SEPTEMBER 2025 SMALL BUSINESS OF THE MONTH: GARICA INSURANCE AGENCY

Competing with giants: Garcia Insurance Agency proves small still scales

Diana Garcia’s firm has expanded across Indiana and Texas by doing what automated quotes can't: building trust.

By Shelby White | Greater Lafayette Commerce

Published Sept. 30, 2025

In the summer sun of the 1980s, Diana Garcia learned what it meant to work. Her parents were migrant laborers from Mission, Texas, chasing the harvests across the country — apples in Washington, oranges in Florida, asparagus in Michigan. Indiana was just another stop on their long circuit back then, a place she returned to each year before heading back south for school.

“Indiana has always felt like my second home,” Diana recalls.

She eventually returned to that “second home”, where she would go on to build one of Greater Lafayette’s most trusted insurance agencies: Garcia Insurance Agency.

Even as online quote engines and direct-to-consumer brands spend billions on advertising, independent insurance agencies, like Diana’s, still dominate the nation’s $1 trillion property-and-casualty market.

Indiana alone has nearly 10,000 insurance brokerages. It’s a crowded field, but Garcia Insurance Agency’s staying power lies in the kind of personal trust Diana has built over two decades: investing in the community and explaining deductibles in plain language.

“It’s not about pushing the most expensive policy. It’s about helping people understand what they’re buying,” she says.

Diana traces her first brush with insurance back to her teenage years in Texas. At sixteen, she applied for a job as a secretary for a local insurance agent who sat her down with a blackboard and explained how insurance worked: how a book of business grew, how commissions accrued, how risk was pooled.

“That stuck with me,” she says. “I always thought it would be easy to make money if you’re just good to people.”

After college, Diana’s path led back to Indiana, where she worked at a human resources firm and then for State Farm before striking out on her own. In 2004, she opened an agency under Farmers Insurance, with her aunt co-signing the initial contract. A few years later, she bought out her book of business and stepped out, fully independent.

Her entrepreneurial streak has always run wide. Garcia has owned a Mexican restaurant and today still operates a staffing company for agricultural workers, a nod to her family’s roots. But insurance, she insists, is her true calling.

“I’ve always had side jobs,” she explains. “But this is the one I love. I’d rather be here selling insurance than doing anything else.”

Garcia Insurance Agency has grown steadily, stretching beyond Lafayette, with offices also in Logansport and South Texas. The Lafayette headquarters alone has a staff of eight with turnover almost nonexistent — a rarity in the industry. She attributes that to trust and flexibility. “We’re a team,” she says.

Diana treats her clients the same way. She insists on honesty. If someone is overpaying for medical coverage they don’t need, she helps them adjust. If home deductibles are low (say, $500), she may suggest increasing them to $1,000 or $2,000 to lower premiums — if that’s feasible. She sees that kind of tailoring as part of the value of being independent.

The approach has built a large customer base, as diversified as Lafayette itself.

Contractors, especially small roofers and builders, now make up a key segment. Diana delights in their success stories: “Some of my roofers came in terrified to buy their first policy. A few years later, they’re making half a million a year. Watching them grow — that makes me so happy.”

The same care she gives her clients shapes the way she shows up for the broader community.

Diana has poured her time and sponsorship dollars into local organizations and causes including Greater Lafayette Commerce’s Latino Business Expo, the Tippecanoe Latino Festival, arts programs, local youth soccer teams, the Lafayette Symphony and even a bowling league lane she’s supported for 20 years.

After years of investment, being named Small Business of the Month feels like recognition that small can still scale.

For Diana, it’s validation not just of her business but of her journey.

“I want to be an example — for Latina girls, for anyone — that it’s possible,” she says. “All you have is your name, your word and who you are. When people think of me, I want them to say, ‘She tried. She helped.’”