We learned this business from the claims side. That changes what you sell people.
Before John Kleppinger ever wrote a policy, he spent years as a claims adjuster, first at Progressive handling litigation, bodily injury and medical claims, then at Erie. That is the side of insurance most agents never see: the phone call after the accident, the coverage form read line by line, the moment a family finds out what their policy actually says.
You do not walk away from that work selling minimum limits. You walk away knowing exactly which cheap policy falls apart, which endorsement nobody thought to add, and which claim gets denied because of one word in a declarations page. He later moved to the other side of the business as a District Sales Manager at Erie, learning how agencies are built and run.
In 2014 he opened Kleppinger Insurance as an independent agency, and the independence was the entire point. A captive agency would have meant going back to selling one company's product regardless of whether it fit. Instead we built appointments with more than twenty carriers, so the answer to "who should insure this?" is a real question we get to research rather than a foregone conclusion.
That is still how we work. We shop the market at the quote, we shop it again at renewal, and we tell you when your current policy is already the right one. Twenty-five years in, the job has not changed much: read the coverage carefully, explain it in plain English, and be reachable on the day it matters.
