The safe choice was never us.
A year ago, Centered Partners had no track record to point at. No case studies.
The safe choice was the incumbent broker, the incumbent vendor, and separate relationships nobody ever had to defend.
But our first clients were not betting on a firm. They were betting on people they already knew.
Real gratitude to every client who chose a different model this past year.
Some have handed us risk management, employee benefits, capital markets or real estate advisory. Some have handed us all of it.
I visited more than a half dozen clients recently. Some of the best operators I have ever seen.
Disciplined on capital, obsessive about the customer experience, honest about what is not working yet. You learn more in two hours walking a property or a plant floor with someone like that than in a year of reading reports and zooms.
What appears to be resonating is the work upstream of the transaction. Providing what is actually needed rather than what is easy to quote.
And sometimes providing what a client needs can mean building it ourselves:
Ironclad Pension Solutions, for union contractors carrying withdrawal liability very few know how to explain, much less price.
ScriptBetter, PharmD-led, because pharmacy spend has been managed for years by people who never filled a prescription.
EleSure, for a category I know from the inside out.
None of them are completely finished. Some are live and early. Some are still being built. All of them are being pressure tested in the open, with clients and partners who know exactly where each one stands.
Innovative, strategic, and client focused are easy words to put on a website. They only mean something when a client can point to the outcome.
Cleaner risk profiles. Better benefits spend. Cheaper capital.
Those are not separate wins. They compound into real enterprise value.
But clients were not the only ones betting without proof.
Every name below came to a firm that was still proving itself, and then spent their time here doing the unglamorous version of this business while the story catches up.
The clients took a risk on us. The team took the same one, from the other side of the table.
To the clients and the team, thank you! 🙏
Joe Stroot, Jill Berger, Elaine Rossy, Emily Fox, Arturo Sordo, John Moore, Tate Matheny, Kathleen Janick, Gerri Mazdra, Bradley Grellner, David Estes, Kay Cameron.
Trust before proof is the hardest thing to earn. We intend to keep earning it.