Eber and Associates
Bill Eber’s first foray into business ownership was humblingly inauspicious.
“I started at zero clients. Zero,” he said, smiling a tad ruefully at the memory of leaving a full-time insurance job to launch his own enterprise. But with time, he found the ideal balm for that initial pain: success.
“Who knew? Seventeen years later, here we are,” he said from the Pleasant Hills offices of Eber and Associates, a full-service, independent insurance agency with branch offices in Claysville, Cranberry and Wampum. “Full service,” in this instance, means auto, home, personal, business, life and health insurances, plus six group benefits categories.
Eber and Associates, with 22 employees overall, matches clients with 20 different companies, the largest being Erie Insurance. “If we can’t help you directly, we’ll put you in touch with someone who can help,” added Eber, a Pleasant Hills resident.
He said his two-year-old office building, on Old Clairton Road, a few hundred yards from the Route 51 cloverleaf, is where “we’d like to grow our footprint.” That is the agency’s focal point of operations. But, as Eber eagerly points out, it already has a formidable footprint to the southwest — its Washington County branch.
That would be Walker MacCartney Insurance Services, at 304 Main St., Claysville. The business is as interwoven in the town’s fabric as any number of Maggis, dating to the early 1950s. Eber is pleased to have a presence there, one with five employees and an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 clients.
“We have very good, loyal clients in Washington County,” he said. “I like small towns like Claysville and Wampum (Lawrence County) because people like to stay with local folks.”
Eber, 50, bought Walker MacCartney in September 2013 from Dennis Dutton, an affable and efficient insurance guy who — try as he might — cannot completely retire.
“I continue to do this because I like it,” he said. “After I sold the business and my wife retired as a schoolteacher, I had choices. One wasn’t having to continue to work. I could have fully retired.
“I am doing more with my wife and family, but when I don’t have much to do, I come into the office. I’m really an adviser, helping people manage their everyday risks.”
Dutton, 67, grew up in Taylorstown and lives near there now with his spouse, Mary Lea, a 37-year McGuffey instructor. He is a member of the Washington County Tourism and Promotional Board, and by now probably knows every centimeter of his workplace, having toiled there for more than 40 years.
Walker MacCartney was the result of an ’80s merger of two Claysville insurance companies. John Walker launched Walker insurance in the early ’50s and Dutton started MacCartney years later. Dutton partnered with Joe Wilkerson, Walker’s grandson, to lead the new enterprise, and the two worked closely for 15 years. Wilkerson left and is now a vice president with Erie Insurance.
“Mr. Walker gave me an opportunity by letting me buy,” said Dutton, who speaks reverently of John Walker, 97, who now lives in Washington with his wife.
Walker MacCartney functions with an office staff of five — a branch that, Dutton is proud to say, is “incredibly ingrained in this community.”
Eber is pleased that it is, and gratified by where his agency is heading. In addition to the four offices, the agency has one sales person each in Plum and Meadville, and Eber is pondering expansion to the east of Pittsburgh. Growth is a vital term in his professional lexicon.
“I’m looking at organic growth, through word of mouth, and looking at acquisition if it’s a good fit,” Eber said.
He has certainly impressed that wily insurance veteran in Claysville. “If I didn’t think well of him, I wouldn’t have sold the business to him,” Dutton said. “What separates Bill Eber from his competitors is that he and those around him outwork others and succeed.”
That also can be said of Dennis Dutton — who is too self-effacing, and too dedicated, to agree. “This is a great business,” he said. “I enjoy what I do.”