Shopping OC
IN THE BIZ
MCMAHON INSURANCE AGENCY
From left: Patrick, Bill, Michael, Maura, and Brian McMahon.
B
ILL AND MAURA McMahon trade stories in his office at the McMahon Insurance Agency’s gleaming new headquarters at Ninth Street and Simpson
Avenue. Completed in November of 2017 – the business moved in the week before Thanksgiving – the new building is the latest outward sign that the business has been growing since Bill McMahon bought it in 1981. He started with two full-time employees and one part-time. Now McMahon Insurance has 40 employees in three locations, Ocean City, Marmora and Cape May. “For years, we were at 2131 Asbury Avenue. We just simply outgrew it,” said Bill. “We tried really hard to stay there, to find a way to expand it a little bit,” added Maura. A decade ago, they built a location in Upper Township to allow for some breathing room. “Then we filled that building,” Bill said. “We had two buildings bursting at the seams – so what do we do now?” “It was really important for us to stay in Ocean
City,” interjected Maura. “We’re thrilled with how it turned out, with where we are in town.” Bill is Bill McMahon III. Their dad, Bill Jr., got his start as a young man in the mail room of a Philadelphia insurance firm. He found out that the firm would pay for him to go to night school. “He realized he wanted to take advantage of that,” Maura said. “He worked his way up the ranks,” she said, then he started to work at an independent agency in the late 1960s into the early ‘70s. “He and my mom always wanted to move down the shore. He saw an opportunity to work
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for an insurance agency in Cape May and moved the whole family down here.” Their parents, Bill and Sandy, had spent their summers at the beach growing up, he in Stone Harbor, she in Longport, and when they were dating, they came to Ocean City with their friends. “They loved the shore and they wanted to make it happen,” Maura said. Eventually, he bought the Chattin-Halliday insurance company in Ocean City from Albert Halliday. “The agency was established in the 1920s, so it’s been an Ocean City business since then,” Maura said. She and Bill both got involved in the business right out of college, in the 1990s. Two sisters are not directly involved, with three more brothers working
The McMahon family business continues to grow! Visit them at Ninth Street and Simpson Avenue.
