MarshBerry is an investment banking and consulting firm that has served insurance brokerage and wealth management clients since 1981. The firm is based in Woodmere, Ohio, and built its name on merger and acquisition advisory before expanding into benchmarking, consulting, and market research. In 2025, it became part of Lincoln International, a global investment banking firm, while keeping its own brand and client relationships intact.
Website: marshberry.com
Head office address: 28601 Chagrin Blvd, Suite 400, Woodmere, Ohio 44122
Founded: 1981
Company type: subsidiary of Lincoln International (US investment banking services provided through MarshBerry Capital, LLC, a member of FINRA and SIPC)
Regions served: US and Europe
Larry Marsh founded the firm in 1981 to provide valuation and merger and acquisition advice to independent insurance agencies. Data quickly became part of the pitch. By 1985, the firm had launched its Perspectives for High Performance report. The report turned agency financial figures into a benchmarking tool that owners could use to measure themselves against peers.
Key milestones include:
Each expansion added to the same core idea the firm started with: pairing deal experience with financial data that independent agencies could not gather on their own.
The firm organizes its work into practice areas that follow a business through different stages of ownership, from early planning to an eventual sale. These include:
Clients often use more than one of these services over time. An agency preparing for a sale, for example, typically relies on the same data that MarshBerry uses when advising buyers on the other side of a deal.
Beyond deal advisory, the company has built a reputation as a source of market data that other publications, including Insurance Business, draw on when reporting on the insurance industry. IB has referenced the firm’s research on UK insurance M&A valuations and deal volume across multiple stories over the years.
IB also drew on MarshBerry’s analysis of federal labor statistics and NAMIC workforce data in its 2026 Rising Stars report, which examined the industry’s looming retirement wave. That habit of being cited traces back to 1985, when the firm first published its Perspectives for High Performance report. It remains one of the older benchmarking tools built specifically for insurance agencies.
Few advisory firms of its size keep a research arm this active. That has made it a routine trade-press reference for decades.
MarshBerry won Insurance Business America’s Best of the Best award in the consulting category in 2015. It was an early acknowledgment of the firm’s standing among insurance agencies and brokers.
More recently, IBA’s 2026 Rising Stars report named a regional VP at FirstChoice, a MarshBerry company, among that year’s top young insurance professionals. The same report also cited the firm’s own labor-market research on the industry’s talent shortage.
Curious what MarshBerry has been up to lately? Scroll down for its latest news and deals.
