When Trent Richmond bought a small-town Kansas insurance agency from a family friend in 1999, it's safe to say he didn't know what he was getting into. “I wasn't an insurance agent or a college graduate; I worked for years at a rural electric company,” Richmond said. “I went home and told my wife I thought I was getting into the insurance business. And when I bought the agency, I quit my job before I was even licensed to sell insurance. How dumb was that?”

As it turns out, the agency's original owner, who saw in Richmond solid people skills and first-hand knowledge of the rural insureds they served, was right on the money.

Bridges Agency Inc., founded in 1894, is still one of the oldest businesses in rural Norton, Kan.–”a small independent agency on a downtown street corner,” as Richmond describes it–and still providing protection to the region's second- and third-generation farmers.