There’s a version of this story that gets cleaned up for the highlight reel. The leap to independence. The agency acquisition. The team of nine — almost ten — and a family photo on day one that became a symbol of everything they were betting on.
But Patrick McBride told me the real version.
The version where the financing fell through two days before launch. Where he walked out of the office, drove twelve miles home, and pulled over on the side of a country road because he was physically ill. Where he crawled into bed — fully dressed, at forty years old — and stayed there until he could figure out whether to fight or surrender.
Patrick is the founder of McBride Insurance Agency, an independent commercial and personal lines shop that launched on April 1st, 2022. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, a father of four, and one of the more quietly driven people I’ve sat across from since starting Agency Blueprint. When I called him for this conversation, he had staff changes, process overhauls, and an agency acquisition happening simultaneously. He stopped all of it to talk.
That’s Patrick.
I Work Hard Because I Don’t Want To
When I asked Patrick where his drive came from, he gave me one of the most honest answers I’ve heard on this show.
“I work hard because I don’t want to.”
He laid it out plainly. He doesn’t want to get up early. He doesn’t want to work out or cook or come into the office at eight and grind through the day. What he wants is time with his kids — watching them jump off a dock into a lake somewhere, taking that two-week vacation, building memories that have nothing to do with premium volume.
But he’s figured out the equation. Those things only happen because of the work. The freedom is on the other side of the discipline. And that understanding — that maturity, as he calls it — is what gets him out of bed when nothing else would.
He grew up without his father, who passed away when Patrick was very young. He describes him as a forty-foot statue casting a hundred-foot shadow — charismatic, athletic, larger than life in every story people told. It took Patrick until he was forty years old to realize his dad was twenty-one when he died. A kid. Still figuring it out. That realization didn’t shrink the shadow; it made it easier to step out from underneath it.
He also learned early from a stepfather who quietly modeled what work looked like — second jobs, night shifts, a master’s degree finished as an adult. Nothing flashy. Just consistent, unglamorous effort. Patrick didn’t understand what he was absorbing until years later, when something came up and his first instinct was simply: I’ll go work harder.
The Day Everything Changed
Patrick came to insurance through grief. His daughter Karen passed away at fifteen days old after being born premature. In the months after, their local insurance agent called and asked if they could talk — not to sell anything, just to make sure they had what they needed. They sat down. The agent walked them through life insurance, through what a children’s term rider would have covered, through what real protection actually looked like.
“I walked out of that office and looked at my wife and said I will never do anything except strive to be an insurance agent. Being able to provide that level of care and concern for people was life-changing.”
That moment set the course. He stayed in the bicycle industry a few more years, took a producer role inside a captive office to learn the business, and in 2017 launched his first agency under a captive contract. Five years later, as the carrier went through ownership changes and the model stopped fitting what he’d built, he made the call to go independent.
He walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. He kept his staff. He kept his location. And on April 1st, 2022 — with his wife, his four kids, and his son making faces in the background because that’s what eleven-year-olds do — he took a photo in front of the McBride Insurance Agency sign and started from zero.
The Country Road Moment
What nobody tells you about that kind of leap is what happens when the plan falls apart.
Two weeks before launch, Patrick had two financing options lined up — an SBA loan and a private investor. Within two days of each other, both said no. He shut his office door, walked to his car, drove toward home, and had to pull over.
“I pulled over on the side of the road, and I was physically ill.”
He went home. Closed the curtains. Lay in bed, fully dressed, in what he describes as the fetal position, trying not to get sick again and trying to figure out what came next. After a few hours, he came downstairs and told his wife he had two options: fire the staff and grind it out together like the early days, or drain their savings, pause their paychecks for fifteen months, and bet that the revenue would catch up.
She didn’t like either option. They chose the second one anyway.
What pulled him out of that room wasn’t optimism. It was something simpler — a principle he carries from his time in the Marine Corps.
“Really simple idea: the difference between bravery and cowardice is one moment of action. It’s one choice.”
Staying in bed wasn’t going to solve anything. He still had dinner to cook, kids to face, a morning coming regardless. So he got up, looked at the numbers again, and found a way forward. Not a perfect way. But a way.
Six weeks after that photo was taken, his wife’s grandmother passed away. They were responsible for expenses a thousand miles away in Texas. They didn’t sell the house until last month — four years of payments they hadn’t planned for, on top of everything else.
They made it anyway.
Don’t Talk About It — Be About It
Patrick doesn’t spend a lot of time on the highlight reel. He won Agent of the Year in Illinois last year. He was on the cover of a magazine. He had an article written about him. If you walked into his office and looked for the award, you wouldn’t find it — he moves it often, considers the hiding of it a game, and his reasoning is straightforward: his clients don’t care. The award doesn’t change what he does for them.
“None of it matters. Just do the right thing, and that’s all that matters.”
That philosophy runs through everything. His team is trained to ask why before they ask what — when someone calls for a quote, the first question isn’t about VIN numbers. It’s about what’s really going on. Why today? What happened with your current agent? What are you actually trying to solve?
His agency doesn’t lead with price. They lead with discovery. Help, and trust the revenue to follow.
“We don’t say, ‘Here I can save you this much money.’ We show them, ‘Here is how we can actually help you.’ Period.”
What He’d Tell Himself at the Start
Patrick’s agency is about to almost double in size through acquisition. He’s hiring a ninth team member. He has a VA he hopes to work with until the end of his career. He’s focused on three things — recruit, coach, acquire — and he hired a CTO specifically so he could stop being the one who does the technology.
The hardest part of that, he admits, is letting go of the things he’s genuinely good at. Delegation is easy for the stuff he hates. The real test is giving up the areas where he knows he’s excellent, so someone else can own them while he focuses further up.
His advice to agency owners still doing everything themselves is blunt.
“Because when you are, you don’t actually own a business anymore. You still own a job.”
And if he could go back and tell himself one thing at the beginning of all of this — before the agency, before the leap, before the country road and the bed and the two worst phone calls of the launch year?
Just do the right thing. Keep being who you already are. The rest will follow.
You can connect with Patrick on LinkedIn and learn more about his agency at McBride Insurance Agency.
At ia Blueprint, we help insurance agency owners build teams that let them focus on the work only they can do. If you’re ready to stop doing everything yourself and start building something that runs without you in every seat, book a discovery call. Let’s talk about what’s possible.