Bryan Warren

Bryan Warren is the co-founder of Direct Event Insurance. He returned in May 2026 to help David Carbrey rebuild the business as a modern operating platform for event risk. His role is to magnify David: to design and build the systems and the strategy that let David serve more customers without losing what makes the relationship work.

David is the broker. The voice on the phone, the empathetic ear, the musician who understands why a festival promoter is calling at 11pm Friday. Bryan is the operator who builds around David and steps in when a conversation calls for both heads. David handles every routine customer relationship. Bryan is available when a question crosses into strategy, AI, or the operating side of how DEI works.

How they met

Bryan and David have known each other since grade school in Oklahoma. Both went to the University of Oklahoma and pledged Sigma Chi, where the friendship deepened over four years in the same fraternity and never broke.

After college, their paths diverged. Bryan licensed as a CPA in 1995 and joined Ernst and Young's consulting practice. David went west to Los Angeles for music and production work. They stayed in touch over the years that followed.

Founding DEI in 2011

In 2011, Bryan founded Direct Event Insurance in Frisco, Texas. The customer base was event organizers, festival promoters, wedding planners, the long tail of people running public gatherings. A year in, Bryan brought David on to run the agency. He knew David was a roadie in Hollywood, played in bands, and lived inside the production and entertainment world. He knew David would understand the people DEI needed to serve, the rhythms of their work, and what they actually needed from an insurance broker.

Bryan was right. David built relationships with customers other brokers could not reach. The product worked. The fit between David and the customer base has been the through-line of the entire business since.

2016: David takes ownership, asks Bryan back as partner

By the mid-2010s, Bryan had stepped away from the day-to-day to return to consulting. In 2016, David took total ownership of Direct Event Insurance and reciprocated the original favor. He asked Bryan to come back, this time as his partner. He had seen something in this category that nobody else was building, and he wanted Bryan in the foxhole with him for what came next. For the years that followed, David ran DEI with integrity and care. It worked, but it never scaled past what one person could carry.

During those years, Bryan stayed in the transformation space. He served senior advisory roles across financial services, manufacturing, and professional services. He worked across the Americas, including extended remote engagements based out of Mexico from 2021 through 2023.

His most recent corporate seat was inside the Business Transformation Office at Link Consulting, where he led transformation engagements until that group was eliminated in early 2026.

In parallel during the last few years, Bryan went deep into operations technology. Specifically into the problem of pairing humans with modern automation tools so that one person can do the work of a team. That work became the Human-Agent Partnership Framework, a five-layer model for pairing every employee with a dedicated workflow assistant and measuring the result as a single economic unit. He founded CAG LLC, a productivity consultancy, to bring the framework to regional accounting firms.

May 2026: returning to rebuild

In early May 2026, Bryan returned for what was supposed to be two days of looking at the books. The conversation was straightforward. David had the talent and the relationships. The business had always had the right operator. It had never had the right operating system. With modern tools mature enough to run real workflows, with the Subscribe Vendor Program as a genuine product wedge, and with more than a decade of customer goodwill that David had built one conversation at a time, the second act was finally available.

Bryan spent two days in Frisco with David, then came back the next week and stayed on David's couch to build the operating plan. That plan is now underway.

What Bryan is building

Right now, today, the work in motion includes the financial model, the operator cockpit David is starting to use to run his day, the infrastructure that pulls every customer interaction (email, call, text, chat) into one place so David can see the full picture, the rebuilt intake flow on this website, and the Vendor Liability Program enrollment pipeline. Most of this is being built in real time as customers come through the door.

The goal is simple. Free David to spend his time on the high-value relationship work where he is irreplaceable. Move the manual work to modern tools that can do that job better than a human alone.

What Bryan brings to the work

The credentials that make the architect role credible. CPA since 1995. Big 4 consulting alumnus at Ernst and Young. Thirty years across operating model design and transformation. Founder of CAG LLC. Architect of the HAP Framework. Co-founder of Found1st.ai (generative engine optimization for contractors), Survival Swim OS (aquatic safety platform), and ApplyMate AI, all in active development.

When a DEI customer needs strategic input, AI integration help, or anything that benefits from a second operator at the table, Bryan is there. For the day-to-day broker relationship, the conversation belongs with David.

The role, simply

David is the broker. Bryan is the AI Operator. Most conversations happen with David. When a customer wants to talk strategy or AI or how the operating side actually works, Bryan steps in. Together they cover the whole surface.