Insurance business is all in the family at Quinn of Lynn

LYNN – There aren?t many family secrets inside the quaint but busy Seaport Landing office at 152 Lynnway, Suite 1D.The five people behind Quinn of Lynn Insurance Corp., all Nahant residents, are all related. And the founder of the agency and patriarch of the family, Thomas F. Quinn Sr., last year marked 50 years of serving the insurance needs of Greater Lynn.A week ago today, the family members and colleagues alternatively took breaks from their work to discuss the industry, the agency?s success and their role in it, and how it?s possible for so many family members to work in such close proximity without going stir-crazy.Commenting on the latter point, Quinn?s wife of 48 years, Elizabeth “Betty” Quinn, who has been with the agency since 1990, didn?t miss a beat: “It?s easy, I just don?t listen to him,” she joked, quickly adding, “Actually, we get along quite well.”Quinn Sr. said, “She?s the bookkeeper so we don?t get paid unless we?re nice to her.”Quinn Sr. started selling insurance with the former John McCarthy Agency in Lynn in 1962 and stayed on when Farquhar & Black took over the business. While he continued to dabble in the industry and kept pace with its changes, his career took a different path between 1969 and 1993 when his primary job was assistant clerk magistrate at Lynn District Court.Asked if he missed the court, Quinn said, “Not at all. When I worked there, there was probably one interpreter for Spanish people. Now there are so many (languages spoken) you have to get a hold of so many (interpreters) it just holds up the court.”?I was fortunate in 1993 when early retirement was offered,” he said. “I knew I wanted to have my own (insurance) agency. I had that plan, and I wanted to see what the kids (Colleen, Kerry and Thomas Jr.) were going to do when they got out of school.”Colleen, the eldest, is a radiology nurse at Mass General and is the only of her siblings not involved in the agency.Quinn had already acquired the former Webber Insurance Agency to form Webber & Quinn in 1977.Betty, who formerly worked at Shoreline Travel, and daughter Kerry, who like her father learned the ropes of the insurance business at Farquhar & Black, had already been working in the family business when Tom Quinn Sr. retired from the court.Tom Quinn Jr. came aboard in the early 1990s after graduating from UNH and in 1995, Kerry?s husband, Perry Barrasso, who formerly worked for Raytheon and who was recently elected to the Nahant Board of Selectmen, also went to work at the agency.The agency continued to acquire small competitors including Collins Insurance Agency in 1995, and today is a full-service carrier – home, auto, life and commercial property and worker?s compensation – with approximately 3,200 individual and family clients and 800 business clients in Essex County, as well as some clients in Maine, New Hampshire, western Massachusetts and Cape Cod.Quinn Sr., 73, said, “We?ve been holding our own, doing pretty well.”He said the formula for a successful agency “is to try and write as much good, clean business as you can,” explaining “good” means “claim free.”?People have insurance to collect if they have losses, but sometimes people have an awful lot of losses,” he said.One area that has been challenging as far as risk in recent years, Quinn Sr. admitted, is homeowner insurance for coastal properties, given the frequency and intensity of storms.?We were being shut off (by underwriters) on the coast in Swampscott behind the old Surf Theater ? Commerce (Insurance) came out and said ?We?re not willing to write anything within five miles of the water,” he said. “So we moved (that business) over to different companies.”?There are a few companies that will write coastal properties,” Tom Quinn Jr. said, noting Narragansett Mutual out of Rhode Island is one of Quinn?s bigger underwriters of homeowner policies.And though nature does seem to unleash its fury along the coast more frequently, Quinn Jr. said the science of determining risk has