Hyatt Brown’s dad, J. Adrian Brown, was a manager with Metropolitan Life Insurance and had his eye on Daytona from both a personal and professional perspective. Hyatt’s older brother, Worley, had suffered from asthma and Adrian looked for the clean bracing salt air of the ocean to improve Worley’s health – which it did. From a business perspective, Adrian wanted to expand from life insurance into property and casualty insurance which Florida badly needed.
Adrian moved the young family to Daytona at a moment in time when pennies were pinched within an inch of their lives during the Great Depression. Not only did Adrian arrange to repurpose cast-off materials from the Sanford train station to save money on building the family home, but he was determined to build it without borrowing money. It took two years to build and was fortified with the strong iron rails from the old train track. Hyatt continues to visit the home his dad built which is now Martini’s Restaurant in Daytona.
Hyatt’s mom was ahead of her time, graduating in 1921 from West Virginia University with a double degree in math and Latin. When Adrian started the insurance agency, she pitched in as the bookkeeper. Initially known as Brown & Owen, the agency was a family partnership with cousin Charles "Cov" Owen. When Worley graduated from the University of Florida’s law school in 1955, he joined the agency and the family split the agency in two with their half becoming Brown & Brown, Inc.
Hyatt joined the agency after graduating from University of Florida as well and two years later bought the agency from his Dad after Worley headed to Atlanta to become CEO of a small paper box manufacturer, now a $20B publicly traded company.
Hyatt took on a company of eight employees with $61K in revenue and made $1,400. By the time he handed the CEO reins to son Powell in 2009, Brown & Brown had offices around the world, $975M in revenue, and more than 23,000 employees.
The 88-year-old Chairman of the Board and majority stockholder of the publicly traded company doesn’t hesitate when asked what achievements he’s most proud of. “I’m not a seeker of recognition,” he says. “The most important thing I’ve done is build an organization that’s helped a lot of people do exceptionally well. To do that, you’ve got to always think about the team. We’ve banished the vertical pronoun from how we speak here.”
Popular culture often feeds on society’s fascination with dynastic tales of family empires and thinly veiled dramatizations of famous families as seen in the HBO Max show Succession. If you study the Brown family history, though, you find success achieved and sustained with discipline and merit across generations. There is a long-line trend of measured succession planning; an observation with which Hyatt readily agrees.
“The real measure of a leader is to have in line a person who is better than you to succeed you. My son Powell is better than I am,” states Hyatt. “He’s brought in a cadre of a dozen really good people from across the country who are on our operating committee. You can’t continue to grow without a quality team.” Under Powell’s leadership, Brown & Brown reported revenue of $5.902B in 2025 and has issued a budget statement of $7B for 2026. The $65M headquarters built by Powell in 2021 is the tallest building in downtown Daytona and part of a growing campus overlooking the Riverfront Esplanade, a 22+ acre park on the Intracoastal created by a $36.5M investment fully funded by Hyatt to give back to the community which has given him so much.
“We are invested in Daytona Beach and Volusia County. We are committed to helping continue to revitalize this area,” states Hyatt. “We can measure our area’s success through the growth in median family income which in 2010 was about $27,000 In the core city of Daytona Beach. It’s now around $52,000. This is compared to roughly $66,000 to $68,000 for the county as a whole – which is okay, but we want it to get better because as the economic tide rises, all boats will float up.”
Another measure of Hyatt’s commitment to the community is his work with the CEO Business Alliance which was formed in 2010 to bring business leaders together during the U.S. financial crisis. “There were five of us who each invested $100,000 and four of us are still actively involved,” said Hyatt. The organization is led by Brigadier General Ernie Audino, U.S. Army (Ret.) and is a who’s who of top business leaders, including Jim France, Chairman & CEO of NASCAR, with whom Hyatt worked to negotiate the merger of NASCAR and the International Speedway Corporation.
The deal-making doesn’t end there, though. When the German company, B. Braun Medical, acquired a Daytona company, Hyatt got wind that they intended to move operations to California. He and Cici had the B. Braun executives to their house for dinner, and by the end of the evening they decided to stay in Daytona. Today, B. Braun has invested nearly $500 million in its Daytona operations, with a significant increase in employees and higher wages.
“More people are beginning to see this area as a strong place to invest,” according to Hyatt. Boeing is one of the most recent examples – a success that Hyatt attributes to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Boeing has around 150 engineers locally which is expected to grow to about 400. These high-paying jobs push improvements in schools, healthcare, and services.”
That’s how communities improve and that’s how the deal maker has been able to create prosperity all around him.
A great deal of personal fortitude, consistent determination, and time have gone into keeping the company’s growth and culture on track as evidenced by the success and growth exhibited over its 87 years. During a nearly ten-year period in Hyatt’s tenure at the helm, he was also a Florida House Representative, becoming Speaker of the Florida House to finish his term. “When the legislature was in session, our family lived in Tallahassee and then we returned to our home in Daytona. I traveled all week, every week to meet with the growing roster of Brown & Brown employees in Ireland, England, and the Netherlands, as well as Canada, Germany, Italy, Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong,” he says.
“It’s no secret that I was extremely lucky marrying Cici,” he says. “We have a wonderful family and business, and we’ve been fortunate to travel all over the world with our children. That’s the benefit of having the right partner—otherwise, those experiences might never have happened. A great deal of success in life comes from choosing the right partner and the people who surround you.”
The Browns are clearly a family who relish travel. While their son Preston has also joined the family business, their son Kellim caught the family’s travel and art collecting bug. He lived in Brussels for many years as an African art dealer, traveling the Congo with the head of the African Apostolic Church where few outsiders had ever been. He is now stateside unearthing single-issue historic firearms alongside John Carter Cash, the son of the legendary Johnny Cash who was also a well-known gun collector.
To sit at a table with Hyatt is to envision time spent around the Brown’s dinner table with generational discussions on the current state of things, whether that be the insurance business, the world, intellectual pursuits, requirements for becoming fully-functioning members of society, or pitching in to improve the community close to home.
There’s history here, artistry here, and a sense of legacy. In the end, leaving a place and people better than how we found them is what really matters.
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