How do you build culture in an acquisition environment?

It is a question we think about a lot at Equal Parts. In a traditional company, you can interview hundreds of people, screen for a specific profile, and try to build a team around a common set of traits. You can optimize for consistency.

That is not how acquisitions work.

When you acquire agencies, you are not hiring one person at a time. You are bringing entire teams into the business. Different backgrounds. Different personalities. Different operating styles. Different histories. Different strengths.

The goal cannot be to make everyone the same. The goal has to be finding the thing that keeps everyone aligned.

At Equal Parts, that thing is equity.

Not just equity in the financial sense, although that matters. We want the people building this company to be owners in this company. But equity also means something bigger. It means shared upside, shared responsibility, shared accountability, and a shared belief that the company is better when different people bring different strengths to the table.

That is why we are excited to welcome D3 Insurance to Equal Parts.

D3 was started in Amarillo, Texas by Rex Young, Stephanie Musick, Dustin Webb, and Brock Sherwood. Collectively, they bring more than 75 years of insurance experience to the table.

Four founders is not ordinary. Four founders with different personalities, different strengths, and different perspectives is even less ordinary. They did not build D3 around a conventional CEO model. They built it as four partners.

That can be hard to make work. Without alignment, four voices can create confusion. Without trust, four partners can pull a company in different directions. But at D3, the opposite happened. They did not need one person to dominate the room because they were aligned on building a great business.

Everyone had a role to play. Everyone brought something different. And the company was stronger because of it.

Spend time with the D3 team and you feel it immediately. There is no mistaking where they come from: boots, pickup trucks, Texas accents, and deep relationships built over decades. They are proud of what they built.

They should be.

That is exactly the point.

At Equal Parts, our goal is not to erase what agency owners built. It is to give them a better foundation to build from. The relationships, trust, local knowledge, and operating experience inside these agencies are not things we are trying to replace. They are the reason this model works.

We now have agencies across four states operating on Ultron, the AI-native operating platform we are building for insurance agencies. Ultron is the system that helps our teams move off legacy software, centralize workflows, improve servicing, manage data, and operate more efficiently.

But the platform only works because it is being built with the people who actually do the work.

Each agency is different. Each team has its own history, culture, customer base, and way of working. That will always be true. Everyone brings something different. Everyone sees the world a little differently.

That is not the challenge. That is the advantage.

The challenge is making sure we are all building toward the same thing.

That is where equity matters.

We are building a platform for relationship-driven agencies enhanced by AI. That only works if the people closest to the customer help shape the platform every day. The operators, producers, account managers, and agency leaders who have spent years serving customers need to have a voice in what we build.

D3 is not just joining Equal Parts...

They are helping build it.

They bring experience we do not have. Relationships we have not earned. Market knowledge we could not manufacture. A culture that was built in the real world, over decades, through trust and service.

That makes us better.

We will have challenges. Every company does. We will disagree. Every strong team does. We will have moments where things are messy, hard, and uncomfortable.

But the way through is the same every time: equity over egos.

Welcome to Equal Parts, D3