Earl Vance’s
State Farm Insurance agency is practically an institution in downtown Sidney, Ohio. Now, the small town of 21,000 in Shelby County is getting ready to say goodbye.
After 55 years in the insurance industry, Vance is retiring and closing his office Thursday, March 31. The legacy he leaves behind is one of old-fashioned recruitment techniques and committed client care.
“I watch how he treats people. He loves the clients,” Angela Evans, an office manager with the agency, told
Sidney Daily News. “I think he’s a fair, good man.”
Vance’s success was so great, State Farm eventually put another agent in Sidney, but insurance wasn’t the career he set out to attain.
Vance was working as an inspector and salesman for Stolle Corp. when State Farm executive Earl Roberts approached him about a job opportunity. The 24-year-old Vance had been referred to Roberts by church ministers in town as someone who might make a good insurance agent.
After taking a test, Vance was hired and worked with Roberts for several weeks. He couldn’t officially be paid as an agent until he was 25, so on his 25th birthday, he opened his office with his wife Joyce as his office manager.
The couple began work from their home with 12 clients, but Vance’s work ethic quickly led them to relocate as business grew.
“I knocked on every door in Sidney. I talked to everybody who was home,” he said.
Vance also made accommodations for the town’s large number of factory workers, who could only talk insurance following overtime shifts. He met people at 10:00 at night and stayed up late producing flyers to hand out at the local fair.
All the legwork led Vance to lose 25 pounds and gain hundreds of customers.
It wasn’t always easy going, though. For the first two years, State Farm paid Vance a salary that was actually a loan. Once his business was established, the insurer began to deduct his loan payments from his compensation.
“Sometimes, we’d cry when the check came in,” he said. “The first check was for $16.”
But that changed as business grew, and the Vance family become a well-known presence in the town.
Earl Vance’s daughter, Deborah Luellen, believes it was his genuine care for his clients that helped his business thrive.
“For years, he cut out clippings of every single client for weddings, births,” Luellen told the newspaper. “He’d send them a card with the clipping.”
He also helped elderly clients with paperwork, counseled teenagers who had car accidents and attended funerals of clients’ relatives.
In retirement, he hopes to keep up his relationships as well as spend more time walking his three dogs and visiting his nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
