Insurance Owners: The Builders Behind Bob Stahl, Chris Cole, Jessi Park and Gordy Bunch

Bob Stahl

Founder, Stahl & Associates Insurance — St. Petersburg, FL

Official links: Website

Bob Stahl is a steelworker’s son from Pittsburgh whose family moved to St. Petersburg when he was thirteen, in part because Florida’s warmer climate promised relief for his mother’s lifelong battle with kidney disease. He graduated into a sluggish job market and took the work he could get — a claims adjuster at Royal Insurance.

The job was not glamorous, but it taught him how cases really worked, and it planted an idea: the attorneys seemed to be the ones making the money, so maybe he should go to law school. Law school said no — repeatedly.

Stahl earned an MBA at night instead, moved into marketing, and started noticing something else: the independent agencies were doing pretty well. Maybe he should be doing that.

“I didn’t have a penny to my name after that.”

In 1983 he bought a small agency in Seminole, putting $50,000 down — some of it borrowed — and pouring his last $1,500 into the business checking account. There was no salary for him in the early days; if he could sell a couple of thousand dollars a month, he could make it work.

He made it work for forty years. Stahl & Associates grew from one location and six employees into the largest privately held insurance agency in Florida, acquiring more than thirty agencies along the way, with both of his children eventually in leadership roles.

When the time came to choose a partner, he chose Higginbotham — and said plainly why: the team was like family, and he had to look out for them as well as his clients.

The boy whose father told him to go out and do his own thing did — and built something big enough to take care of everybody in it.

Tampa Bay Business & Wealth — “How Bob Stahl Used His Entrepreneurial Spirit to Build One of Florida’s Most Respected Insurance Firms”
Higginbotham — “Higginbotham Teams Up with Florida’s Stahl & Associates”
Insurance Business Magazine — “Higginbotham Swoops for Top Florida Agency”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Shawn Meaike  ·  Chris Cole

Chris Cole

Owner, Brightway, The Cole Agency — Palm Springs, FL

Official links: Website

Chris Cole came to insurance from pharmaceuticals and State Farm, and he built fast — a $30 million agency, a team of eighteen, and Brightway’s Agency Owner of the Year award for revenue, twice running. From the outside it looked like a straight line up. It was not.

Two and a half to three years into owning the agency, the number one agent in his company was broke — and foreclosing on his house. He had run the agency the way he had been taught, managing a book while nobody set the pace. So he set it himself.

“One day I woke up broke, the only way out was for me to start selling $100,000 a week in premium.”

Cole let his salespeople go, kept two or three support staff around himself, and personally sold $300,000 to $400,000 of premium a month for about six months — treating renewals exactly like new business and pushing retention toward 92 to 93 percent.

Then he brought salespeople back, set the bar at the pace he had just run, and scaled the agency back up across its Palm Springs and Boynton Beach locations, driving annualized written premium to nearly $25 million.

Today he runs SecureEVAs, a services company that helps other agency owners with the work an owner should not be touching — still teaching the lesson his foreclosure taught him: the owner has to become the pace setter first.

YouTube — “How a Broke P&C Agent Built a $30M Agency” (Chris Cole interview)
Brightway Insurance — “Brightway Names Multi-unit Owner Chris Cole Agency of the Year for Top Revenue”
Brightway Insurance — “Multi-unit Owners Chris Cole and Billy Wagner Earn Top Awards”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Bob Stahl  ·  Dan Garzella

Dan Garzella

Founder & CEO, Garzella Group and Darkhorse Insurance Brokers — Scottsdale, AZ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Dan Garzella drove his Mitsubishi Eclipse from Michigan to Arizona at twenty-three, a recent Central Michigan University graduate following friends west — unemployed, with $500 to his name. Insurance was not the plan.

He figured he would work as a server; he applied at fifty bars and restaurants before one hired him, and the place shut down on his first day. One of the first jobs he could get came from a recruiter at Farmers Insurance.

Encouraged by his father and mentor, he became a scratch agent, got licensed, and worked a list of leads for home and auto — and over ten years became one of the top five Farmers agents in the country.

“Perseverance, persistence, and a commitment to the growth and success of others drive me forward.”

At the top, he risked it anyway. In 2014 Garzella sold his Farmers agency, combined the proceeds with a business loan to cover his team’s salaries, and worked seven days a week for eighteen months to found the Garzella Group from zero — no outside investors.

The brokerage grew organically to $62 million in premium, and the group around it became a portfolio of insurance and insurtech companies operating across all fifty states, with OpenDialog putting nearly $100 million in premium in sight.

When his own agents began dreaming of brokerages of their own, he did not show them the door — he built Darkhorse Insurance Brokers to help captive agents become independent owners, the same crossing he had made himself.

MarketersMedia — “Insurance Entrepreneur Dan Garzella’s Perseverance and Commitment to the Professional Growth of His Employees”
OpenDialog — “Trailblazing Insurance: How Dan Garzella Is Using AI to Scale the Future of Insurance”
East Coast Sentinel — “Insurance Entrepreneur Dan Garzella’s Commitment to Fostering Professional Growth”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Chris Cole  ·  David Duford

David Duford

Owner, Duford Insurance Group — Tennessee

Official links: Website · Facebook · X

David Duford did not choose insurance from a position of strength. His personal-training business, BodyElite, was going down the tubes as the Great Recession squeezed the fitness industry, and in 2011 he jumped into final-expense insurance — by his own account, as an act of desperation.

The hard landing taught him something he has built a career on: follow a tried-and-tested system without deviation, because part of his early struggle came from drifting off it.

He sold final-expense policies face-to-face, full-time, for six years — the unglamorous policies that pay for a burial or cremation so a family does not have to scramble at the worst moment of their lives.

Then Duford did something the industry had left on the table: he gave the expertise away.

Through YouTube videos offering frank, sometimes biting assessments of insurance companies — competitors included — he built an audience of tens of thousands of subscribers and turned content into his recruiting engine, with the great majority of his newly recruited agents saying the videos and follow-up emails are what brought them to him.

He has recruited more than 3,000 agents nationally to sell final expense, annuities and Medicare products, dozens of them becoming six-figure producers, and written three insurance sales books along the way. A business the recession destroyed became the tuition for a bigger one — built on teaching strangers, for free, what desperation taught him.

Nasdaq / Stay Paid — “How Master Recruiter Uses Untapped Tactic to Attract and Retain 3K Agents”
Hooked on Startups — “Cracking the Insurance Sales Code with David Duford”
Legal Reader — David Duford (author page)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Dan Garzella  ·  David Price

David Price

Founder & CEO, The Price Group

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

David Price spent nearly twenty years battling addiction. He has been homeless, bankrupt, and sleeping on other people’s couches — and he tells that part of the story first, on purpose.

Recovery came through twelve-step programs and a decision to listen to people who were actually having success; he rebuilt from rock bottom, earned his insurance license in 2018, and became a millionaire within three years — one of the fastest rises in his industry.

The speed matters less to him than the route: a simple, virtual system that everyday people — single mothers, career changers, anyone starting over — can run from home.

The company he founded, The Price Group, is an insurance marketing organization that has generated over $50 million in sales and helped more than 50,000 families, and Price — now a Forbes Business Council member, keynote speaker and mentor — spends his platform on the people standing where he once stood.

His teaching starts with the conversation inside your own head: a destructive inner narrative keeps people stuck, massive change requires massive action, and selling the most intangible product there is — life insurance — begins with uncovering a client’s real fears and desires, honestly.

It is a recovery story that became a business model: the man who needed a second chance now manufactures them for agents.

Love Your Brand (Listen Notes) — “From Homelessness and Addiction to Millionaire Success: David Price’s Journey”
From Caving In to Crushing It — “The Sentence That Saved David Price’s Life — and Built His Career” (Ep. 178)
Your Intended Message (Podscan) — “From Rock Bottom to Millionaire: David Price”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  David Duford  ·  Jessi Park

Jessi Park

Founder & President, Inspired Insurance Solutions — Maitland, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

In January 2017, Jessi Park started her business while on unemployment, using an air mattress as a desk. Needing a real office environment, she used her Orange County Public Library card to reserve student rooms in four-hour blocks and dialed aged leads from the library — while job hunting, just in case.

Within eight months she had written over $1 million in business; within a year she was making six figures; and she rented her first real office, then outgrew it, then outgrew the next one. A single mother who had been scraping by, she built the agency the way she describes it herself: one agent at a time.

“I built my agency, one agent at a time.”

Three years in, Park was debt-free, had bought her first home, and — in the summer of 2020, in the middle of a pandemic — purchased a 6,000-square-foot commercial building for her agents to work in.

Inspired Insurance Solutions grew into a nationwide brokerage of hundreds of agents across health, life, Medicare and annuities, named one of Central Florida’s Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses by the Orlando Business Journal.

Park, a University of Central Florida graduate, now teaches her “Good, Better, Best” method to thousands of agents and wrote it into a book, Soul Beneficiary — the air-mattress years turned into a curriculum for the next founder starting with nothing but a library card.

ABNewswire — “Inspired Insurance Solutions Named in Orlando Business Journal’s Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses”
OrlandoVoyager — “Exploring Life & Business with Jessi Park of Inspired Insurance Solutions”
Your Partner in Success Radio — “Jessi Park: Breaking the Cycle”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  David Price  ·  John McMillen

John McMillen

Founder & Owner, McMillen Insurance Agency — Harrisonburg, VA

John McMillen planned to become a professional golfer. In high school, that future ended in a single season of loss: his father was murdered, and the same year, frozen pipes burst and flooded his father’s store — damage the store’s insurance policy did not cover, forcing the business to close.

Then John saw the other side of the same industry. After his father’s death, several life insurance policies paid off the family’s business loans and personal debts, easing the financial burden in the hardest year of their lives. Too little coverage had closed a store; the right coverage had saved a family.

He has spent more than thirty years in insurance because he lived both lessons before he was old enough to vote.

“We’re selling coverage to secure our clients’ tomorrows. That’s what we do.”

After college, McMillen sold life insurance for a few years, opened his first agency with a partner in 1988, and in 1994 opened McMillen Insurance Agency in Harrisonburg, Virginia — the independent agency he still runs today, more than thirty years on, across personal and commercial lines.

He chose the independent model for a reason rooted in that flooded store: an independent agent can always find the policy that actually fits the client.

His pitch to clients is simply his own story, told straight — he is in this business, he says, to show people why insurance is important, and he should be the one to tell them, because he has lived it.

Smart Choice Agents — “From Personal Loss to Purpose: How One Agent Built an Impactful Career”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jessi Park  ·  Justin Brock

Justin Brock

Owner & CEO, Bobby Brock Insurance; Founder, MedicareCon — Mississippi

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Justin Brock spent nearly eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps, including service in Iraq, and left the Corps in 2014 aiming, at first, simply to match his military salary.

He joined Bobby Brock Insurance, the firm his father had founded, with $26,000 in savings and an operator’s eye for systems: he saw a Medicare market being marketed the old way, and set about breathing fresh air into it — early social-media marketing, a thriving agent culture, and lessons in team building carried straight out of the Corps.

He acquired his father’s book of business and other agencies, consolidating them under his father’s name in his honor.

“Our industry needs agents and brokers to focus on consumers’ needs first.”

The agency became a national brokerage serving more than 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries and earning a place on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies. Brock founded MedicareCon, an annual conference for Medicare agents that grew from 200 attendees to more than 1,250, and sold a 51 percent stake in his companies to AmeriLife in a $70 million deal.

He wrote the journey into a book, Purpose After Service: From Marine to Millionaire, and now spends much of his energy on the audience that recognizes his first career — veterans and transitioning service members learning that the discipline that carried them through service can build a company, too.

AmeriLife / NewsDirect — “AmeriLife’s Senior Resource Group Partners with Bobby Brock Insurance”
Success Story with Scott D. Clary (GetPodcast) — “Justin Brock: Turning $26K in Savings Into $70 Million”
The Hitstreak (Listen Notes) — “How to Sell, Market, & Scale to $70 Million with Justin Brock” (Ep. 157)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John McMillen  ·  Richard “Gordy” Bunch

Richard “Gordy” Bunch

Founder, President & CEO, TWFG (The Woodlands Financial Group) — The Woodlands, TX

Official links: Website

Richard “Gordy” Bunch joined the U.S. Coast Guard at nineteen and came home decorated, with an honorable discharge and a habit he never lost: learn a task, then ask whether there is a better way.

He did his insurance basic training at Texas Farm Bureau and climbed through American National and Prudential — and in 2001, with a wife and a baby, he bet his entire life savings of $10,000 on his own agency, The Woodlands Financial Group. People told him he was crazy to start with so little capital.

His first year in business brought September 11, and the decade that followed brought hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and a financial crisis — the worst stretch the industry had seen since the Second World War, arriving all at once for a man with $10,000 in the bank.

Bunch lived off his savings and sacrificed an income for almost three years, working eighty-hour weeks while his family did without, and built anyway.

And when the disasters came, he went to them: traveling to the scenes of hurricanes and floods, knocking on his customers’ doors, sometimes standing in water and shards of glass, writing TWFG checks on the spot to give families immediate relief.

The company built on the single word “caring” grew into one of the largest independent insurance agency networks in the country — ranked the number one agency in Texas for personal lines, with more than 300 branches, $320 million in premiums, and access to more than 200 carriers — and Bunch was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for the Gulf Coast Area.

The $10,000 bet became a company whose whole brand is showing up on the worst day of a customer’s life.

TWFG — “Gordy Growing” (company profile)
TWFG — “Richard ‘Gordy’ Bunch: An American Hero, Insurance Entrepreneur, Unpaid Public Servant”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Justin Brock  ·  Shawn Meaike

Shawn Meaike

Founder & President, Family First Life — Boca Raton, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Before Shawn Meaike sold a single policy, he spent thirteen years as a social worker with Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families — work he chose because he had lived around abuse and violence growing up and did not want to see kids or women hurt.

He was good at it, and it did not pay enough to build the life he wanted for his own children. Along the way he fought through financial hardship and achieved sobriety. The turn came when someone pointed out that protecting families was already his job — he was just doing it on the wrong side of the paycheck.

As he tells it, selling life insurance is social work: you call people up and protect them and their families.

“Building a company that truly puts both the families of our clients and the families of our agents first.”

Meaike sold final-expense and mortgage-protection insurance part-time, then at a high level as an independent agent, running real-estate and contracting ventures on the side — and in late 2013 he launched Family First Life with the name as the mission statement.

The company generated over $10 million in paid premium in its first year and grew to more than 37,000 licensed agents across almost all fifty states, projected to reach over $800 million in issued paid premium.

He gives generously to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, children’s hospitals and the DreamCenter Foundation — the social worker’s priorities, kept, at a scale the state job could never have given him. The painful past did not disqualify him from the work. It was the qualification.

eSpeakers — “Shawn Meaike” (speaker profile)
WWSG — “Shawn Meaike” (biography)
Let’s Talk Legacy Podcast — “Family First, with Shawn Meaike”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Richard “Gordy” Bunch  ·  Bob Stahl