Fresh off his promotion to president of retail insurance, with full P&L responsibility across Patriot Growth Insurance Service’s (Patriot) property and casualty and employee benefits businesses, Bill Donato (pictured) said the firm is leaning into a seemingly paradoxical strategy: scale at the center, locality at the edge.
The fast-growing top-25 broker has completed more than 180 acquisitions in six years and is now doubling down on local leadership, specialty focus, and people-first growth to balance its growth with agility.
“We have to get smaller to take advantage of our size,” Donato told Insurance Business America, meaning Patriot is seeking to bolster its local expertise and keep the neighbourhood-broker feel while taking on larger accounts. “The talent is there; now our job is connecting great people, so we feel more intimate, more collaborative, and even more local than before.”
Patriot’s aim, Donato said, is to keep decision-making close to clients and markets while layering in national resources, especially around specialty expertise, data and analytics, proprietary technology, and shared services, that individual agencies couldn’t easily build on their own.
On the P&C side, the firm is expanding construction, captives, and risk management verticals; on the employee benefits side, it is investing in group and standalone self-funding and alternative risk to help employers capture cost-containment opportunities.
The broker has also built a premier client group to elevate service for high-net-worth personal lines accounts.
Why those verticals? The talent already in-house and the book composition across Patriot’s platform, said Donato: “We have leading agencies with strong local, and in one case national, construction expertise. And many producers were targeting construction on a smaller scale. Now we’re arming them with the resources – claims, risk control, safety, technology – to go after larger, more complex accounts.”
Despite its acquisitive reputation, Donato emphasized that strategic, culture-aligned M&A remains the filter. Patriot isn’t stretching to chase dots on a map; rather, it wants “high-growth agencies that want to keep growing.” Donato added, “This is not the place for somebody who wants to exit. We want to keep our leaders here and have them help build us and take us to the next stage.”
That philosophy mirrors Patriot’s recent leadership moves: Donato to president of retail insurance, Bob Monard to CFO, and Clara Arrington to general counsel. The company framed this as an investment in the next generation of leadership.
For Donato, who continues to oversee the Northeast region, talent is the throughline. “We’re in a people business,” he said. “Technology and AI matter, but they only add value if our people can use them and explain them to clients.”
On the technology front, Patriot is pushing hard on data aggregation across its mosaic of acquired systems, then applying proprietary AI to sharpen sales execution, market selection, and client conversations. That includes embedding intelligence into the CRM and quoting tools to steer submissions to the right markets and present options with greater speed and clarity.
But Donato is careful not to let the tech overshadow the relationship. “We don’t want to hide behind technology; we want to use it to keep the connection with our clients,” he said. “We want to scale that nationally, but that local relationship that makes business special will stay there.”
Donato sees a knotty near-term environment for insurance buyers, with softening in many commercial lines, ongoing stress in others (particularly commercial auto) and property segments that vary by geography and peril. That complexity, he said, is precisely where a regionalized brokerage model pays off.
“Local trends trump national ones,” Donato said. “We can talk about softening property nationally, but there are pockets that are still hardening. We want to keep knowledge local, so that when we have a unique risk in North Dakota, we have somebody there that understands North Dakota.”
That local fluency, he added, must surface well before renewal. “It can be a very confusing time, and that's why we have to lean in. These can't be conversations that take place at the renewal.
“It's going to take connection with our clients and partnership with our insurance companies to create and build the right solutions. That's what clients are looking for in times of uncertainty. That's where good brokers shine. We want to come in and help shepherd them through these challenging times, hold their hands, build the right program, and give them the confidence that as the landscape around them shifts, we're going to give them that stable base.”
Looking ahead, Donato expects Patriot to broaden its specialty verticals, continue acquiring best-in-class agencies, and further unlock shared national resources without diluting local autonomy.
If “shrink to grow” as a strategy sounds counterintuitive, that’s the point. In Donato’s view, Patriot’s next leg of expansion depends on being big enough to invest and small enough to listen.
“I think we'll be able to better utilize our size and scale as we continue to build out our resources that are now shared, as opposed to operating as independent agencies,” Donato said. “We’re only six years old, and so we are still in our growth mode. This is not the end of the line for us.”
