Miller mentioned, our corporate and franchise teams are healthier than ever before, delivering strong growth and profitability. As the product market has improved, franchisees have increasingly leaned into growth. We now have multiple agencies with more than 40 producers, and one agency over 50 producers. As we have talked about in the past, the productivity impact of that is not linear. Each time a franchise adds an additional producer, it raises the average productivity per producer meaning that growth accelerates in excess of the producer count. To give you some context, the number of highly productive agencies during the second quarter: we had approximately 70% more franchises produce $100 thousand of gross new business commissions and agency fees in a month when compared to the prior year. More and more agencies are hitting all-time production highs, and the bar continues to get raised. Our corporate sales team is a key enabler for future franchise growth. We produce the highest powered agency owners inside of our corporate team first before launching them into their own franchise. In total, we have over 60 agencies who launched from corporate, representing more than 170 producers inside those franchises. A new development with our highly differentiated corporate sales talent is to seed these producers into an embedded franchise, like our partnership with Planet Home. We are able to provide embedded agencies that have natural lead flow access to plug-and-play talent from our corporate salesforce. A majority of Planet Home's team consists of former corporate sales agents and the ramp up has been faster than any franchise in system history. Pairing high-quality lead flow with embedded seasoned talent has allowed them to produce at a strong level immediately, placing them near the top 5% of franchises after just six months of production. Fueled by our strategic partnerships, enterprise sales is quickly becoming a more material portion of our business. During the second quarter, this team generated approximately $3 million in new business commissions and agency fees. In just three years since its inception, enterprise sales is approaching a third the size of our corporate sales team which we have been operating in an industry-leading fashion for 20 plus years. That growth reflects increasing demand for businesses across the homeownership ecosystem that are looking to improve the client experience while adding recurring high-quality revenue streams. Goosehead is uniquely positioned to support those partners. We combine national scale with local expertise, access to more than 200 carrier relationships, sophisticated technology, and a service platform built to support clients as their insurance needs evolve over time. We know of no one else that has that combination of capabilities and execution at scale. As our partners continue to grow, we would expect enterprise to become an increasingly more meaningful contributor to both revenue growth and profitability. Technology is an important part of enabling that opportunity. Over the last several years, we built capabilities that broaden how consumers interact with Goosehead. Our digital agent platform allows consumers to shop across multiple carriers through a seamless digital experience while preserving access to a licensed Goosehead agent whenever advice or expertise add value. Today, consumers in Texas can complete the entire shopping and binding process digitally across multiple home and auto carriers. We believe that is an important step forward not because technology replaces our agents, but because it allows our agents to spend more time where they create the greatest value. Our early results reinforce that view. We are now generating business entirely through digital interactions; many clients still choose to engage with an agent before completing a purchase. By the time that interaction occurs, the client has already completed the data collection process, creating highly qualified opportunities for our producers and driving productivity. Enhancing agent productivity, while also driving fully digital interactions will allow us to break the human capital bottleneck that exists in traditional agent models and accelerate growth. Over time, we believe one of the best ways to measure the success of the digital agent will be growth in new business production per active producer rather than digital adoption alone. That is ultimately the economic outcome we are trying to achieve. We are applying the same philosophy across our broader technology investments. Lily, our AI voice assistant, now handles approximately 20% of our inbound service calls from start to finish, with performance exceeding 30% during certain periods. Those interactions reduce routine administrative work while allowing our service professionals to focus on situations where experience, judgment, and empathy have the greatest impact on client experience and retention. Technology should improve the overall offering and economics, not simply automate activity. If automation enhances the client experience, increases producer productivity, or improves retention, we will continue to invest aggressively. If it does not, we will not. That discipline will remain central to how we allocate capital. We have made amazing progress over the last several years across every area of our business and I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress as we continue to march towards industry leadership. Again, I am grateful, honored, and humbled to have the opportunity to lead this organization to the next phase in our journey. I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our teammates, franchisees, carrier partners, board members, and our shareholders for their support. I will turn it over to John Martin, Chief Financial Officer, to discuss the quarter's results and outlook for the rest of the year.

Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to speak with you today for the first time as Goosehead's CFO. I have enjoyed meeting many of you in the second quarter, and I look forward to engaging with more of you in the months ahead. Before we dive into the numbers, I would like to take a step back and briefly share my perspective from these first few months on the executive team. I have had the opportunity to dig in and pressure test what really makes our company different and what is especially clear to me is the business is stronger and the opportunity is larger than I initially appreciated from the outside. At the core of Goosehead's success are a number of foundational competitive advantages, beginning with talent. The belief that people represent our greatest asset has been central to our ethos from the beginning. This is clearly reflected in the quality of our team who show up eager to win in the market every single day. Across sales, service, technology, and more, our differentiated human capital foundation has no peer. Goosehead's integrated technology, proprietary data, carrier relationships, product breadth, and nationwide distribution enable a flywheel at scale that is incredibly difficult to replicate. With the client at the center of every decision, Goosehead leverages the scale to reinvest in what matters most: improving the client experience, reducing complexity, and providing greater choice across products and transactional modalities. Goosehead has always led with the home, not in spite of its difficulty, but because of it. This uncompromising focus has allowed our business to become the authority for clients and an essential partner for carriers. Within a massive, essential, and fragmented market, we have a proven history of capturing significantly outsized share. Our competitive positioning, long-term approach, and consistent execution have together created a rule of 50 financial profile that grows stronger year after year. Goosehead's unique value proposition and recurring revenue model delivers sustainable growth, attractive margins, and natural operating leverage with scale. This is the hallmark of a true compounder. Companies of this quality are extraordinarily uncommon and the results speak for themselves. Since the 2018 IPO, revenue and EBITDA have increased more than sevenfold organically. And while these figures are helpful in setting context, what is most important is the number our entire organization is focused on: 99%. With less than 1% market share today, more than 99% of our addressable market remains in front of us. This is what we wake up every day thinking about. And it could not be a more exciting time to be here. With that, I will turn to our financial results for the second quarter. Total written premiums grew 14% year over year to $1.3 billion, accelerating from 13% growth in the first quarter. Policies in force grew 15% year over year to 2.1 million, accelerating from 14% growth in the first quarter. Total revenues grew 21% year over year to $113.4 million and core revenues grew 10% year over year to $95.6 million. Strong new business generation, improving client retention, and meaningful contingent commissions all contributed to our robust top-line performance. As a reminder, in the second quarter of 2025, we recovered $4 million related to previously unpaid renewal commissions and royalty fees from a carrier partner. Adjusting for this amount in 2025, total revenues grew 26% year over year and core revenues grew 16% year over year. New business commissions grew 27% year over year to $9 million. We have now delivered consecutive quarters of over 20% growth in new business commissions for the first time since 2021. Improvements to agent management infrastructure, a healthier product market, geographic expansion, and enterprise sales and partnership efforts together drove the strength in new business commissions. Enterprise sales continues to scale rapidly and represented 21% of total new business commissions and agency fees in the quarter. New business royalties grew 20% year over year to $9.4 million. This was the fastest pace of growth in the last six quarters supported by increases in both producers and producer productivity. Franchise producers grew 5% year over year and 2% sequentially, to 2.19 thousand producers. We are encouraged to see continued momentum here with producer hires increasing 30% year over year. As our franchisees continue to scale their producer forces, lean into best practices, and benefit from a healthy product environment, they are reaching impressive new levels of success. Client retention increased sequentially as expected from 85% to 86%, driven by strategic client experience initiatives and a more stable year-over-year pricing environment. Ancillary revenues, largely comprised of contingent commissions, grew 180% year over year to $16.3 million. Improved underwriting loss ratios, favorable carrier mix dynamics, and initiatives to optimize carrier relationships all contributed to the increase in contingent commission revenues in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA grew 30% year over year to $37.9 million, representing a 33% adjusted EBITDA margin. During the second quarter, we generated $15.9 million in operating cash flow and repurchased 95 thousand Class A shares for a total of $3.9 million. On a year-to-date basis, we generated $38.8 million in operating cash flow and repurchased over 1 million Class A shares for a total of $53.7 million. We now have fewer Class A shares outstanding than we did at the time of our IPO. And we will continue to be opportunistic with the $144.6 million remaining on our existing share repurchase authorization. We continue to believe the price of our stock is meaningfully dislocated from the value of our business. Recent filings reflect that conviction showing that Mark Jones Jr., Mark Miller, our general counsel Martin Thornthwaite, and I all purchased shares in the open market during the quarter. We ended the quarter with $23.7 million of cash and cash equivalents, and $323 million of total debt outstanding. Turning now to the balance of the year. We are increasing our revenue outlook for the full year 2026. We now expect total revenues to grow organically in the range of 12% to 19% year over year. This increase to the bottom end of our revenue range reflects a more favorable outlook around contingent commissions, which are currently tracking to outperform our prior expectations. We are encouraged by the 12% year over year growth in core revenue we delivered in the first half, and we continue to expect a second-half acceleration from these levels given the upward trajectory of client retention and strong new business generation. Finally, we continue to expect total written premiums to grow organically in the range of 12% to 20% year over year. I would like to close by emphasizing how thrilled I am to be part of such an exceptional team and such an extraordinary business. Our unique positioning provides a strong foundation for continued share gains and compounding growth far into the future. Though Goosehead has come a long way, it truly feels like we are just getting started. And it is such an exciting time to be here. Thank you to our teammates, partners, and franchisees for the hard work you do to make all of this possible. And thank you to everyone joining us today for your continued support of Goosehead. With that, we conclude our prepared remarks. For today's Q&A session, our Co-founder and Chairman, Mark Jones, will be joining us. Let's go ahead and open the line for questions. Operator?

Thank you. To ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone. You will hear the automated message advising that your hand is raised. We also ask that you please wait for your name and company to be announced before proceeding with your question. Our first question of the day will be coming from the line of Tommy McJoynt of KBW. Your line is open.

Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. And congrats, Mark and Mark as well. My first question, actually just around the trajectory of margins. Obviously, a very strong margin report in the second quarter. And part of that was benefiting from the high contingents number. So can you go through your expectations maybe on a full year basis for how you think about margins on an ex-contingent basis, how you see those trending? Thanks.

Sure thing. Hey, it's John here. So there is no change on an underlying basis with respect to how we are thinking about expenses for the year. Ultimately, from a planning perspective we look at our expenses largely on a revenue ex-contingent basis. And, as we have mentioned previously, we expect moderate compression this year driven by the growth investments that we are making. Our guidance around expenses thus remains unchanged. We have also commented that we expect comp and G&A to grow in the high teens to low 20s for the year, which will likely be in excess of core revenue growth just given the current investment cycle.

Got it. Thanks for that. And then switching over, there have been some well-publicized changes regarding the comp and benefits at the largest captive insurer in this space, one of your competitors. Have you seen any notable uptick in interest from captive agents in the Goosehead opportunity just over the last few weeks or months? And then seeing those changes in the market from a competitor, any impact at all on your go-to-market strategy around recruiting, compensation, or anything?

Hey, Tommy. This is Mark Jones Jr. It is a pretty interesting development. What we are seeing is a lot of our franchisees and producers have contacts across the entire insurance landscape. So I think what you are going to end up seeing is a lot of free agents on the field who do not necessarily feel like they are being treated the right way. Ultimately, I think that could potentially be a tailwind for our producer recruiting. It is not changing the way we think about our go-to-market strategy. We are going to continue to invest in things like the digital agent to drive digital conversions, but that is also a tool that is going to help arm our existing agent force with productivity enhancements, help them get through their entire funnel more quickly. Ultimately, we believe we have a model that is going to win in the marketplace over the long term. Thanks.

One moment for the next question, please. Our next question is coming from the line of Andrew Andersen of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good afternoon, and congrats to you both. Productivity improved pretty significantly for both the newer and tenured franchise operators. Could you maybe just elaborate a bit on what is driving that step up and how durable you think that is? I imagine there was a good chunk of it related to the agency staffing program and the agency size, but hopefully you could expand a bit more on that productivity gain.

Yeah. We are seeing really positive things with our franchise continuing to lean into the growth message and hire new producers as well as adopt best practices. And we are also getting a tailwind from the product market being considerably more open than it was in the previous couple of years. Ultimately, what we have been trying to do for the last multiple years is continue to grow really high-quality franchises inside our corporate sales team first and then launch them into that community. You can see the impact of that in the less-than-one-year franchise count. There are approximately 30-ish franchises that launched out of corporate that are included in that. You can see that is driving a 70% productivity improvement in that tenure band. And our more tenured agencies are continuing to hire. The same-store sales stats for this quarter are pretty awesome. So in aggregate, same-store sales is up 22% for this quarter. And the top end of the franchise community, the top 50, same-store sales was over 40%. So they are really leaning into the message, they are onboarding new producers, and I think we can continue to grow franchise unit productivity for the foreseeable future.

Thanks. And you had mentioned kind of your next chapter focused on speed of execution and simplification. Parts of the business do you think you can move materially faster here? Is that on product development, technology, more partnerships, kind of all of the above?

Yeah. I mean, it is really all of the above. We have done a lot of foundational work in the last few years and massive credit to Mark K. Miller for the amount of work that he has done in getting this business in a really stable position with a strong foundation. Now we need to look for opportunities to reduce complexity where we can. As the product market had constricted over several years, we had to onboard a tremendous amount of new underwriters. And I do not necessarily think having 300 underwriters on the platform is ideally the right amount. So we have reduced some complexity there and we are going to continue to do that. On the service side, that had a massive complexity increase over the last several years just with the changes in the product environment and underwriter capacity. Beginning to alleviate that is an area where we can use technology to automate everything that should be automated, not necessarily everything that could be automated. We still really believe in the role of the human service agent. We are going to continue to expand that. Some of the nitty-gritty stuff in the back office that I do not think the industry fully comprehends—things like how do you get an agent licensed and onboarded nationally for something like our enterprise sales team in a really scalable fashion—is actually a pretty complex challenge because you have 50 different state regulators, a whole bunch of different licensing exams, and every carrier has different requirements for licensing and appointing in their state. We are making a ton of progress on that front, and we are going to continue to look for opportunities to speed up everywhere in the business. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question is coming from the line of Jon Paul Newsome of Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Congratulations, Mark, on the changes. Was hoping you could talk a little bit about additional color on the contingent commissions and the sustainability thereof. Seems to be the biggest happy surprise. Anything in there that would be deemed kind of unusual or anything that we should think of from that perspective?

Hey. So just on speaking to the contingents, nothing's changed structurally or with respect to how we are approaching recognition or anything like that. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, there are really three main drivers of favorability this year. One, growth in the new business we are driving; two, profitability of the business; and three, more favorably negotiated contracts. But all three of these have been tracking a bit higher than we initially anticipated. And, as you know, contingents can have a relatively wide range of outcomes depending on where business flows and boxes shake out throughout the year, but our updated guidance reflects confidence in where we are going to land this year.

Is there anything today that would change the cadence of new production relative to new agents that we have seen in the past, or should we generally think that the new agent forces should have about the same impact prospectively over the next 12 months as they would have a year ago or something like that?

I think agent ramp-up is going to look similar to how it has looked in the past. We have invested a ton in training tools and management infrastructure, so we should get incrementally better in ramping up new agents. On the corporate side, we have expanded that pipeline of new agents from more so like 90% college hires to now more of an even split between experienced hires and college hires. That mix has been pretty impactful for agent ramp-up because the agents come in with a little bit more experience underneath them. We have a good onboarding class coming during the summer. We feel great about the position of our sales panels and we are more spread out than they typically have been, so you have more market opportunity. I think that is one of the biggest things: the aperture of opportunity has opened up for us as well. Great. Thanks, folks.

Thank you. One moment, please. And our next question will be coming from the line of Brian Meredith of UBS. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thanks. Just a couple of quick questions here for you. First, just on comp and benefits. I guess, it looks like there is going to be a pretty big ramp-up second half of the year. Is that all just coming from the new hires you have coming in? And should that ultimately kind of lead to additional sales?

Yeah. It is a couple of things, Brian. It is new sales talent coming in the door, it is continued investments in our technology teams, which is really differentiated talent in the industry, as well as continued investments in our service function to keep driving client satisfaction and move client retention up as fast as possible. So you are going to see some of that end up reflected in new business production, but not all of that compensation increase is going to go directly towards current-day new business. It is more platform stability and scalability.

And then I saw a little bit of a tick up in customer retention rates. Do you expect that to continue here?

We are pretty pleased with the trajectory of client retention. We were confident it was going to tick up to 86% during the year and we saw that. Obviously, we are not going to promise any specific timeline for when you'll see the next tick up, but we have put some of our sharpest human capital against client retention to make sure we continue to see that forward progress. The improved product market is super helpful, but we are not just sitting on our heels waiting for the market to heal itself. We are being pretty aggressive with investments in this area.

That is helpful. And then I guess last question, just curious: commission rates, base commission rates—seeing any tick up there yet?

Aggregate commission rate has improved. So it improved in Q1 over Q4 and improved again in Q2 over Q1, which is a combination of multiple factors. First, business mix: less of it going to your statement plans, less of it going to excess and surplus, and more of it going towards the traditional admitted markets. But as carriers have gotten into a really healthy position now, they are looking for ways to incentivize growth. I think we have talked about in the past that we look at those negotiations holistically: how do we drive the most efficient service interactions, how do we get the most efficient technology interactions, and how do we make sure we have appropriate market compensation for the business we are delivering.

Thank you. One moment, please, for the next question. And the next question is coming from the line of Charlie Letter of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey. Thanks. Maybe just on the digital agent: You had previously said you anticipated that being a contributor in the second half of 2026. Do you still expect that to be the case? Do you have plans this year to expand that outside of Texas? And then you also mentioned that new business per active producer KPI. Do you have any stats around how that is running? I will leave it there. Thanks.

Hey, Charlie. Thanks for the question. We were really pleased to deliver this version 1 of the platform slightly ahead of our anticipated schedule. Our tech team has done a really amazing job putting something in market that has never really existed before. For a client to interact in a fully digital world in a choice model has not existed in the U.S. So super excited to have delivered that in the first half of this year. The second half of this year, the focus is on optimizing the Texas conversion funnel. As we talked about in the prepared remarks, we have got fully digital transactions going through. We also have plenty of people who are getting all the way down to the buy screen and then kicking out because they want to talk to an agent. Our agent network is a massive competitive moat for us, one that I do not believe exists elsewhere in the market. We will keep investing in Texas, optimizing the conversion funnel, and then rolling it out to additional states subsequently, as well as increasing functionality and improving the user interface, making it more chat-like so it feels more like you're talking to a normal human agent. We just want to make sure we are providing a couple of things: our agents with leading technology, our carrier partners with highly profitable business that match their risk appetite, and our clients with a tremendous experience.

That is helpful. Thanks. And maybe just on the pricing environment and geographic mix, can you update us on how you are thinking about premium per policy trends from here? It looked like it decelerated a little bit in the quarter. Thanks.

Yeah. It is in line with our expectations. We planned to see stability in the pricing market that we are seeing right now. We anticipated moderate pricing declines in most geographies. You're seeing that in the policies-in-force growth rates versus premium growth rates. Historically, those have been considerably different given the pricing environment, and now they look a lot more similar. But that is not driving any negative impact on our business. We expected that to happen; it is contemplated in our guidance. We prefer a product market that is considerably more stable because it makes everything else work more efficiently in our business.

Thank you. One moment for the next question. And our next question will be coming from the line of Andrew Kligerman of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good evening, and congratulations to both Marks. I want to follow up just quickly on Charlie's question. Could you clarify or define what you meant by 'moderate' in terms of pricing decline? And then maybe separately home versus auto.

Sure, Andrew. In auto, what you are seeing is more like mid-single-digit pricing decline, and obviously that is geography dependent—there are places where that is not necessarily the norm. But if you look nationwide, you should expect something like mid-single-digit pricing decline. Home has been much more durable; it is looking more flat and in some geographies still low-single-digits. The new business trends have been interesting: the pricing on new business has not been as impacted as it has been on the renewal book. So the pricing decline on renewal has been larger than the pricing impact on new business. We are actually still continuing to see higher pricing on new policies that we are writing. But, generally, auto market mid-single-digits down; home market generally flat.

Super helpful. And then just a little clarity on productions: both corporate and franchise—really solid numbers, better than solid. You mentioned a little earlier that the mix was kind of even college versus more experienced. I'm curious what the mix or the new agent count mix was for embedded versus non-embedded—meaning agents immediately put into embedded channels versus going into a typical corporate setting.

So the agency staffing program has added a large number of producers into existing franchises from our corporate agent team. We have taken more than 10 producers in the last several months out of the corporate agent team and placed them into something like Planet's embedded franchise where they have natural lead flow. The exciting thing is it is actually improving the productivity of those agents. They were already solid producers inside our corporate agent force; we put them in a situation where they have the same type of lead flow but effectively at an unlimited amount, and they are doing a great job. Planet has had a tremendous start for the agency.

And then lastly, in terms of franchise producers, up 5%. So you are now starting to see the producer count grow as well as the franchise count, which is great. You mentioned 30% increase in producer hires. Do you see the producer count accelerating up from 5% over time? Where could that go a couple of years from now—are we going to start to see double digits pretty soon?

There are a lot of possibilities. Obviously, we do not control exactly what our franchisees do. We explain best practices, help walk through the model, and help them understand the level of value they can create by onboarding more producers and hold them accountable to the standards we think they should be able to produce. You are seeing the top end of the franchise community continue to grow at a really exciting pace. We have multiple agencies over 40 producers now and one over 50. If you remember, a couple of years ago Mark K. Miller used to refer to a goal of 50 franchises that have 50 producers or more—that could be a great moniker for us. We have talked about getting producers per franchise number up to five. I still think that is a pretty attainable target in the near- to medium-term. Even if you just go, okay, we have ballpark 900 franchises—could all of those hire one additional person? That feels reasonably attainable. Could the top 50 of those hire five people? That feels reasonably attainable. So you can get to some math that looks pretty exciting. We are not going to provide specific guidance on what producer count goes to, but you can see how this model works really well, especially because they generate such durable income streams inside their business.

Thank you. One moment, please, for the next question. Our next question is coming from the line of Mark Hughes of Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Thank you. Good afternoon. The enterprise sales team, I think you described the $3 million in new sales this quarter and that is really ramped up. To what extent is that growing faster, and as it becomes a bigger part of the mix here, is it going to be a tailwind for new sales and the corporate channel?

I think it absolutely is going to be. It is our fastest growing sales channel right now. We have tremendous leadership there, great partners, and we built strong technology to effectively route leads to the right agents. We have a great agent force that can handle the complexity of dealing with leads from across the entire country. We have tried to make that as easy as possible. That is a business that is going to grow at a really strong rate for a long period of time. If you think about it, our corporate agents and our franchisees typically go towards the home closing transaction as their main lead source; it is not their only lead source, but it is their main lead source and that is somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million transactions annualized. The enterprise sales team is focused on embedded pools of clients—mortgage servicing with 85 million mortgages existing in the U.S. today is one example, as well as other adjacencies like financial services, moving companies, and partners like Vivint. We get access to a lot more potential clients in a really efficient way. I think it is going to be a meaningful portion of the business over time.

If it was $3 million this quarter, what was it in this quarter last year?

We said it was about 70% growth year-over-year for that channel.

Very good. And then the retention: the renewal commissions look like in the corporate channel a little less strong than the royalty fees. The renewal royalty fees seem to be a little better than corporate. Is there any reason for that or is that just normal variability?

I would point toward geographic diversity. The franchise side of the business is much more geographically diverse than the corporate side. We have done a great job extending outside of Texas in corporate over the last couple of years and made strong progress, but corporate does have larger Texas exposure than the franchise side. That diversification can insulate you more on the franchise side. From an incentives perspective, a franchisee is making 50 cents on every dollar on every policy that renews. We do everything that we would do for corporate on the franchise side with the service team, but the franchisees also put in additional work on their end because that is how the incentive structure works. For the second half of 2026, we are expecting total second-half renewal commissions to have some improving revenue retention.

Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question is coming from the line of Rounak Majumdar of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good evening. And I wanted to quickly congratulate Mark and then, of course, John on the first quarterly call. I believe the percentage of calls that are being handled by Lily is similar to last quarter. Could you maybe walk through what percentage you might be able to reach long term? And any significant savings that might come through with Lily?

Yes. We said 20% this quarter is kind of the everyday level we feel is sustainable. We are reaching periods of 30% now with some consistency, although I would not plant the flag that 30% is the long-term target—it's the current watermark. I do not really have a hard target exactly for what percentage should be fully contained by Lily. I think that will be dictated by client satisfaction scores. If we get to a position where people do not like interacting with that system, then we will adjust. What we have found so far is that for the more administrative-type tasks—things like "need my ID card," "I have a billing question," "help me understand a piece of my policy"—that works really well. People get it handled immediately and they are highly satisfied. I also think there is a considerable portion of the work our service function does that we probably could automate but are not going to because if that would negatively impact the client experience, that would negatively impact client retention. Our goal is to always maintain a tremendous client experience and continue to drive client retention because that is where all the profitability is in this business. I do not necessarily have a target for exactly what we want the number to be. Those cost savings are going to continue to get reinvested into further tools and technology that help our clients. Ultimately, over time that should reduce our cost to serve. Again, we want to maximize client experience.

Could you maybe just quickly walk through the cash utilization strategy? I was a bit surprised to see buybacks slow despite the price being down on the shares.

Sure. I think about the Q1 and Q2 repurchase levels much less as any sort of signal on our view of the business or the price of the stock and more as a reflection that we have bought a ton of stock recently. Since the beginning of 2024, we have repurchased over 3 million shares and one million of that has come from the first half of this year alone. You can also see management has been aggressive in the open market. I share the same view that management has always had around capital allocation: first priority is investment into the operations of the business, after which we think about return of capital to shareholders. What we are aiming to do is make sure the core business is appropriately funded and retains as much optionality as possible. We do not want to be in a position where we are making operational decisions based on our capital structure. To that end, we maintain a conservative balance sheet and have a conservative approach to leverage. We will continue to follow that approach and buybacks will remain an important part of our capital allocation when opportunistic.

And then if I could maybe sneak one more in: there is an adjustment for a contract termination cost. Could you maybe highlight what that is?

Yeah. We were making some technology changes in our service function to reduce complexity and improve routing technology and provide more analytics. We exited one contract and implemented a new system.

Thank you. One moment, please. And our next question will be coming from the line of Ryan Tunis of Cantor. Please go ahead.

Hey. Thanks. Good evening, and congrats to everyone. I have a question for Mark Jones Jr. I am just an observation. This is not to take anything away from the investments the company has made; I think management has made right capital allocation decisions. But the stock price has been a bit uneven in the last few years. How are you thinking about shareholder value creation? For me, it is margins and growing your earnings power. If it is not margin, does a take-private scenario make more sense than staying public? I will leave it there.

Ryan, I think the way to maximize long-term shareholder value is to drive the maximum long-term profit dollars. We are not going to be concerned with short-term swings in equity valuations. We have a lot of confidence in the direction that our business is going. Obviously, you can see the management team voting with their wallets. We are in the right place in the value chain. I think we have a pretty strong head start on the industry and we are going to continue to drive as much growth as we can while maintaining strong margins. We have made material progress on our margin profile over the last number of years while still delivering organic growth considerably in excess of the average player in the industry. I am not concerned with short-term equity dislocations. We are long-term shareholders and we intend to remain long-term shareholders.

This is Mark Jones, the largest shareholder by a significant margin. Our focus is building long-term shareholder value. We are not going to get distracted by short-term fluctuations or tempted by a take-private transaction. This is about building long-term shareholder value. We are confident that we have the right strategy and the right team, and ultimately we believe we will be the winner.

And, like I said, congrats. I got confidence here. So thanks.

Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question will be coming from the line of Katya Sakys of Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good evening, and congratulations to all. My first question is on the increase to the full year total revenue growth guide. Do you guys think that core revenue growth can hit that new 15.5% midpoint this year?

Yeah. We are extremely pleased with what we have delivered in the first half of the year both in terms of our financial results and the directionality of our major operational KPIs. Growing new business at an incredibly strong pace and the direction of client retention point to a second-half acceleration off the 12% that we delivered in the first half. That includes both gains from client retention and new business generation. One thing to keep in mind is last year we saw a meaningful acceleration in new business generation in the second half as product availability came back into the market and we began hitting our stride on a number of initiatives. So when you think about year-on-year growth in Q3 and Q4 this year, keep that quartering of last year in mind. Overall, we are performing well against our expectations so far and things are setting up well for the back half.

And I would say our expectations on core revenue have not changed. The increase in the low end of the guidance range was really to adjust for the outperformance on contingencies driven by strong profitability and growth.

And, sorry, just to follow up: previously we had commented around 60 to 85 basis points for contingent commissions as a percent of total written premium. Our more updated view, which is reflected in the full-year revenue update, is 70 to 100 basis points on the year.

That takes care of one of my follow-ups. I guess just to sneak one more in quickly: it looks like even excluding the contract termination charge, adjusted G&A expense was a little bit higher than I was expecting for the quarter. Certainly appreciate that you guys are investing quite a bit in technology and professional services, but could you unpack the year-over-year increase there and give any color as to whether there was a pull forward in the timing of certain costs or if you're spending more year over year than initially expected?

Yes, Katya. There were a couple of pull forwards associated to digital agent implementation projects. Nothing hugely material, but on the margin it can moderately increase year-over-year growth rates. Remember, we delivered the country's first choice shopping platform end-to-end and that generates some incremental G&A expense. We also had our Presidents' Club conference for franchisees in this second quarter, which incrementally was about $1.5 million of G&A. But that explains the Q1-to-Q2 change year over year in the second quarter versus the second quarter of last year.

Thank you. There are no more questions in the queue, and I would like to turn the call back over to Mark Miller, CEO, for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Yeah. I just want to thank everybody for joining us on today's earnings call. We look forward to talking to you again in October to review our third quarter results.

This concludes today's program. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.