Chip McClain will tell you he’s a chaser of shiny things. He said it himself, laughed about it, and then spent the next thirty minutes proving he’s figured out exactly what to do about it.
Chip is the founder of McClain & Co. Insurance Advisors in Southlake, Texas — operating out of a building right behind a four-story chrome dragon off Highway 114. He’s been in insurance since 2011, spent a few years before that teaching English and coaching football at a high school where they mostly gave him the seniors who needed to not kill each other, and somewhere in between tried to open a gym, became a bartender to keep the lights on, and made a deal with God that he tried to crawfish out of before God made sure he didn’t.
He brought Legos to the new office because his wife won’t let him have them at home.
I sat down with Chip for Agency Blueprint and came away thinking about effort, buses, and what it actually means to build something that funds the life you want.
Effort Equals Success — But First, Check the Bus
Chip taught this to his high school students. He believes it now more than ever.
“Effort equals success. If you work at something, you are going to be successful at it.”
But there’s a version of that lesson most people skip.
“If you are on the wrong bus, then you are going to take that bus to a bad place.”
He knows this from experience. For a stretch around 2018–2019, Chip got pulled toward the gym idea — a brighter, shinier object than insurance, more fun on the surface, easier to get excited about. He poured energy into it. Then COVID hit twelve months after he’d sold out of it and walked away.
“That’s why we weren’t supposed to have a gym open a year before COVID and put all our money into it.”
The closed door wasn’t a punishment. It was a redirect. And it took a pandemic, a wife newly starting a job, a preschooler home from daycare, and two dogs competing for attention to finally get him to stop crawfishing and accept what he was supposed to be building.
The Prayer That Locked It In
Chip was a teacher and coach for ten years across four schools and somewhere around eight or nine head coaches. When the head coach at his last school, Grapevine High School, started telegraphing his exit, Chip made a deal.
“Okay, God. If he leaves, I am done. I’ll go do insurance full time.”
The next day, the coach announced he was leaving.
Chip immediately started reconsidering. He hemmed. He hawed. He crawfished — his word, and a good one. And then God, as Chip describes it, made it hurt until he stopped.
He left teaching, went full time into insurance, and proposed to Tiffany about two months before making the leap. No safety net, almost no income, a mortgage, a ring on the way.
The bet paid off. But it wasn’t the timing that made it work — it was finally getting on the right bus and staying on it.
The Mom Who Built a Studio in the Garage
When Chip was in kindergarten, his parents divorced. His mom took him and his brother Cody, quit her job, and built a photography studio in the garage so she could be home when they got out of school.
“She put us on her back and carried us up the mountain.”
She also never stopped being a little bit of a jack wagon — Chip means that as the highest compliment. Fun was a value in the household. Work was non-negotiable. His stepdad, who grew up on the streets of New York City and outworks everyone in any room he walks into without needing a parade, reinforced both.
The message Chip absorbed from all of it: own your own business. Not because employment is bad, but because ownership is freedom.
“If you own your own business, you can write your checks. You can do what you want.”
Both Chip and his brother Cody got there. Cody builds high-end hot rods and custom cars in Oklahoma. Chip sells insurance behind a chrome dragon in Southlake. Their half-sister works for NASA, which Chip can’t say much more about for clearance reasons.
The Fun Is the Strategy
Here’s what I think a lot of people miss about Chip’s story. The Legos and the chrome dragon and the outrageous Christmas cards — those aren’t decorations on top of a business. They’re the whole point.
His mom got tired of normal Christmas cards when he was a junior in high school and said she was done with it. They’ve been escalating every year since. Top Gun. Clue. The whole family dressed as bridesmaids. This past Christmas, Chip fed everyone’s photos into an AI tool and turned the entire family — including the dogs, including Bumble the ten-foot roaring Rudolph character he bought at Lowe’s — into claymation characters from the 1960s holiday special.
“People want to get on the list. They get amped waiting for our card.”
That’s marketing. Not paid marketing, not funnel marketing — the kind you can’t buy, built from twenty-plus years of a family deciding to be memorable and committing to it every single year.
The same spirit shows up in how he runs his agency. Personality is the brand. Fun is the differentiator. Insurance, in his hands, becomes approachable.
“I can be me. I can have Legos and silly stuff. And make it more approachable for people.”
Field Trips, Focus, and Not Being Insurance Agent Chip
Chip has a name for what he does to keep from burning out or getting pulled completely off course by the next shiny object.
Field trips.
Most afternoons around two o’clock, he gets out of the office. Walks somewhere. Runs an errand. Goes to look at cars at the BMW dealership. Drives past the chrome dragon. It doesn’t matter what it is — what matters is breaking the pattern of staring at a screen for eight straight hours and then going home to stare at a smaller one.
He also goes to a weekly networking group that gives his week some structure. Someone else sets the agenda. He just shows up.
Both of these are ways of managing the same thing: staying on the bus without losing himself to it.
“I am not insurance agent Chip. I am Chip and I happen to be an insurance agent.”
That’s a distinction worth sitting with. He built a business he calls the money monster — the thing that funds the freedom to do everything else he loves. But the money monster doesn’t get to be his identity. It’s a vehicle. The life is the point.
His closing advice, simple as it gets:
“Effort equals success. You get to decide how you feel. Make every day a great day — but you have to decide to do it.”
You can connect with Chip on LinkedIn and follow the fun at McClain & Co. Insurance Advisors.
At ia Blueprint, we work with agency owners who are ready to stop doing everything themselves and start building a business that funds the life they actually want. If you’re tired of staring at the screen all day with no one else to hand things off to, book a discovery call. Let’s figure out what’s possible.