The Voice of Insurance: Terry McLean on walking towards risk when everyone else steps back

Mark Geoghegan has had plenty of founders on The Voice of Insurance. He does not often open an episode by calling someone “one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs” to have come on the programme.

He did that for Terry McLean, the founder and CEO of SageSure.

The reason is simple enough. SageSure expects to write $3.6bn to $3.7bn of gross premium in 2026, and most of it sits in the cat-exposed end of US homeowners. That is the part of the market many insurers have spent years trimming.

McLean’s instinct, as Mark puts it, is to walk towards the risk when others are walking away from it.

“The first thing I say is I’m a runner“

Asked to introduce himself, McLean does not lead with his job title.

“The first thing I say is I’m a runner,” he says.

It lands because it fits the rest of the conversation. He talks like someone who understands pacing and repetition, and who is comfortable with long stretches of unglamorous work. The sort that does not show up in a press release, but does show up in results.

His career path was not tidy either. He started on the actuarial track, moved into insurance M&A in New York, and then ended up inside a Florida insurer in the early 2000s, fixing operations and building systems when the business needed a reset.

Hurricanes changed the map

The real inflection point came after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons.

McLean and his partners believed the coastal pullback from national carriers was not temporary. They thought the market had changed for good.

Their first attempt to act on that was not SageSure. It was a software and services business. That taught them a lesson quickly. Selling software into insurance can be slower than the problem you are trying to solve.

So they pivoted to the underwriting model and started building SageSure.

Inspect it, then insure it

McLean keeps coming back to what SageSure is actually trying to do. It is not “coastal homeowners” in the abstract. It is a specific type of customer.

“The simple way to describe it is somebody who’s in a new house or a house with a new roof,” he says.

He gives a detail that underwriters will recognize as real. The last time he checked, SageSure’s average roof age was seven years. He even points out that seven years means different things in different places. Sun and weather do not treat Texas and New York the same.

The other defining feature is control. SageSure’s approach is built around knowing what it has on the books.

“Let’s go build a long-term business strategy to underwrite these risks, inspect 100% of them, make sure we know what we have,” McLean says.

That is not a marketing line. It is a cost decision. It is also a culture decision.

Big states, clear numbers

SageSure’s growth has not been a one-state story.

McLean says the first policy was written in New York in 2009. Alabama was next, then South Carolina, then Louisiana. Today, Texas is the largest state by premium.

“I think we’ll approach eight or 900 million in Texas in 2026,” he says.

“With the Olympus acquisition, we’ll be 700 million in Florida,” he adds. Louisiana sits around half a billion, New York around 400 million, with California and South Carolina rounding out the top five.

On a pro forma basis, he puts the group at $3.2bn of premium in 2025, moving into the $3.6bn to $3.7bn range in 2026.

“We put our money where our mouth is“

Mark steers the discussion into capital, and McLean is unusually direct about alignment.

“As we tell every reinsurer and cat bond investor, we put our money where our mouth is,” he says.

“So we have over a half a billion dollars of our capital invested in balance sheets in a non-controlling way.”

He follows it with the point that sits underneath the whole structure. “We have a lot of capital risk, a lot of skin in the game.”

It is one of the reasons SageSure has been able to keep moving through tight capacity periods. It is not a pure fee business. It is built to share outcomes.

Rate reductions and short memories

Towards the end, the conversation turns to 1 January renewals and what rate easing means for the sector.

McLean does not sound relieved. He sounds cautious.

“It does feel like we’ve got two years of rate reductions in one,” he says. “It feels a little bit overdone.”

He adds, “I like stable markets rather than volatile markets.”

Then he lands the line that explains why he is uneasy. “It feels like memories are too short in my mind,” he says. “That’s what worries me. The risk is real.”