From Waitress to Agency Owner: Stephanie Riggins's Pandemic Startup Strategies That Still Work Today
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
Starting an insurance agency during a pandemic is not the recipe most aspiring owners would choose. The networking events, community meetings, and face-to-face referral conversations that traditionally fuel a new book of business were unavailable. Stephanie Riggins launched anyway, and the systems she built to survive those conditions have become the foundation of a thriving agency with 15 years of industry knowledge behind it.
Jason and Craig sat down with Stephanie to trace the specific decisions, strategies, and mindset shifts that took her from a service industry background to a growing agency ownership, including the parts that didn't work and what she learned from them.
The Hospitality Advantage Nobody Talks About
Before insurance, Stephanie was a waitress. That sentence sounds like a contrast, but it's actually a setup: the skills that make someone exceptional in hospitality are precisely the skills that build extraordinary client relationships in insurance.
Waitressing is emotional intelligence under pressure. You read a table in seconds, who needs more attention, who wants to be left alone, who's having a bad day, who's celebrating. You manage multiple competing demands simultaneously without anyone feeling neglected. You learn to handle complaints with grace and turn a bad experience into a reason to come back. These skills map directly onto client relationship management, and Stephanie brought them fully formed into her insurance career.
The specific insight she carried from hospitality was this: decisions are emotional and then rational. Clients don't choose an agent because of a coverage comparison, they choose an agent because of how the interaction felt. The coverage comparison confirms the decision; the relationship makes it. Agents who lead with data and follow with relationship are usually losing to agents doing the inverse.
This reframe changed how Stephanie structured every client interaction from the beginning. The first priority was always making the client feel genuinely heard and understood. The coverage recommendation came second, and it landed differently because the relationship foundation was already in place.
Building a Book During a Pandemic: What Actually Worked
When in-person networking disappeared, Stephanie did what adaptive entrepreneurs always do: she found the digital equivalents and learned them faster than her competitors. Video calls replaced coffee meetings. Social media content replaced community events. Email sequences replaced the casual follow-up conversations that happen naturally after face-to-face interactions.
What she discovered was that some of these digital approaches actually outperformed their in-person counterparts, not in warmth, but in efficiency. A well-crafted video message sent to 50 prospects costs the same time as a coffee meeting with one. A piece of social content that demonstrates expertise reaches her entire network simultaneously rather than one person at a time.
The referral system she built during the pandemic was necessarily systematic rather than opportunistic. Without the casual social interactions where referrals often arise naturally, she had to create structured moments for them. She built a post-close follow-up sequence specifically designed to generate referrals at the moment of highest client satisfaction, within the first two weeks of onboarding. That sequence has continued to run and produce referrals long after the pandemic made in-person networking possible again.
She also learned to be explicit about the kind of clients she wanted referrals for. Vague referral requests ("let me know if you know anyone who needs insurance") produce vague results. Specific requests ("I'm looking to help homeowners in this zip code who've had trouble getting competitive rates recently") produce qualified, high-conversion leads.
Scaling Past Founder Production: The Owner Mindset Shift
The growth plateau that hits most new agency owners is the moment when they've built a book they can't expand without cloning themselves. Stephanie hit this wall and made the conscious transition from producer to owner, which is among the most difficult moves in agency growth.
The transition requires changing what you measure. A producer measures closed deals and premium written. An owner measures team production, system efficiency, and the metrics that predict future performance rather than just reporting current results. The mental shift is from "what did I produce today?" to "what did the agency produce today, and what does that tell me about next month?"
Stephanie started hiring with a clear profile for the type of producer she wanted: people with the hospitality orientation she came from, who naturally prioritized client experience and understood that relationships were the actual product. Insurance knowledge could be taught; client empathy was much harder to install after the fact.
She also built accountability structures before she needed them. Rather than adding management systems in response to problems, she put frameworks in place proactively, scorecards, meeting cadences, and performance reviews tied to specific metrics. This gave producers clarity about expectations from day one and gave Stephanie the data to recognize emerging problems before they became crises.
What This Means for Your Agency
Stephanie's referral sequencing is immediately replicable. Build a specific touchpoint into your new client onboarding, at approximately day 10 to 14, when the client has experienced the value of working with you but the memory of the process is still fresh, that includes a genuine expression of appreciation and a specific referral request. Track the results for 60 days and compare them to your baseline referral rate.
If you came from a service background before insurance, mine it deliberately. The interpersonal skills you developed in that context are competitive advantages in a relationship-driven business. Document the specific practices that made you effective in that previous role and ask yourself how they translate to client interactions today.
On the owner mindset shift: if you're still doing the majority of production yourself despite having producers on your team, schedule a deliberate audit this week. Identify every production task you're doing that a trained producer could handle, and start the delegation process on the lowest-risk items first. Each successful delegation creates capacity for the strategic work that actually builds the business.
The Bottom Line
Stephanie Riggins built her agency under the worst possible starting conditions and emerged with systems that are more sophisticated than most agencies develop in ideal circumstances. The pandemic forced a level of intentionality that normal conditions allow you to avoid, and the intentionality turned out to be the competitive edge. Whatever constraints you're currently operating under, the same principle applies.
About Stephanie Riggins: Stephanie is a 15-year insurance industry veteran and agency owner whose journey from the hospitality world to building a thriving P&C agency is a case study in adaptive leadership and relationship-first sales., LinkedIn
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