Masters in Business · Thursday, July 9, 2026
McKeel Hagerty described a pivotal moment in 1995 where he realized Hagerty could thrive by acting as a club for car owners rather than just an insurance business. This insight led him to drop out of his PhD program and shift the company's focus to building an automotive-branded business centered around membership.
“And so I was literally sitting in this Plato's Republic class and on the side of my notebook I wrote this thing like, if we would just stop acting like an insurance business and start acting more like a club for car owners, it would just transformed the conversation that you're having with people, because then you're acting more like a car person instead of an insurance person trying to sell a car person something thing, and I literally wrote this idea of like turn Haggarty into a car club.”
“I wrote it in my notebook and I closed my notebook. I went home that night to my apartment, and I dropped out of my PhD program right then, and I went home the next week.”
“But it's obvious in hindsight. Oh, of course you're going to focus on this niche that is kind of ignored, Yes, by the major insurance companies. How challenging was it to convince the rest of the fam, Hey, this is. The way to go. We're not an insurance company selling to car collectors, where car people satisfying a few of the box, checking a few of their boxes.”