Insurance Agency
Position:
- Part Owner
Years:
- 1986
- Sold 2009
Location:
- Flossmoor, Illinois
Partners:
- Chuck & Jodi Hruska
Factoids:
- Agency Started by Mom & Dad in 1960s
- Used as a laboratory for Applied Software
- Chuck & Jodi sold to Gallagher
My Parents
My parents were entrepreneurs in the insurance business. While in college at the University of Illinois my father began selling life insurance for Prudential. After graduation, he could find no company willing to pay him as much as he was making selling insurance part time, so that was the direction he set out in.
After working for Prudential for a few years, he broke out and started his own insurance agency in Evergreen Park, IL. This agency was mostly devoted to life insurance in the early years. After my mother Donna finished raising us six children (can you imagine?), she began to work in the agency and started up the Property and Casualty business selling homeowners, auto, and small commercial policies. They managed a nice living running this small insurance agency as I grew up and went to college.
Brother Chuck
After graduation, my brother Chuck began working in the agency in sales. After five years or so my parents decided to sell him the business, and my mother Donna went to work at Applied Systems selling the automation system I had developed. Chuck and his wife Jodi worked in and ran the business, and eventually needed additional capital to survive and grow. I stepped up as an investor, and purchased a portion of the business. I viewed it as a good long term investment, as well as a laboratory for the insurance agency automation product I was building with Applied Systems.
Chuck has taken the business from only a few hundred thousand dollars in premium volume in the 1980s, to many millions today specializing in property insurance. He and his wife Jodi have worked their fingers to the bone, through many lean and now more prosperous years, and today employ dozens of full time people on the south side of Chicago. I sold my interest to them in 2009, and today their entrepreneurial energies run high.
My father would be very proud of the mark they have left in the Chicago area insurance market.
In 2021 Chuck and his wife Jodi were featured on the front page of a national insurance periodical.
Recently Chuck and Jodi decided to exit the insurance industry by selling their business to Gallagher insurance, the largest broker in the mid west. It been a 45 year career. Another overnight success story!