Over 25 years, Aaron Hatanpa has grown two small State Farm offices into a three-location, 18-person operation recognized among the company’s top 100 agencies nationwide. Along the way, he has built something harder to measure: a team of leaders, a pipeline of future business owners and a growing collection of places where other entrepreneurs can build something of their own.
Photography by Matthias Leyrer
Aaron Hatanpa never planned to work in insurance.
In fact, when his father suggested it, Hatanpa had approximately the reaction you might expect from a young man trying to establish a career of his own.
“Insurance is the last thing I’m ever gonna do,” he remembers thinking.
His father knew the business. He had spent roughly 40 years with Federated Insurance, eventually rising into senior claims leadership. Hatanpa had recently graduated from the University of Minnesota Morris, where he played basketball, and was working as a stockbroker in downtown Minneapolis.
His father kept nudging.
“You should go work for State Farm,” Hatanpa remembers him saying.
Thirty years later, Hatanpa can concede the point.
“It turned out he was correct,” he said. “At the time, you don’t always believe your parents.”
Taking a Chance on Mankato
Hatanpa grew up in Dayton and attended Anoka High School. College took him to Morris, a town of roughly 3,000 people, where he discovered something about himself.
“I really kind of realized I didn’t want to live in the Twin Cities,” he said. “Small town had a lot more appeal to me.”
After his stint as a stockbroker, Hatanpa took his father’s advice and joined State Farm, spending nearly four years handling automobile claims in the Twin Cities.
At the time, working for the company was one path toward becoming an independent contractor State Farm agent. Hatanpa began learning how the agency model worked and quickly saw the part that appealed to him.
“I didn’t want to be a claims person, work for corporate America for my whole career,” he said. “As soon as I found out about that, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m gonna go do. This is what I want to do.’”
Opportunities eventually opened in Mankato and Mapleton. State Farm gave him both, an unusual arrangement at the time.
There was just one problem.
Hatanpa barely knew Mankato.
Before deciding to move his family here, his most meaningful exposure to the community had come when Minnesota Morris played Minnesota State University, Mankato in basketball.
“I saw the gym,” he joked.
That was apparently enough.
Hatanpa moved south with two young children and took over two small existing agencies, Marlow Nelson’s operation in Mankato and Larry Walsh’s in Mapleton. He opened his doors in January 2001.
Twenty-five years later, those two small offices bear little resemblance to what he operates today.
Building a Different Kind of Agency
Hatanpa estimates the business has grown roughly tenfold since he took over.
Today, Hatanpa Insurance Agency operates in Mankato, Mapleton and Lake Crystal, with 18 licensed team members across the three locations. Hatanpa says the agency has ranked among State Farm’s top 50 agencies nationally multiple times and currently sits around the top 100 among approximately 20,000 agents.
Those numbers tell part of the story. The structure behind them may say more.
The traditional insurance agency model Hatanpa encountered early in his career generally revolved around one agent supported by an assistant or two. A few years into owning his agency, he decided that wasn’t going to work for what he wanted to build.
“It can’t just be me being the agent,” he remembers deciding.
So he began recruiting differently.
“I went out and started looking for people that had the ability to become State Farm agents themselves,” Hatanpa said. “That caliber of person.”
Some eventually did.
He points to former team members including Scott Goins, now a State Farm agent in Dubuque, Iowa; Jay Zender, who operates State Farm agencies in St. Peter and Le Sueur; Brett Oertli, a State Farm agent in Moorhead; and Jake Paulson, who operates a State Farm agency in Byron.
For Hatanpa, their success is another measure of what the agency has built over the years. He wasn’t simply looking for assistants. He wanted people capable of becoming business owners themselves.
Hatanpa sees his approach as an early version of what has since become a more modern agency structure.
“We were one of the first State Farm agencies to really embrace that model,” he said.
The philosophy is also visible among those who stayed.
Karen Springer was already working in the Mapleton office when Hatanpa arrived in 2001. She is still there today, running that location. Emily Norland has spent nearly two decades with the agency and specializes in life insurance and financial services. Zack Kolars helps lead the sales team and specializes in commercial lines.
Hatanpa says a majority of his team has been with the agency for more than a decade.
That longevity has allowed the business to become increasingly specialized. Rather than expecting one person to know everything, Hatanpa has built a team where different people develop expertise in claims, business insurance, life insurance, financial services and other areas.
“There is so much to know in this business,” he said. “Even after 30 years of doing it, I’m still, it seems like, learning things that I didn’t know.”
When the Policy Becomes Personal
Insurance is an unusual product. Customers pay for something they hope they never need.
Hatanpa has spent enough time on both sides of the business, first handling claims and then advising customers, to know how quickly an abstract conversation about coverage can become painfully real.
He remembers one customer backing out of a driveway in a residential neighborhood. A bicyclist happened to be passing behind the vehicle.
The driver struck him. The bicyclist later passed away.
It was the kind of accident anyone could make on an otherwise ordinary day.
Fortunately, Hatanpa’s office had previously talked with the customer about protecting against catastrophic liability and added an umbrella policy providing an additional $1 million in coverage.
That policy suddenly mattered.
The umbrella coverage helped compensate the bicyclist’s family while protecting the customer from potentially having a lifetime’s worth of accumulated assets exposed to the claim.
Money could not undo what happened. For Hatanpa, the experience demonstrated why conversations about unlikely risks matter long before anyone expects to need the coverage.
“We want to make sure you understand what the options are and how this stuff works,” he said. “You make the decisions. Totally up to you.”
The same philosophy becomes even more difficult with life insurance. When Hatanpa learns that a customer has passed away, one of his first instincts is to check the agency’s records.
Did they have the conversation?
Sometimes the customer bought the coverage. Sometimes they chose not to. Hatanpa wants to know his team gave them the opportunity to understand the risk before there was no longer anything anyone could do about it.
That requires a certain kind of employee.
“This is a job where you have to care about other people,” he said.
An Agency That Keeps Growing
Hatanpa’s operation has expanded beyond the property and casualty insurance business most consumers associate with State Farm.
His background in financial services eventually came full circle as the agency added investment and advisory services alongside auto, home, business, life and health insurance. The agency recently added an in-house advisor, another step toward Hatanpa’s vision of serving more of a client’s financial needs under one roof.
The Lake Crystal office came in 2022. Longtime State Farm agent Bill Webb had retired at the end of 2021 after more than 57 years serving the Lake Crystal community. Webb passed away in February 2022, and Hatanpa subsequently took over the agency, bringing his operation to three communities.
The agency’s performance has earned Hatanpa repeated recognition within State Farm. He has qualified for President’s Club, an honor that now recognizes the top 100 agents in a given category among approximately 20,000 State Farm agents. His agency has also received Chairman’s Circle recognition and Million Dollar Round Table recognition.
Hatanpa seems proudest when the numbers point back to his staff.
“We’re comparing ourselves to agents that are in towns of three million people,” he said. “That speaks to our staff and the job that they do every day.”
Building Beyond Insurance
The same instinct that expanded Hatanpa’s agency eventually began showing up in bricks and mortar.
His first Mankato office was inside the former Ginny Mae Donuts building on North Riverfront Drive. As the agency grew, Hatanpa needed more room. He expanded his leased space, then began wondering why he didn’t own it.
Around 2007, he bought his first building.
Then the agency needed more room again.
He bought another section.
Parking became important, so another property made sense. Before long, what started as a practical real estate decision had become something else.
“I guess I like this part of town,” Hatanpa said.
He began rehabilitating older spaces along North Riverfront Drive and leasing the extra square footage to other businesses. Many were entrepreneurs looking for their first commercial location.
Eventually, Hatanpa’s own agency outgrew those spaces too.
Rather than displacing the businesses that had filled the properties around him, he bought another building farther south on North Riverfront Drive. The former Kato Tool property at 1416 N. Riverfront Drive had been largely industrial space, with a warehouse and loading dock.
Hatanpa acquired the roughly 9,200-square-foot building and undertook a major renovation, dividing it into multiple commercial spaces. Today, Hatanpa Insurance Agency operates from Suite 1, while other businesses occupy portions of the renovated property.
The project followed a pattern Hatanpa had already established: find an underused building, invest in it, create the space his own business needs and make the rest available to someone else.
The connection is personal for Connect. Otto Media Group was among those businesses, moving into one of Hatanpa’s earlier spaces when its owner was 24 years old and still trying to figure out how to afford the first month’s rent.
Hatanpa didn’t know that part at the time.
What he did know was that another young entrepreneur wanted a place to start.
“A lot of business stuff, it’s the people you meet,” Hatanpa said. “What are you feeling? What do I think about this person?”
Over time, he watched tenants grow, add employees and sometimes move into larger spaces.
The portfolio grew too.
Hatanpa has also invested downtown, including the historic properties at the corner of Cherry and Front streets that house Julee’s Jewelry and La Bamba Taco. He has invested in residential rental property and commercial buildings in the communities where his agencies operate.
The projects he enjoys most tend to involve existing buildings with some history left in them.
In Mapleton, he renovated an older Main Street building. In Lake Crystal, he restored a former bank building, exposing original brick and restoring the old bank vault and its door.
“I like these old buildings,” he said. “I think they’re so cool.”
There is economics behind the preference. Older properties can provide space at a cost that allows Hatanpa to offer rents that work for younger businesses.
There is also satisfaction in seeing an underused building become useful again.
Investing in the Place He Chose
Hatanpa arrived in Mankato knowing almost nobody.
His wife, Jess, had deeper roots here. She was born and raised in the community and has since served on the Mankato City Council. Together, they raised five children here while building the agency.
Jess has also worked within the business for years, something Hatanpa says has made entrepreneurship easier to navigate.
“Especially being a small business owner, as you know, there’s a lot more going on than it looks,” he said.
Having a spouse who understands why something occasionally has to happen at night, or why another problem follows you home, has mattered.
“She cares. She’s invested like you are,” he said.
That investment increasingly describes their relationship with Mankato as well.
“I think Mankato is one of the best communities in the country,” Hatanpa said. “The people that live here, the involvement of the people that live here in this town, it’s a wonderful place to live.”
Keep Building
Twenty-five years into owning the agency, Hatanpa still talks like someone looking around for the next thing that could be improved.
There was no master plan that connected insurance, three offices, an 18-person team, financial services, future State Farm agents and a collection of rehabilitated commercial buildings.
One decision simply created room for another.
Even Hatanpa seems a little surprised by where it has led.
When he started, he’d meet insurance agents who had been in the business for 25 or 30 years and think one thing.
“Man, they’re old.”
Now, with three decades at State Farm behind him, he laughs.
“Man, I feel young.”