By Angela Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-906931.mp3
Fulton, KY – Economic analysts often cite the importance small businesses have to the national economy. According to research from the U.S. Department of Commerce, small businesses employ over half of private sector employees. In the past fifteen years, 64 percent of new jobs were in small business. Small companies also keep profits local. If it lasts long enough, a mom-and-pop operation becomes a pillar of the community. In Fulton, Kentucky this month, Fall and Fall Insurance Agency celebrates its 120th anniversary. Fall and Fall is the longest continually-operated business in Fulton. Angela Hatton has this story.
Fall and Fall Insurance's name is misleading. The last member of the Fall family to own the business retired nearly 30 years ago. Colonel J. F. Fall started the company in 1890. Retired agent and former partner Bill Fossett worked with the colonel's grandson and the last of the family insurance salesmen, Ernest Fall. Ahead of an anniversary reception in their ten-year-old location on Main Street, Fossett sat at a table spread with newspaper clippings from the history of the company and reminisced about his former co-worker.
"Ernest was very frank, abrupt individual. I mean, you knew just where you stood with Ernest at all times. He was like a father to me. He was very unique individual," he said.
During his time at the company, Fossett hired Roger Kephart, who is now Vice President and Agency Manager. Kephart said Fall and Fall is the only remaining independent agency in Fulton.
"Used to say an independent agent serves you first," he said.
Kephart believes independent agents have more flexibility in the kind of policies they offer their customers. Insurance agencies aren't like companies that compete for business by offering better products. According to Fossett, every insurer is selling the same thing.
"The only thing we really have to sell is service, and that's, I think, where the difference comes between agencies," he explained. "If, if, you serve the public and do a good job and treat everybody the same, I think that has a lot to do with being a successful agent."
Chris Wooldridge is the Director of the Murray State University Small Business Development Center, and makes his living studying the best ways to stay in business. Wooldridge said companies that have longevity tend to offer necessary commodities. He says they tend to be good money managers, and they recognize the need to change and evolve with the market.
"As the economy changes," Wooldridge said, "What the customers expect from their businesses are gonna change, and how well they listen to their customers and they see what their customers want, that is going to help them either make a sale or not make a sale, and potentially stay in business or not stay in business."
Fall and Fall has survived major shifts in the economic climate in the last 120 years. The company has also weathered changes in their business, outlasting and absorbing three other independent agencies. In the late nineties, the company was sold to a local bank. Now, they are a subsidiary of Heritage Bank, though Fall and Fall still makes its own operation decisions. Technology and automation allows the company to stay small, with only four employees. For a people-person like Kephart, the downside in the current system is businesses merge and turn over employees faster than they did before.
"The landscape changes so much and so often that, that one of the causalities of that is we have lost a lot of the personal relationships we had with company underwriters and company personnel and it has become a lot more of an impersonal business," Kephard said.
As an extension of that, fewer people now talk to an agent directly when they want to buy insurance. Kephart said folks, particularly young ones, are buying their coverage online. Kephart said that trend hasn't reached western Kentucky yet, but it's coming.
"We would have our heads in the sand if we thought that wasn't happening to some degree and is probably going to continue to grow," he said. "That's one challenge that I see before us now is we, Fall and Fall does not have a good strong presence on the network on the internet."
In addition to new media, Kephart is looking to the future of the company. He said he isn't retiring anytime soon, but the possibility is on the horizon. In the meantime, Kephart is tasked with the job of finding a new manager to keep Fall and Fall in the insurance game.