Rachel Vela

Insurance Consultant
Vela Insurance Agency
Lakewood, Colorado

Age: 26
iPhone or Android? Android
Favorite streaming service? Spotify and Netflix
What’s in your earbuds currently? Spotify’s Badass Women playlist

What brought you to insurance?

Insurance definitely wasn’t my dream career when I was younger. I never even wanted a desk job, actually. I did a year at University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I just stopped because I was really unsure. I was like, “Well, let me just take a break, and if I want to come back, I’ll come back.” Then I had some odd jobs, restaurants mainly, and it just felt like a dead end.

This is my mom’s agency and she kept telling me, “Come try it, just for a year.” I was really hesitant because when I was younger she’d always bring me and my sister into the office, and we hated the office. I was 20 or 21 at that point and  my parents had bought a Coldstone that my dad and I were managing. But he was busy doing his firefighting job and the office, so I was doing the Coldstone thing a lot and it was just super exhausting. So right after that I was like, “Alright, fine. I’ll give the desk job a chance.” That was about five years ago, and I’m still here.

What keeps you in it?

With some of the jobs I had before, I found myself counting down the hours. It would get so boring, being at a restaurant where it’s not busy and you’re literally doing nothing for probably hours. Insurance is challenging. It’s not what I thought it was going to be. I even had someone mention to me recently that my job is just picking things from a dropdown box. And I’m like, “Hey! I do more than that.” Especially in commercial lines, there’s always different things coming up these days, like Uber and Lyft. That was a brand-new thing for the insurance industry and it was hard to figure out what to do with those at first.

Role model/mentor?

Definitely my mom because she’s been doing it for so long. She’s done different little things within insurance, but she’s been doing it for 20-25 years, so she knows the ins and outs of insurance and life.

And everyone in the office, we’re always talking to each other and learning from each other. We try to bring more fun things into the work environment too. All those big places like Google, they have all these cool things going on at work to help you de-stress. We always have little birthday celebrations, or we’ll go bowling after work, and we did an Easter egg hunt in the spring with some games and everyone had a great time. It’s a big team effort we’ve got going on. We all know we all count.

Perpetuation planning?

My mom is definitely trying to phase out of here, so we’re trying to figure that part out. It would be me and her other employee Daniel. A lot of our customers are Spanish-speaking and I don’t speak Spanish, but he does, so he’d be a good business partner. We’re still considering different options. It’s kind of up in the air right now, but running a business, that does sound scary! Can I do it as well as my mom? Am I going to run it into the ground? The pressure, the pressure! 

Millennial stereotype that fits you?

We’re more open-minded and we’re trying to change the industry. If we could revamp the image of insurance, we could make it more of an appealing thing to other young people. The insurance industry in many ways has been slow to change technology-wise, and it can turn people off because it’s like, “Oh, I have to wear a tie to work every day.” It’s boring. If we can modernize and change with the times like everything else is changing, that would be a good thing.

Industry’s biggest challenge?

Our technology is really behind. Direct companies like GEICO, Progressive direct, they’re creating this question: Is the independent agent going to go away? I don’t think we’ll die out because insurance can be complicated. I don’t think everybody can just go online and get a workers comp or liability policy for all their businesses. I think it’ll be a challenge, and there might be some agents who don’t make it. We have to be able to keep up with those companies who are the most ahead of everybody.

This article is the last in a series that profiles 10 millennials in independent insurance, based on IA’s July cover story.

Jacquelyn Connelly is IA senior editor.