Of the many stories J. Hyatt Brown told me in a recent interview reflecting on his 50-year career with Brown & Brown Inc., a few in particular stand out in my mind.

The first was a story about when he was a senior in high school in 1955 and was given an assignment from his English teacher to write a term paper.

“This sounds very nerdy,” he told me, but “my term paper was on the growth and development of inland marine insurance.”

He laughed and said that when the teacher gave him his paper back, she told him that she had “no earthy idea” what he was writing about, but since it was well-written she was giving him an "A."

The next story was about his father Adrian Brown, who started the family agency in 1939. I asked Hyatt what he had learned from him.

He proceeded to tell me about the family farm in the country with oranges, hay and horses and how his father believed that boys should never have idle time.

"So when we were growing up we always had to work (on the farm) on Saturdays during the school year and then during the summer we had to work six days and Sunday was off. "

“He was a slave driver,” he said of his father. “You got out there to work just as the sun was coming up and you didn't leave until the sun was going down.”

“I learned two things,” he said. “No. 1, I didn't want to be a farmer. And No. 2, I learned that hard work does pay off.”

The last story was about his first couple of years selling insurance at Brown & Brown.

He explained that his sales strategy consisted of taking out the phone book every Wednesday and identifying 10 potential commercial customers whom he would write a letter to. The following Monday, he said he would go see those prospects and try to quote their property/casualty insurance.

That first year “I worked my butt off and sold only three commercial accounts, one of which went broke about six months after I wrote it,” he said.

Things took a turn for the better the following year, however, when Mr. Brown said he went to see a local beer distributor whom he had solicited the year before.

He said the distributor told him that he was not much different from his current P/C agent, but then asked him “Do you know anything about employee benefits?”

“I'm an expert,” Mr. Brown said he replied, noting to me that he had never sold an employee benefit account before.

“So he gave me the file and I wrote the account and it was about a $2,800 commission and that was 1960,” Mr. Brown said. “That's about a $10,000 commission today, and it looked huge to me. So I started writing his employee benefits and…six months later…that same beer distributor called and said ‘I'm unhappy come write my property/casualty.' ”

After more than 48 years at the helm, Mr. Brown officially stepped down as CEO of Brown & Brown today. He has handed the reigns over to his eldest son, J. Powell Brown, who certainly has some big shoes to fill.