Holmes Murphy & Associates

Holmes Murphy & Associates

Holmes Murphy & Associates was founded in 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, by Max Holmes and Ray Murphy, initially securing accounts for a young trucking industry before expanding through the Midwest. CEO Dan Keough has spearheaded a diversification strategy that grew the firm from a regional benefits broker into a national platform with offices including Waukee, West Des Moines, New York, and Pleasanton. The firm remains 100% employee-owned, with equity held broadly across its workforce, a structure it credits with aligning incentives for long-term client retention and independence from external shareholders. The firm structures its operations across four primary practices: business insurance, employee benefits, risk management, and alternative risk financing through captive programs. It serves sectors including construction, agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing, though it does not publish a formal allocation breakdown. Holmes Murphy has built recognized expertise in alternative risk transfer, particularly for large agricultural cooperatives and healthcare systems, designing group captives that let members self-insure layers of property-casualty and medical stop-loss risk. Its construction practice acts as the broker for multiple contractor-controlled insurance programs across the Upper Midwest and Mountain West. With over 1,200 employees across approximately two dozen offices, Holmes Murphy represents one of the few independent brokers of scale remaining in a consolidating industry. In October 2023, it acquired Minnesota-based Foster Klima & Company, a life and employee benefits advisory firm, deepening its presence in the Twin Cities market. The firm also operates BrokerTech Ventures, an accelerator program it co-founded to fund insurtech startups, alongside Community Investment Corporation, a philanthropic arm funding early childhood education and homelessness prevention in its headquarters region. Holmes Murphy’s structural differentiator is its employee-ownership model within an industry dominated by public consolidators like Marsh McLennan and Aon. Rather than returning free cash flow to shareholders, the broker recycles equity internally and commits significant resources to captive formation and risk-control engineering — cost centers many scaled public peers have trimmed. That ownership stack lets it act as a fiduciary in captive design, free of an intermediary's dual-loyalty tension between carriers and plan sponsors.