State Farm agent finds success with focus on minorities

Vivian Mora has a long history of helping the Hispanic community in the Birmingham area.

Her State Farm insurance agency, with offices in Hoover and Irondale, was honored late last year as the Alabama Small Business of the Year among businesses with 11-50 employees.

Her outreach to minority communities played a big part in her success since opening her agency on Lorna Road 13 years ago, she said.

Mora was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a Spanish father and a Danish-Yugoslavian mother and is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

She spent more than 20 years in language teaching and translation in Spain, Brazil and the United States. After moving to the Birmingham area in 2000, she co-hosted educational radio and TV programs in Alabama, while pioneering bilingual positions for international business development and serving as a liaison with the Hispanic community for local governments and other agencies.

She supported her husband, Hernan Prado, in starting a bilingual marketing and media firm called Hola Latino in 2003.

Both of them were active with the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, and Mora was elected chairwoman of the Hispanic Business Council for a two-year term and provided leadership for educational conferences and workshops for Hispanic small businesses.

Her husband’s business thrived for about five years, but when the recession hit in 2007 and 2008, the business came on hard times, going from more than 150 clients to about five and having to let go of 18 employees in two months, Mora said.

She and her husband spent most of their savings covering the bills, and they knew it was time to adjust career plans.

Six months prior to Hola Latino’s collapse, a recruiter for State Farm had approached Mora about becoming an insurance agent. When she contacted him back almost a year later, the opportunity was still there.

Mora opened her own State Farm agency in Hoover in January 2009, and she and her husband moved to the Green Valley community by Star Lake.

Thirteen years later, Mora has grown the business to the point where her agency has assisted more than 5,000 families with protection plans that include auto insurance, homeowners insurance, renter’s insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, home loans and refinancing, college funds and retirement accounts.

In April 2020, she opened a second location in Irondale, where the couple previously lived. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, her agency sold more than 3,000 new policies between the two locations, she said. Her office achieved the State Farm President’s Club in the bank, health and life category, meaning her office was among the top 50 out of 19,000 agents in the country, she said.

Her agency specializes in helping Hispanic clients and people who are new to America, she said. She has 12 employees in the Hoover office and six in Irondale, with 90% of them bilingual in languages that include English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Her employees are from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Yemen, she said.

Mora has been a member of the Hoover Area Chamber of Commerce since opening her insurance business in 2009 and was elected to the chamber’s board of directors in 2021.

She helps promote chamber events and initiatives with Hispanic and Latino business owners and helped get Hispanic restaurants to participate in Hoover Restaurant Week.

Mora also serves on the board of directors for the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and formerly was a member of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama; a bilingual public information liaison for the Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency; program coordinator for the Alabama Latin American Society and bilingual program coordinator and conference mediator for the Birmingham Pledge Foundation.

She also is a big supporter of community events, with her agency helping sponsor almost 50 events in the greater Birmingham area in the past two years.

Her award as Small Business of the Year came from the Business Council of Alabama and Chamber of Commerce Association of Alabama.

Forty-five businesses across the state were chosen as finalists, and four were chosen as winners by out-of-state judges based on criteria that included community involvement, chamber participation and business success.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 2:13 p.m. on Jan. 24 to better reflect the Vivian Mora State Farm agency's specialty areas, number of employees in each office and the countries from which they come.