When John Ritenour and his wife, Valli, launched Insurance Office of America in 1988, they built the company to provide extensive and comprehensive insurance options for varying types of personal and business needs. Already an insurance industry veteran, John Ritenour saw a need for one-stop shopping in the insurance industry. At the time, few agencies offered both personal and business insurance products.
Today, under the leadership of John and Valli’s son, CEO Heath Ritenour, IOA continues that one-stop-shopping philosophy, and offers more than three dozen different types of insurance coverage. The company prides itself on taking the time to understand each customer’s family or business and their unique insurance needs.
The Many Types of Insurance Offered by IOA
True to its roots, Insurance Office of America offers several dozen different types of insurance. Just a few of the insurance policies customers can purchase from IOA include:
Vehicle insurance
Vehicle insurance includes policies to cover your automobile, truck, boat, motorcycle and recreational vehicle. If it has an engine and is licensed for the road or the water, there’s a good chance that IOA has a policy to protect it from loss. Vehicle insurance ranges from basic liability coverage to full collision and comprehensive coverage.
Property Insurance
Property insurance helps protect clients from loss should something happen to their home, or the contents inside that home. This includes single family homes, condos, manufactured homes and vacation homes. Also included is renters insurance to protect personal property housed inside an apartment or rental home. IOA also handles flood insurance, which isn’t included in standard homeowners policies.
Individual Insurance
Individual insurance includes life insurance, as well as a variety of extra coverages, such as umbrella liability insurance to protect against a lawsuit resulting from activities outside of the home or work, like volunteer work, craft fairs and coaching a child’s little league team. IOA also offers extra policies for high-value items that aren’t fully covered on homeowners policies. These items include things like jewelry, artwork, antiques, sterling silver and hand-woven area rugs.
Select Business Insurance
Insurance Office of America makes it easy to get both the personal and the business insurance consumers need, all in one place. Some of these business coverages IOA offers include business interruption insurance, which protects a business from loss if it has to close due to something like fire damage, a hurricane or vandalism; professional liability insurance (also referred to as errors and omissions insurance), which helps protect against losses due to employee mistakes; commercial property insurance, which protects the buildings your company owns; and cyber liability insurance, which protects against losses due to hacking, malware and other cyber crimes. These are just a few of the more than three dozen business coverages IOA offers.
Insurance for Specific Industries
Some industries have specific insurance needs. Insurance Office of America offers policies for more than a dozen industries, including agriculture, aviation, construction and equine businesses.
Worker’s Compensation
Most businesses are required to carry worker’s compensation coverage, with the notable exception of Texas businesses (as the Lone Star state made this coverage optional for businesses in 2018). Worker’s compensation insurance helps protect business owners and their employees if someone should be injured while performing their job. This type of insurance provides funds for medical expenses and lost wages for injured employees in exchange for them waiving the right to sue the company for damages relating to their injury. Like other types of liability coverage required by law, there is the mandatory coverage and optional additional coverage.
Business Liability Insurance
Professional liability insurance and worker’s compensation are just two of many types of business liability coverages that IOA offers. In addition, the company can help any business with employer’s liability coverage (sometimes referred to as “stop gap” insurance), employment practices liability coverage (to help protect a company if it faces a hiring discrimination lawsuit), fiduciary liability coverage (to help protect against lawsuits involving the handling of employee benefit funds) and product liability coverage (to help manufacturing companies protect against losses due to a lawsuit claiming injury due to a product flaw).
About Insurance Office of America
Insurance Office of America is truly a one-stop insurance shop. Experienced and friendly agents take the time to get to know every family or business before suggesting a particular insurance product. IOA’s leading Insurance Producers want to know what’s important to every consumer, what they dream for their family or business and what keeps them up at night. Once they know a little bit about each potential consumer, they’ll put together a comprehensive portfolio that addresses their insurance needs but doesn’t make them pay for coverages they’ll rarely, if ever, need.
IOA professionals work with businesses of all sizes, whether they’re a family-owned, two-person office or an established, multi-office corporation. For families, experienced Insurance Producers work with consumers to find the best auto insurance coverage for their needs.
Headquartered in Longwood, Florida, Insurance Office of America has grown to include more than 60 offices in the United States and the UK since Valli and John Ritenour founded the company nearly 40 years ago. What started as a three-person operation has grown to employ more than 1,300 team members. Now under the direction of John and Valli’s son, Heath Ritenour, the company reported gross revenue of $225 million in 2020. Insurance Office of America was honored to be named among Insurance Journal magazine’s list of “Top 100 Independent Property/Casualty Agencies in the US” in 2019.
About John Ritenour
John Ritenour has devoted his professional life to the insurance industry. Born and raised in McKeesport, outside of Pittsburgh, John Ritenour tried working a few years in the region’s steel mills before giving that up to try his hand at insurance sales in the early 1970s. He was a natural. After six months as a door-to-door insurance salesman, John Ritenour became a top Insurance Producer at his company.
The move to insurance gave him the confidence to propose to his high school sweetheart, Valli. She accepted and became his partner in business as well as life. The couple opened their own agency, Ritenour Insurance, in Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s. Wanting a warmer climate and the opportunity to develop their philosophy of a one-stop insurance experience, John and Valli moved to Florida and opened Insurance Office of Florida, the company that would eventually become IOA.
John Ritenour earned numerous awards in his more than 30 years in the insurance business. Notable accomplishments include Success magazine’s “Success Award for Business Achievement” and the Symetra Tour’s (LPGA) “Eloise Trainor Award”.
Now retired, the Ritenours still live in Central Florida, but let their son Heath handle the day-to-day decision-making at IOA. However, John Ritenour remains active in the company’s charitable activities and is happy to help the company they founded develop a meaningful, spirited, and positive corporate culture.