Insurance specialty broker Ryan Specialty (NYSE: RYAN) beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q3 CY2025, with sales up 24.8% year on year to $754.6 million. Its non-GAAP profit of $0.47 per share was in line with analysts’ consensus estimates.

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Company Overview

Founded in 2010 by insurance industry veteran Patrick Ryan, Ryan Specialty (NYSE: RYAN) is a wholesale insurance broker and underwriting manager that helps retail brokers place complex or hard-to-place risks with insurance carriers.

Revenue Growth

A company’s long-term sales performance is one signal of its overall quality. Any business can experience short-term success, but top-performing ones enjoy sustained growth for years.

With $2.96 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, Ryan Specialty is a mid-sized business services company, which sometimes brings disadvantages compared to larger competitors benefiting from better economies of scale. On the bright side, it can still flex high growth rates because it’s working from a smaller revenue base.

As you can see below, Ryan Specialty grew its sales at an incredible 26.6% compounded annual growth rate over the last five years. This is a great starting point for our analysis because it shows Ryan Specialty’s demand was higher than many business services companies.

We at StockStory place the most emphasis on long-term growth, but within business services, a half-decade historical view may miss recent innovations or disruptive industry trends. Ryan Specialty’s annualized revenue growth of 22.3% over the last two years is below its five-year trend, but we still think the results suggest healthy demand.

We can dig further into the company’s sales dynamics by analyzing its organic revenue, which strips out one-time events like acquisitions and currency fluctuations that don’t accurately reflect its fundamentals. Over the last two years, Ryan Specialty’s organic revenue averaged 12.8% year-on-year growth. Because this number is lower than its two-year revenue growth, we can see that some mixture of acquisitions and foreign exchange rates boosted its headline results.

This quarter, Ryan Specialty reported robust year-on-year revenue growth of 24.8%, and its $754.6 million of revenue topped Wall Street estimates by 2.9%.

Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 16.5% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last two years. Still, this projection is commendable and indicates the market sees success for its products and services.

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Adjusted Operating Margin

Adjusted operating margin is one of the best measures of profitability because it tells us how much money a company takes home after subtracting all core expenses, like marketing and R&D. It also removes various one-time costs to paint a better picture of normalized profits.

Ryan Specialty has been an efficient company over the last five years. It was one of the more profitable businesses in the business services sector, boasting an average adjusted operating margin of 16.5%.

Looking at the trend in its profitability, Ryan Specialty’s adjusted operating margin rose by 4.2 percentage points over the last five years, as its sales growth gave it operating leverage.

This quarter, Ryan Specialty generated an adjusted operating margin profit margin of 14.7%, up 1.2 percentage points year on year. This increase was a welcome development and shows it was more efficient.

Earnings Per Share

We track the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) for the same reason as long-term revenue growth. Compared to revenue, however, EPS highlights whether a company’s growth is profitable.

Ryan Specialty’s full-year EPS grew at an astounding 17.4% compounded annual growth rate over the last four years, better than the broader business services sector.

Like with revenue, we analyze EPS over a shorter period to see if we are missing a change in the business.

Ryan Specialty’s astounding 23.1% annual EPS growth over the last two years aligns with its revenue trend. This tells us it maintained its per-share profitability as it expanded.

In Q3, Ryan Specialty reported adjusted EPS of $0.47, up from $0.41 in the same quarter last year. This print was close to analysts’ estimates. Over the next 12 months, Wall Street expects Ryan Specialty’s full-year EPS of $1.97 to grow 17.4%.

Key Takeaways from Ryan Specialty’s Q3 Results

We were impressed by how significantly Ryan Specialty blew past analysts’ organic revenue expectations this quarter. We were also glad its revenue outperformed Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, we think this was a solid quarter with some key areas of upside. The stock remained flat at $51.86 immediately after reporting.

Should you buy the stock or not? The latest quarter does matter, but not nearly as much as longer-term fundamentals and valuation, when deciding if the stock is a buy. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here, it’s free for active Edge members.