Service and evolution drive
Michigan agency’s future
By Maura C. Ciccarelli
Photography by Tim Meyers
Service has always been at the heart of Linda Fisher’s life. It started when she was a teenage volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters and continued, since 1988, throughout her insurance agency career.
As she contemplates how her agency, the 22-year-old Cardinal Insurance Group, will continue forward, service has taken on an expanded meaning.
“Our service philosophy has never changed,” she says. “That means in the traditional sense of educating clients, rebuilding homes, navigating difficult claims with them, giving surprise gifts for new home and new vehicle purchases and [to] young drivers. But it also encompasses taking care of our community.”
That community includes her own people so they can focus on serving their clients.
To get there, the Traverse City, Michigan, agency owner has had to think deeply about how she runs her business and what her role should be to continue her legacy.
Today, as the agency has doubled its staff and is building a new office, this is the story of how Linda and her team got there and where they are going.
Origin story
Linda began her insurance career in 1988, working full-time as an agency receptionist while studying criminology and clinical psychology as an honors student at Northwestern Michigan College. Two years in, she revised her career path.
“I just said, ‘I really love this insurance thing,’” she explains. “By then, I had gone from receptionist to CSR to sales in that short period of time.”
At age 21, she was a 100% commission producer. Over the next 14 years, she built a book representing about one-third of her agency’s premium volume. But after having her son, Logan, she asked her employers if she could work just four days a week, especially since she was on 100% commission. When they turned her down, she offered to buy into the agency ownership. That, too, was denied.
So, she spent the next seven months figuring out how to open an agency from scratch. Industry relationships—particularly through connections in the Michigan Association of Insurance Agents—helped her secure the carrier appointments she needed.
“In 2004, I founded Cardinal to build the kind of agency I believed clients deserved,” Linda says. “In the early years, I did everything from answering phones and serving clients to building desks and fixing toilets. Cardinal was truly built from the ground up around one purpose: genuinely taking care of people.”
Growth built on relationships
For much of Cardinal’s history, growth was gradual. But as aggregators and private equity changed the local insurance market in recent years, Linda saw a growing demand for the agency’s relationship-based approach.
During 2025, Cardinal hired seven people, bringing its staff to 13, including five agents. Personal relationships have remained central, even as the organization has expanded.
“Technology is important,” she says, but some clients still want to “sit at the kitchen table with you.” In Traverse City, which is the Cherry Capital of the World, that often means visiting cherry farmers on their properties rather than expecting them to come into the office.
Industry changes, she says, “have not gone over well with our community, so the demand last year was huge for us to write new business.”
Now, she says, “it’s time to scale and grow.”
Today, Cardinal’s book is about 75% personal lines and 25% commercial, with a significant high-net-worth niche and a growing concentration of builders and developers. The agency serves clients in 12 states, largely because longtime clients moved, bought additional homes or expanded their businesses and wanted Cardinal to continue serving them.
Client relationships average 12.7 years, retention remains above 93%, and more than half of personal lines clients carry an umbrella policy.
(Above) In advance of the agency’s new building being constructed, the team poses at “invisible desks” in relation to where everyone’s office might be at the future location.
(Above Right) The location of the future Cardinal Insurance Group office.
(Below Right) From left: Sylvia Kelly, Account Executive and Personal Insurance Advisor; Brittany Atkins, Account Executive and Client Support Advisor; and Jennifer Russell, Operations Coordinator.
Construction on a new home office, dubbed “The Cardinal’s Nest,” is scheduled to begin this fall on Highway 31 in Traverse City, with completion expected in 2027.
Leadership lessons
As Cardinal has grown, Linda realized that the qualities that had made her a successful producer could limit her as a leader.
“The agency could not evolve until I evolved,” she says. “The abilities that made me a great producer—high-achieving, independent, do it all yourself, and solve every problem on your own—don’t make a good leader.”
One catalyst was The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier. Linda, who reads about 60 books a year, recognized that she enjoyed being what she calls “the human search engine”—the person employees turned to with every difficult problem.
But solving those problems herself kept employees from developing their own judgment and reputation with clients.
“I had to let go,” she says. “I realized I was limiting the growth of the agency by holding tightly to everything.”
Other books, including Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell and 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, reinforced the lesson that growth required her to stop doing everything herself.
That changed how she thought about employees, too.
“Agency owners hire people to chase our dreams. But it’s not their dream,” she says. “Our job is to find out what is your dream and how can I help you have that better quality of life.”
The team enjoys time at Traverse City’s Apache Trout Grill. From left: Sylvia Kelly; Marilyn Oakes, Account Executive and Client Support Advisor; Corrina Huffman; Leslie Campbell, Account Executive and Business Insurance Advisor; Patrick Zionskowski, Account Executive and Client Support Advisor; Brittany Atkins; Logan Fisher, Technology and Systems Support; Linda Fisher; and Jennifer Russell.
Building the structure for growth
Linda’s changing leadership philosophy led to changes throughout Cardinal. Employees have generous PTO, paid early-release Fridays during the summer, flexible and hybrid work arrangements, paid volunteer time, bonuses and incentives, and administrative and virtual-assistant support.
Virtual assistants handle back-end processing so that producers can spend more time advising clients and helping with claims. Linda has also hired executive and administrative support to take routine work off her plate.
Another catalyst came in 2025, when she entered the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.
“Within four weeks, I realized all I had to do was completely change my agency,” she says with a smile.
Cardinal began separating sales from service, developing a true commercial-lines department and investing in specialized roles, processes and technology so that growth doesn’t depend on Linda doing everything herself.
Service is also a big part of the agency’s community outreach. Linda helped establish a Make-A-Wish presence in Traverse City in 2016 and continues as a wish grantor. Cardinal also holds an annual Reverse Trick or Treat at a local cancer center, collects socks through ToeVember and supports other charitable projects.
The service philosophy also extends to hiring. Linda looks for people who share what she describes as a “selfless, servant’s heart.”
Challenges ahead
Linda sees three major issues facing independent agencies: carrier access, artificial intelligence and developing the next generation of insurance professionals.
As premium becomes concentrated among large private equity-backed firms, smaller agencies may find it harder to obtain carrier appointments. Linda believes carriers need to preserve opportunities for well-run independent agencies, not just the largest organizations.
She views AI as both a threat and an opportunity. Agencies that compete primarily on transactions and price may be vulnerable, while relationship-based agencies can use AI to reduce administrative work and give employees more time to advise clients.
“I don’t care how much AI is going on,” Linda says. “Trust and relationships … are what are the most important to us.”
The third challenge is developing people. She believes the industry needs clearer career paths, better training and more opportunities to show young people what an insurance career can offer.
For agency owners, she adds one more piece of advice: Learn to delegate. “The agency cannot become stronger unless the owner is willing to let other people become strong,” she says.
Building Cardinal for the future
Linda estimates she has another 10 or so years before deciding what comes next. Her focus now is building the systems, infrastructure and team that will allow Cardinal’s relationship-based approach to help her independent agency thrive into the future.
“I lived through the banks ‘putting us out of business,’” she says. “I lived through Progressive putting us out of business and the (GEICO) lizard putting us out of business.”
Her answer to today’s consolidation is to emphasize what Cardinal has always sold: relationships and trust.
Rather than follow the trend toward centralized service, she is “doubling down on old-school customer service, being your local agent that you can trust.” Cardinal still has a receptionist answering its phones. “And we will, until I’m done,” she says.
“People want to trust who they put their insurance with because at the end of the day, they’re buying a piece of paper,” she says.
The author
Maura C. Ciccarelli is a longtime freelance journalist originally from Philadelphia. She writes about business and more from an adobe home in southern New Mexico, after spending nine years living on the road fulltime with her husband in their Airstream trailer.
