Brown & Brown steps up hiring plans

Feb. 02--DAYTONA BEACH -- Brown and Brown's planned 10-story downtown headquarters tower is slated to be completed by October 2020, but the insurance brokerage giant will likely fulfill its pledge to create at least 600 new jobs locally well before that date.

Chairman J. Hyatt Brown told a gathering of local business leaders and elected officials Wednesday night that his company plans to relocate profit centers here from the Detroit and Boston areas, which will create a total of 700 jobs.

The planned $30 million headquarters campus on North Beach Street, which is expected begin construction later this year, and the new jobs the company is bringing "will be a catalyst for the downtown area," Brown told attendees of the Volusia County Association for Responsible Development's annual dinner.

"All of what's going to happen down there is going to happen explosively," he said, adding that he knows of other developers who are considering projects that will create housing in downtown Daytona Beach that will boost business for Beach Street restaurants and shops and allow Brown & Brown employees opportunities to live within walking distance of the planned headquarters campus.

The company has pledged in its agreements with the state and Volusia County that the new jobs it will create locally between now and the end of 2022 would pay an average of at least $41,300 a year, well above the current average wage for workers in the county.

Brown told The News-Journal that his company intends to begin relocating those profit center operations here before the completion of the future headquarters campus. "We can't afford to wait that long," he said.

In order to accommodate those additional workers, Brown & Brown is already working to reconfigure its current five-story 75,000-square-foot headquarters building at 220 S. Ridgewood Ave. to increase its capacity to between 450 and 500 people, up from just over 300 currently.

The company also recently leased temporary office space in the Martin & Klayer building on the corner of Palmetto Avenue and West International Speedway Boulevard and also has a leased office space on Clyde Morris Boulevard.

Brown & Brown, which employed approximately 350 workers in Daytona Beach when it announced its plans for its future headquarters on Sept. 1, now employs approximately 400 people locally, including more than 20 new trainees, Brown said.

He declined to specify what kind of jobs the company was creating locally, but said they aren't entry-level positions.

"They're highly complex jobs dealing with specialty lines of insurance," he said.

Brown said the new trainees the company has added recently in Daytona Beach are part of the 700 jobs that are expected to be created by the relocation of the two profit centers.

If Brown & Brown makes the job-creation and average annual wage targets set forth in its agreements with the state and county, it stands to receive $4.5 million in performance-based economic incentives. The county's portion of that incentive money is $900,000.

The company also is eligible to additional incentives to offset some of its costs in developing the site and making public infrastructure improvements to the surrounding area: $4.5 million from the city and $4.5 million from the county.

The site is in the city's Downtown Community Redevelopment Area. The incentives agreement for redeveloping the property requires the planned office tower to be at least 175,000 square feet in size. Brown said his company is looking to build a tower between 180,000 and 200,000 square feet in size. The design and look of the building are yet to be finalized.

"What we want when you see it is that it's a 'wow,'" Brown told the VCARD gathering, where he was being honored as the organization's citizen of the year.

Founded in Daytona Beach in 1939, Brown & Brown is the nation's sixth-largest insurance brokerage with locations in 43 states and approximately 8,700 workers company-wide. Its annual revenues have steadily grown over the years, setting a new record high of $1.88 billion in 2017. The public company's common stock shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BRO.

The company's growth has been fueled in part by acquisitions of other businesses.

Brown credited his son, J. Powell Brown, the company's CEO, with coming up with the idea to build a new headquarters campus two years ago.

"He said, 'We have to think what are we going to do (as a company) when we grow to 25,000 teammates (employees),'" Brown told the VCARD gathering.

He said the company chose to build its future headquarters on the vacant 10.5 acre downtown property that once was the site of two long-gone auto dealerships in part out of a desire to revitalize a blighted area that has "languished" in recent years. He added that when he was growing up, his father, who co-founded Brown & Brown, was "a Chrysler kind of guy" who after World War II bought a new Plymouth car from a dealership on the future headquarters site.

Brown & Brown in late November paid $4.25 million to acquire the property which covers a nearly two-block stretch on the west side of Beach Street, bordered by Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard on the south.

The site includes room for a second office building should the company need to add one at a future date, Brown said.

"Fantastic is the only word that comes to my mind," said Volusia County Chair Ed Kelley of Brown & Brown's plans to relocate the two profit center operations to Daytona Beach. "It's going to make us a destination for employment," beyond service jobs, he said.

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