Welcome to the Max Revenue Letter. Recapping the news, trends, and top producer insights from the week. Before we get started, a bit of housekeeping. Moving forward this will be our one and only newsletter. Our old Max Revenue Letter (Micah’s deep dive that went out on Tuesdays) will rollup inside this one. Onward…

Today: 3 briefs, 3 podcasts, 1 wait list. LFG🔥

Over 200 companies, including nearly every major insurer (Allstate, AIG, Chubb, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Travelers, USAA, and more) plus an unexpected list of tech giants (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta) and retailers (Target, Amazon, Walmart, Ford, Toyota, Uber), signed a letter this week pushing the federal Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to finally require disclosure of third-party litigation funding (TPLF) in federal court cases. The committee meets October 21.

They’re demanding that if an outside funder has a financial stake in a lawsuit's outcome, and a say in how it's litigated or settled, that should be disclosed just like any other financial interest already is under federal court rules. The general counsel put it bluntly, "After over a decade of consideration, it is time… to draft a straightforward rule."

This tracks with everything we’ve been covering, North Carolina's outright TPLF ban, the growing patchwork of 20 states with disclosure laws, and now the first real sign of federal momentum. Worth noting the scale of what's at stake. One industry estimate puts TPLF's cost to insurers at up to $50 billion over the next five years, on top of commercial claims costs that have already been climbing 10-11% annually since 2017. Yeesh.

Our hot take: It’s nice to finally see real coordinated pressure at the federal level, not just state by state. But, courts move slowly and October's meeting is just a hearing. Don’t get too excited just yet.

The Baldwin Group, the publicly traded, 15th-largest broker, doing roughly $1.72 billion in annual revenue out of Tampa, agreed this week to go private in an all-cash deal worth roughly $7.7 billion, led by Sequence Holdings and DFO Management, the family office of Michael Dell. Yeah, the OG computer guy. The deal breaks down to roughly 20x trailing EBITDA. It's expected to close in Q1 2027.

Here's what makes this a must watch: Sequence isn't a traditional private equity shop, it's a venture-backed "permanent holding company" that embeds engineering teams directly inside the businesses it buys to modernize them with AI. This is Sequence's first major deal, and its biggest test yet of whether that model works on a brokerage at this scale. Dell's own backstory here is notable too, DFO (formerly MSD Capital) helped take Dell Technologies itself private back in 2013 in a $24.4 billion buyout, so this isn't Dell's first rodeo with exactly this kind of transaction.

Our hot take: They're going to try to inject real AI tooling into Baldwin. That combined with traditional "margin expansion" and "increased efficiencies" methods like commission and staff cuts points to this being the first real case study worth following, not just another Top-10 AI press release for PR and shareholders.

Last weekend, Anthropic's Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word essay urging AI companies to slow the pace of development, warning that risk prevention needs time to catch up. OpenAI's Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis all publicly backed him within hours. For a moment, it looked like the industry's biggest names were finally asking regulators, or at least each other, to pump the brakes.

Then Mark Zuckerberg broke rank. In a lengthy X post Tuesday, he argued AI labs already have all the incentive they need to build safely, and named the reason directly: "labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this." He pointed to Meta delaying its Muse AI agent for months as proof self-regulation works, and framed independent evaluators as "industry best practice," a pointed jab at Anthropic, which critics say leans on evaluators too close to the company. President Trump piled on the same day from the opposite angle, dismissing AI harm concerns entirely and calling doubt about AI development a gift to China, a view Nvidia's Jensen Huang shares.

Our hot take: Zuck's comment matters. He wasn't arguing AI is safe. He was arguing lawsuits will discipline the market if it isn't, which is a public, on-the-record admission from the CEO of one of the world's largest AI-deploying companies that his own industry expects to be held liable when its models cause harm. Sounds like the kind of sentence a plaintiff's attorney reads aloud in discovery.

In this “producer spotlight” episode, Trey and Micah chat with Matt Sturgeon who breaks down how he built a $1.7M book doing the opposite of what the experts say. He shares how a scrappy networking group of like-minded peers became his biggest growth lever, why he still says yes to the small accounts everyone tells him to drop, and what's actually driving his last three years of $300-400K annual growth per year.

In this “industry update” episode, Brandon Schuh breaks down Michael Dell's family office taking the Baldwin Group private in a $7.7B deal, and last week's AI extinction-risk headlines and what it means for producers.

In this “in the trenches” episode, Micah Salas breaks down why principles beat price every time, and why complacency, not the other agent, is your biggest competitor.

We're officially sold out for Elite Producer Training with Larry Linne (Oct 28-29, Denver). People are still asking to get in, so we're building a waitlist and fighting for a few extra rooms with the hotel. Can't guarantee anything, but if you want a shot, get on the list now.

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