In line to win the Dynetech/Crummer Entrepreneur of the Year Award is John Ritenour, founder of Insurance Office of America in Longwood. Ritenour is one of 12 nominees for the award. The Rollins College Crummer Graduate School of Business is a co-sponsor of the award, to be presented next fall.

Ritenour today runs a $60 million-a-year business empire in Longwood Village that has grown over 17 years from a three-person office to a national company said to be Florida's largest and the nation's 24th largest privately held insurance company. IOA reports about 550 employees (260 locally) in two dozen offices around the country.

Ritenour's philosophy works very effectively: “My concept was, 'What would it take to make me happy as an employee?'” Ritenour said. “I wanted to take the greed out of the insurance business. I wanted to find a way to share the commissions, the wealth, and the ownership.”

Besides an insurance agency, IOA includes a realty company, a full-service advertising agency, a promotional items firm, a mortgage banking company, a payroll service business, and a full-service interactive agency employing an additional 100 people locally.

He and his wife, Valli, came to Florida in 1986 and settled in Longwood, buying Ellis & Yates Insurance, a predecessor to IOA that floundered. When they started what became Insurance Office of America a few years later, they began offering sales representatives 60 percent of commissions and the opportunity for an ownership piece if they met certain sales criteria.

“The ownership factor was the difference in our growth,” Ritenour says. “We attracted producers who came here to be a part of something. We weren't just a place to earn money.” IOA has been growing rapidly ever since, adding three California offices this year alone, another in Alabama, and locations in Tennessee and Texas are expected shortly.

The business model was awarded a National Underwriter P&C Magazine honorable mention in this year's “National Underwriter Commercial Insurance Agency of the Year” award program-one of only three agencies in the country to receive any sort of an award.

Sam Friedman, editor-in-chief of National Underwriter P&C, sees IOA's success as attributable to its atypical way of operating. “IOA is very interesting in its internal structure and the way it does compensation and establishes partnerships,” he explains. “And more than being just policy peddlers, they have sought to position themselves as risk managers for customers, which is not a prevailing philosophy in independent agencies. They also have expanded into other businesses, which is interesting.”

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Ritenour Nominated for Entrepreneur of the Year

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