YouSaid · the spoken record

McKeel Hagerty

lines on the record: 87
first: 2026-07-09
most recent: 2026-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, Chris Kraff and Sentry were the two big manufacturers in the United States. There were sort of some more boutique brands like Garwood and Hackercraft, which were really high-end.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people like it. There's like some interesting fascination with the US television audience of finding the treasurer in the garage. And don't you wish it was you who found it. And I find them fascinating. You may have seen one of the shows we produced for a long time. They're kind of winding down, but it was called Redline Rebuild. And it was where we would do these time-lapse rebuilding of an engine where you take a big dirty engine apart and it would all kind of like appear to assemble itself on an engine stand and then it would start. And just it was mesmerizing. That's the word I was about to say. Mesmerizing, yes”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do, and they're not all just drag races. Nothing wrong with drag races. I like them too. It kind of is a kind of data point about what makes a car cool. But I think Jason just takes it to a whole new level, for example. We also have one of our shows. And by the way, we also have, you know, we have a fast channel on Samsung TV on Amazon Prime. Our content is available out there like a digital television show. Our Barnfine Hunter show for years, you've probably seen it, which is this incredible talent in Tom Cotter going around and finding great cars in barns and kind of doing the big reveal like an antiques roadshow kind of concept, but in the garage rather than brought to some studio somewhere.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's one of the de facto platform for people watching kind of introductory level automotive content. And obviously, lots of brands are putting stuff out there. But what we realized is if you think about the big sort of arc of how people have learned about or consumed automotive media, where it's shifted since the 90s was magazines were the main platform for a long time. Then when you got the first dedicated cable network, which was auto week, speed vision, you got some of those, you started seeing auctions on there. But then a lot of that content started migrating to YouTube But what I wanted to do was do it as the same high quality like we were doing in the magazine. So hire total pros, shoot the stuff really well, you know, great cameras, great locations, all of that stuff”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's where I want to be there and present in their mind so that we help them in that transactional side. And plus, you've probably been to auctions or have watched them on television. Is they're fun. Like car auctions are super fun. It's live, it's vibrant, it's interesting. Sometimes there's multi-million dollar cars up there selling that you can't even believe anybody would pay multi-million dollars for this car. We do that too. I mean, that's why we have Broad Arrow. We connect it with some of our Concour events in many cases. They're around the world. We just had our Broad Arrow auction at the Concourse at Villa Deste, the Villa Deste Concourse, Ogonza. And that was a really successful sale and super cool place to have an auction right on Lake Como.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, the way I think about it now is most people come to us to insure a car. Then they buy the membership thing and we engage them and do media and a lot of fun stuff, invite them to our events. And about every seven years on average, somebody buys or sells a car.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prepared to build the number one live auction business, but they have to do it in a way that I'm proud of because, and I'm not saying that, you know, it's all good or bad, but I wanted to be I wanted to be very proud of the outcome because things will go wrong. You have to make things right for customers. Sometimes cars that people bring to you to sell aren't described exactly as they actually are. And you have to find that out and politely tell them, well, I'm not sure this is a million dollar car. It's a hundred thousand dollar car. And, you know, sorry. If you want us to sell for $100,000, we will, but we're not selling it for a million because it's our reputation too.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's growing rapidly. I mean, we have such a supply that way more supply than you think. And if you think about some of those other great companies like Bring a Trailer's been such a darling in this space, cars and bids, the number two in the US. But there's a supply and demand balance that everybody has to strike. Because if you flood a digital marketplace with too much supply, then the bidders go away. And so if the bidders go away, then nobody's happy. The bidders won't put their cars on it. So it's a fast build, but it's steady. The live auction side of the business brought Arrow, which was an acquisition we did after going public. That's a remarkable business because I had followed that industry for a long time around the world. But it's all about getting the right team. And in my mind, because I'm very protective of our brand and our reputation, we had to have the kind of team that wasn't.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fartner was someone. Oh, no, no. We have our own Haggerty Marketplace platform, which is. Online auctions and then you've”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the business. I'll tell you what, it's a smart team, and I love learning from them. They teach me stuff every day that I need to know.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was exactly it. I mean, if most media outlets that weren't part of our world, if they were covering the space, they were using a lot of anecdotal information, kind of dealer-fed information, or just looking at public auctions. And I love public auctions too. You can learn a lot from watching what all the different auction companies do. And now with so many good online places, it's like even more data. But what we realized with our scale is like we just had way more data points than all of that. Because again, people buying cars, insuring them with us, adding, deleting. It was just this big flow. And yeah, it took a lot of people, a lot smarter than I am to build all the, you know, the, not just the database stuff, but the analytics capability around it. And now with AI, it's even better. And then as we started realizing we could get other data sources that help us validate even more, not just in the US, but outside of the US, it's really been a fun.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That data. And that's why our partners like us, but it's a real asset to have that kind of data and then build on it every year. You know, you mentioned 371,000 new customers. We'll do quite a bit more than that in 2026. Those are all just, it's not just insurance or revenue, it's also data coming our way. What are people buying? What are they insuring them for? What do they sell? When somebody sells a car, it's also a data point. And so for us, that kind of data piece. And again, it's all a big. Not just because I'm a car person, I view it as a flywheel. It's a flywheel, and it all kind of spins and insurance is a beautiful thing, but the rest of it speeds up the flywheel. Yeah.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have by far the richest sets of data about how to value these things, and it's down to that VIN or serial number. You mentioned how does a big insurance company, you know, why didn't they do it? And I remember this conversation years ago in one of those partner discussions where I the CEO is a car guy really wanted to kind of compete with us, wasn't sure if he wanted to partner with us. And I said, well, do you know what a 1969 Camaro is? And he said, I sure do. You know, he's kind of pretty happy with himself. And I said, You may not know that in 1969 the Camaro came in 147 different variants. And that year, the least expensive one was worth about 11 grand. And the most valuable one was worth about $1.1 million. And you can't tell the difference by looking at them from the outside. You have to understand what that serial number is. And I said, we built a patented serial number decoder for all cars pre-1981 so that we could understand our universe and start providing”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, and I was a big fan of car magazines, I was a big fan of automotive media. I mean, that's how I read my way into understanding the car world and going to events. And I always remember somebody told me once that if you're going to go into a niche business that you're really proud of, you kind of need to have, you need to have the high ground on your side. And for me, the high ground was if I could have a media property where we would kind of have that intellectual high ground, that would help. The other piece is the data aspect of it. When I was growing the business and team, we have incredible teams. We're out there trying to figure it out. Valuing these cars was so tricky because there was a lot of opinions about what cars were worth, but not a lot of really good data. And so, you know, as we were investing in the media pieces, talking about cars and entertaining people, we built the resources.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partners rather than to compete with the big insurance companies, it was how do we start taking risk? So that's been a multi-year really decade-long journey that we started in 2017, got that up and running, and it was really a big key piece of how we went public in 2021. And that is that we were going to, you know, we had, everybody knew we had a unique angle on this market that our economics looked great in the business, but that we could realize even that much more. And so that's really been the next big piece of all of this. And it all kind of compounds on itself because if you insure a car, you use the club to kind of engage people. You mentioned reading the Haggerty Drivers Club magazine. I mean, that is, by the way, I don't think the word insurance is mentioned in that magazine. No, anywhere. It's a car magazine.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we started in the simplest possible way, which we were an insurance agency. You might have mentioned that even early in the first intro. And that's true. That's the easiest way to kind of get into one of these things. As I mentioned, we started with kind of a specialty product, which was ensuring special cars, the insurance policy forms were unique. Our pricing, we had a unique approach. We had this driver's club model that started really helping that compounding aspect of it. But one of the big pieces that I guess I dreamed of is that if we actually started taking real risk and became the insurance company itself, not just an agency selling policies for somebody else, it would be the same customer coming in, but we'd have so much more of a chance to really build a revenue behind it. So the other big piece after, you know, if my first aha was Driver's Club, second aha was really realizing we needed a”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To run it. That's right. Most people are space limited. Right. If they have enough money to be into it, they end up buying everything that they can afford and still store. Right. The store is the problem. The store is the problem. I'm waiting for”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At most. So, like, one of the things you asked about pricing. So, not only is the pricing on the physical car less expensive with us on the liability too. And it's exactly to that point. You can only drive one car at a time. Liability follows the person, not the car. And so we had an ad very early on in the program. We had it, there was an late collector out in the Pacific Northwest with over 2,000 cars. And we put a name, his face on one of our ads, and he said, here's Harold LeMay, our worst nightmare, because he has 2,000 cars, but we charge him only one time for liability.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like Well, right. And look, you're the typical 67 Corvette owner probably drives that car a thousand, maybe 1,500 miles a year, some years less. Some years later.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is the core emotional nugget of this business. You know, people have a toy, they spend real money on it, and they take good care of it. And wherever there is care, there is better insurance risk. So you can charge less. You charge less. You can build marketing around that. You can get a little bit of momentum going on.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's, you know, you know, and you talked about you drive your car, but you probably don't drive it very much. You probably have daily drivers that you drive more and you are less concerned about where you park it and that sort of thing. And my late mother passed away just two years ago. I remember asking her even, I'd ask her every year, her memory wasn't so great towards the end of her life. Like, mom, what made this business special? And she would just say, because people take good care of their toys”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Lots of interesting things in that company. And I convinced I met the CEO at the time and just through kind of people helped connect us. And I said, look, I think I can make you better at this one tiny little thing if you just give us a chance. And they're still a partner today, still grow, that program grows every year. And now we've just moved through the entire insurance industry. We've partnered virtually with all of the big insurance companies. And so today, if you go insure your home and your auto and everything with one of them, but you have a vintage car, collector car, whatever you want to call it, that usually comes to us. And so the big scalability of the business was, one, show up like a club, like this member organization. Two, partner rather than to compete. And if you can part, you know, because if you're small, it's impossible to compete against a huge company. But if you partner with them, it changes the game.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, we're a little company, and we're a tiny family business. Like, how the heck are you going to compete against these monsters? And so after we got the club kind of up and running, I realized, well, what if we just partnered with these companies rather than competing against them and said, look, we're going to do one thing and one thing only we're going to be expert in these cars. We know the customers really well. We're building a really big, rich bunch of data. And what if we partnered with them? And so the first big partnership like this, we landed 22, 23 years ago, and that was with All State. And AllState's huge, again, huge company. I knew they insured hundreds of thousands of these cars.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they're in it, they sell a lot of insurance and they treat this group of people USAA serving military family people and families. It just, nobody had ever done it in a business like ours. And so it took a little while to convince them that that was the way to go to market. And we could change the way we were thinking. But you mentioned something that was another piece in this, which was the next aha. And the next aha was that most of these cars were insured by the big insurance companies. So thanks State Farm, All State, you know, today progressive, Geico, everybody.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took me a few years. Yeah. You know, we were very close family. It was really fun to work together with everybody in those early days. My dad retired after kind of that late 90s. My mom retired shortly thereafter. I was working with my sisters. They kind of gave me enough rope to go test it out that if we just changed the dialogue and acted just we're going to build an automotive branded business that happens to sell insurance and we're going to do it around this membership concept. It wasn't like no one had ever done something like that. If you think in the early days, AAA was kind of like that. The motor club, they're very different than that now. If you were to even think of something like AARP, which is a different sort of segment, like there is a...”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a big slog. Yeah. A lot of great, I can tell you. I was trying to help out the family business kind of from a distance. And the challenge with insurance, If we would just stop acting like an insurance business and start acting more like a club for car owners. It would just transform 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. And I literally wrote this idea of like turn Haggerty 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 then. And I went home the next week.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had already started the boat or the car business in the early 1990s. I've had a couple of aha moments. And this one, I remember it like we were sitting here today. And it was the fall of 1995. I was doing my doctoral work in Boston. And we were reading Plato's Republic in Greek. So I'm up in Boston College. We're working on Plato's Republic in Greek.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, of course. Astonishing. Well, the most valuable car today, people will tell you, it's a Ferrari GTO. 1962, they're worth, you know, tens and tens of millions of dollars. But in 1970s, you could buy them for 15 grand. They were nothing. And now they're 50 million, $60 million.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we kind of approached it as a family like, hey, these are you can get a lot of car for not a lot of money and you can have something really fun to enjoy. And so that was just my life growing up.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convince this older gentleman in our town to sell us this 9 11S for 500 bucks. And I had to mow an awful lot more lawns and to sell a lot more apples out of my orchard to buy the parts to restore the car. But by the time I could drive, it was ready. Good planning. It was great planning. And I can tell you there was nobody in my high school driving a Porsche. So I would sneak it into the teacher's parking lot because no one would believe that a student had a Porsche. That's right. That's hilarious. But it's also like back then in the 80s. Cars like that were not expensive. They were not considered to be necessarily that valuable. They were just kind of cool older cars.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was. And my dad was a do it yourselfist restorer guy in the garage and both my sisters also restored cars. They were older than I was with him. And then I was the third along. And we”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I will also note it was the only really good car deal I've ever done in my life. So just for what it's worth.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also a car guy. And so, you know, this was just the fun combining the business knowledge with a passion. And again, my sisters and I kind of all helped out when it was much smaller. And we kind of stumbled into the car insurance business, which was much, much larger than the wooden boat business.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are enough wooden boats to ensure to sustain a very small family business with a few employees. It was kind of a retirement gig for my mom and dad. They had had a general insurance agency and they sold that and they wanted something else to do. And they thought, but there were a couple of principles that were in the back of their mind, which was they wanted a national business instead of a local one. They wanted one that was in a niche rather than sort of general purpose. And they wanted one that could have real sustainability over a long period of time. So Wooden Boats was an unoccupied business space, so literally unmet need. They matched the unmet need with an interest in that underlying interest in wooden boats and in cars. My dad was a wooden boat vintage boat guy.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, with mom and dad, my two sisters, and all of a sudden, I found myself no longer thinking about exams and a dissertation and all those things and thinking about this really cool business.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was this incredible experience because I got to work on my languages. I learned a lot about leadership actually at the seminary because there's some pretty extraordinary individuals there. And then there is no doubt about it. You are there to study to become a priest. And while that was not my driving reason to go there, it's a little bit like Michael Corleone. They kind of drag you in. And, you know, before you know it, you're suddenly thinking about becoming a priest. I didn't become a priest because then I moved on and started my doctoral work in philosophy up in Boston and did not complete that because the family business called. And I had worked in it during the summers up until then.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I kind of think about my academic career in a couple of phases. I was an entrepreneur from the time I was young. I had a bunch of businesses when I was very young and thought I would go study business in college and I ended up falling in love with philosophy and literature and all these things was philosophy in English major. I was a good student. And I thought I'd get my PhD, but I needed a little break to work on languages and some things. And I learned about St. Vladimir's, which is just north of New York here. It's up in kind of near Rye or Scarsdale.”
2026-07-09 · Masters in Business · Insuring Rare and Collectible Cars and Boats with McKeel Hagerty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source