Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:04 We all want a business like Netflix or Amazon prime businesses, where once a customer engages with them, it becomes automatic and a part of their lifestyle from then on. But how do you build that forever transaction? I'm Robbie Kellman Baxter, and I have been studying subscription and membership models for nearly 20 years in this podcast, my guests and I share the secrets and strategies of the membership economy. Join us for subscription stories. True tales from the trenches. McKeel Haggerty is the CEO of Haggerty, a specialty provider of classic car insurance and lifestyle company headquartered in traverse city, Michigan. He is also a co-founder and general partner at grand Rapids, Michigan based venture capital firm, grand ventures. I first met McKeel when I was working with the company, as they prepared to launch the Haggerty drivers club, even as he was leading the company and launching a new membership offering, he was also serving as global board chairman for the young president's organization, YPO a volunteer role that had him on the road for 180 days over the course of his one-year term in today's talk, we'll discuss how this insurance company has transformed into a lifestyle organization with a powerful membership offering by focusing on their forever promise.
Speaker 0 00:01:28 We'll also show you how to nurture, engage, and celebrate your super users. Those people who go beyond just being loyal subscribers and contribute their own time, resources, and skills to support your brands McKeel, welcome to subscription stories. That's great to be with you. So for people who aren't familiar with Haggerty, can you describe the organization and its origins for us?
Speaker 1 00:01:58 Sure. And it's known by many for our historic origins, which were, we were in the collector car insurance business. If you will. We actually started before then in the classic Marine insurance business. And that is in fact, that's the origin of it. It was a specialty insurance organization that was built for people who actually liked cars, not people who had to drive cars to work every single day. So already a niche already a small organization. But when you fast forward the years, since I have been leading the company in 2000, we describe ourselves as an automotive lifestyle company and primarily as a subscription and membership organization that just happens to sell insurance along the way,
Speaker 0 00:02:38 Unusual for insurance company customers to refer to themselves as members. But I remember being so struck by that when I first met you and got to know your organization and how many people approach you at car shows and events and say, Oh, Haggerty, Oh, Oh, I'm a member. I'm a member of Haggerty before launching into some kind of story about this car or that experience. What do you think makes people so passionate about what for many years, was it an insurance business?
Speaker 1 00:03:07 I think it's a real feeling of belonging. I think membership is, is a relationship that's just slightly different than a very transactional one. And you know what? One thing that makes insurance unusual as transactions go is that it's a recurring revenue model anyway. So you tend to renew your insurance every year with whatever company had before people don't change very often. In fact, I think it's on average about seven years that you even go take a look, but we had spent so much time really diving in and getting highly dedicated to our space to realizing that these aren't just customers, it's community, the automotive world is, is rich with events and media. There's all sorts of embedded media in it. Magazines, television shows, you know, as I said, events of all kinds car clubs, and maybe the most interesting part of our membership journey is simply been that in a world that was filled with all of these car clubs.
Speaker 1 00:03:57 And we refer to these as Mark clubs, M a R Q U E Mark, which reversed the brand of a car. Those have been, they're not completely dying off, but they've been kind of seriously challenged in, in this kind of more modern world of membership where membership has spent. So, uh, redefined. So you have people come up and say, Hey, look, I'm a member. I I'm so excited to be part of Haggerty. And I love probably the biggest sign of it is I love what you do for us. That's not, you know, a feeling of, I love what you sell to me. So completely different type of transaction.
Speaker 0 00:04:27 Yeah. That's really interesting. I love what you've done for me or what you do for me. I'd love to get your take on who it is that you are really optimized for as a member. Who is it that you want as a member, a member of Haggerty?
Speaker 1 00:04:39 Sure. I think this kind of goes with my philosophy about leadership and building businesses in general, which is you want to go and, and try to tap into human needs that already exist rather than to try to find mysterious ones that don't exist or to convince large numbers of people to buy something that never was created before. And when you talk to my parents who started the business back when it was very, very small and my mom, who's 85 and elderly in her, uh, mind and body at this point, uh, we were at a Thanksgiving dinner and I asked her mom, you know, I feel sometimes so lucky. I'm so grateful for the fact that you and dad started this thing so long ago. And she just had one phrase, well, people take good care of their toys. And I heard her say that over and over again, but I think that's the core human thing underlying our whole business is that when you go all the way to buy something that you like, and it doesn't matter whether it's a car or a bicycle or a stereo or whatever it is you really like, and you're passionate about it, you're going to tend to take better care of it than you would just something else in your life.
Speaker 1 00:05:36 And, you know, we continue to add offerings around it, but it's all based on that core idea of passion. I would say we're beginning our first, really serious journey down different sort of member segments, where we actually have to have sort of different hold hog, different member offerings, just because the way people describe their interests to be so different. So quick example, some people like to just of show their vehicles and just kind of drive them. Other people are pretty serious about competition, motor racing, that sort of thing. Those groups start separating after a while. Like they just, they will acknowledge that there are other car people out there, but if you're big and attract driving, if you're big into racing, even on an amateur basis, you're just you think of yourself as a different person. I use a different, you know, literally it's I race, I don't just own a vehicle. So we're starting to experiment with some of that stuff. But the core idea is still the same. It's all underneath there. And you can build almost anything on a core human drive if you really understand it. Well,
Speaker 0 00:06:30 The offering that you created that you're now expanding into layers is the Haggerty drivers' club. And I remember when you were trying to decide kind of what would that be? One of the exercises we went through was really understanding a person who loves cars, this passionate person throughout their life cycle. So from the moment that they realized there was such a thing as cars until the moment they were no longer interested, which might coincide with the moment they died, what was that journey? And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that journey of your members that you've seen them go through where we're certainly buying a car, insuring a car might be part of that journey, but kind of where the divergence is from that moment of buying a car and insuring it and the journey of a driver of someone who loves
Speaker 1 00:07:17 Well, I think, I think that's right. It kind of goes to that broad idea of, you know, identifying an existing need of something. That's just like a human drive. And it starts often, and it's often described by people who get really into cars as some of their earliest memories from their childhood memories of what their parents identifying cars. Sometimes they didn't come from a car family. It was, uh, you know, their in fact, her parents would describe them. I couldn't figure out why this kid was in cars car so much. I knew nothing about them and we had very boring cars, but they just fell in love with it and learned the names and the brands and the drivers and all the things that go into it. And then it typically the real car person's experience is a little different than the typical just driver.
Speaker 1 00:07:55 When you get your driver's license at 16 or 17 years old, is that, you know, they wanted to have something special, even if it was very inexpensive and it's, and then it's worth noting. Probably the biggest thing with this world is people either assume that our space is either for the very, very wealthy or for a very, very antique sort of thing. So that model T Ford kind of things, and it's not at all. In fact, um, you know, a lot of people's car passions is with everyday vehicles, very inexpensive vehicles. It's actually much more accessible, much more of a mass market thing, but then a lot of people presume, but our job as we created our membership offering was to realize that, you know, if the only gateway that we had was they had to own a car and they had to insure it with us.
Speaker 1 00:08:33 Then we're really limiting ourselves is that we had to start tapping into those earliest passion, foundational periods of time. So we created a lot of different in our club, a lot of different youth offerings from judging to youth design competitions, to all sorts of things like this. So we run hundreds of youth car judging programs around the world now, which is pretty interesting. And then we even started taking issues like creating what we call our Heggerty drivers experiences, where we teach young people to drive manual transmissions, because it's becoming a little bit of a lost art, but then here's another interesting human desire. I guess we discovered around this interest in vehicles. And that is that, and this is my nod to Neil Ferguson, the great thinker that I think he just identified these six, what he called killer apps of Western society. And one of them is shopping.
Speaker 1 00:09:19 People do love to shop. They, they love to browse things, whether they're buying or not. They like to shop. And I think a lot of the reasons that people love the internet and internet shopping, not just with vehicles, but with anything, clothing to sports equipment is that you can kind of browse. You can kind of shop it's easy. You don't have to leave your home. And that's a big part of the car world. A lot of the reasons people would buy car magazines through the years was to look at the ads and the classified ads in the back and those sorts of things. We needed to create a solution for that. And we also realized in our space, there was very scant data around the collector vehicle world. It was all really ad hoc. If you wanted to know what something is worth, there was a handful of dealers that were a little bit more expert.
Speaker 1 00:09:55 There were a few publications, but they weren't really based on data. So we, we went out and said, we really have to become masters of this data and make it publicly available. What vehicles sell for at our car auctions. Like you see them on TV and plus private transactions. So at first we were saying, well, people need this so that we can make sure we ensure them properly, but actually they're using the valuations to go shopping. They just like to just shop, Hey, you know, I've always wondered what a 63 Corvette split window is worth. And so they just kind of browse around on it. So again, another human need identified another solution for it and all with the idea that it just kind of keeps bringing people back then you, you know, you mature into the car owning yours because there's the prime buying your sent to be about 40 to 60 years old.
Speaker 1 00:10:37 That's often when you know, your core human needs of food and shelter are taken care of, and maybe your kids are starting to grow up. If you have a family and then you have a little extra income and you can spend it not just on an inexpensive car, but maybe one of your real aspirational ones. And then it does taper a little bit later in life. One of the, not anomalies, but features of the baby boomer generation who, you know, very wealthy generation very have been very much in the, from control of the automotive world for a long time. Typically they tend to simplify their car collection and they're collecting ideas later in life. You know, if they had four cars, they might reduce them to two or down to one fun car because they have other things they like to do. Like people are getting smaller homes and, you know, would prefer experiences over having things. And that all works perfectly because we have now more experiences that we can offer more driving tours and things that we can do.
Speaker 0 00:11:26 So can you quickly describe what the Haggerty drivers club is? What benefits members get and what access they're granted through membership beyond the, you know, kind of insurance offering,
Speaker 1 00:11:40 Of course, very simply. And now you can actually buy a higher driver's club membership without being insured with us. So that was a big feature of getting it launched, but there is a freemium offering, which you helped us understand, which was awesome, which is we call a test driver and anybody who signs up to be a higher D drivers club test driver, you create an account online and then you get access to a lot of our media valuation tools and you get invited to events pretty simple when you go to the paid version of it, which is $45. And then there's some kind of add ons that you can add to it for a little bit more, but the core features to it were emergency roadside assistance. So not unlike a AAA, but really niche-y. So it was really designed for people with special vehicles, a magazine that comes six times a year, access to premium events, again, more access to more media, and then a pretty and becoming increasingly rural bus discount program, uh, products and features that, you know, we've gone out to source for our members.
Speaker 1 00:12:35 So whether it's a discount on something or somebody who offer that's made it only available to our members. And I think that program is two years old, and I think we have over 30 partner programs in it in the future, of course, we're going to just keep and building on all of these things and really looking at our membership more as a marketplace than just a, a membership thing. And I think the big evolution for us now is this movement from I pay $45 and I get these six features to I not only get these features, but now really get to connect with this larger car community. So our membership journey is kind of, is now moving from the one-to-one to the one-to-one to many. And that's our, that's the Haggerty drivers club.
Speaker 0 00:13:16 The reasons that I was really excited to have you on the show to share your story. And one of them is that you've really taken to heart, this idea of looking at your customer and saying, how would I treat them differently if they were truly a member, which I think was kind of in your DNA at the beginning, but you've really formalized with the equity drivers club, with the move, to being more of a lifestyle brand of saying, instead of saying, we're going to solve this specific problem, which is when I buy an expensive toy or a toy that I really love, even if it's not expensive, I want to make sure that it's well cared for, you know, hence the insurance to saying, I want this to be part of my lifestyle, whether or not I own a car at any particular point in time.
Speaker 0 00:13:56 And you pointed out that the Heggerty drivers club, you don't even have to have insurance. You can purely be, you know, a, an HDC member to get access to these things. And you've really moved in terms of your core competencies, right? Because being an insurance organization and having those kinds of skills and those kinds of professionals on your team is quite different from what you need to provide a marketplace, to build community and to create content, which are three things that you've spoken about that are better benefits of membership. So commerce, the ability to buy things, physical products, content being your video, your magazine, maybe even some of the events that you have, and then this huge community that you talked about. What was that like moving your organization to this kind of a model from, from an operational perspective, following that customer, that member, what did it take from an organizational perspective? Move it
Speaker 1 00:14:52 Toward this kind of, well, I don't think it'll ever be done. And part of it is we're a little bit of a victim of our success in that we continue to grow very, very fast, and we have a lot of confidence in our ability to grow organically many, many years into the future. So, you know, now it's hundreds of thousands of new people coming to our membership offering through first, finding us through that insurance transaction and then realizing there was a whole lot more here. And the journey internally was often this kind of identity problem. I mean, I can, I and my senior team can talk about all these cool things all day long, but if you have, you know, whatever, we have 14 or 1500 employees and, you know, 900 of them only do insurance stuff all day long. And they kind of feel really proud of what they're doing and they should be.
Speaker 1 00:15:35 But then they say, well, we're kind of making all the money here. What's all the rest of this stuff we're doing. You can actually get a lot more internal resistance to the thing that's makes you special. And as I've tried to describe that, you know, organically, if we had just stayed in the insurance business, we'd be the fraction of our size. And we might be growing sort of three to five percentage points per year, instead of 20 percentage points per year. And it's just convincing everybody that it's a fundamentally different identity and you don't have to be a car expert to work in an automotive business, but you better show some interest in it. You know, you better be willing to sort of say, Hey, we're doing an employee driving experience last year, we had almost 700 employees also drive manual transmissions and learn to drive.
Speaker 1 00:16:15 So we're pretty proud of those sorts of things, but it's, it's that internal identity stuff, breaking down the internal barriers of resistance, even little things like how in the world, deep underneath the whatever number of thousands of pages that exist on somebody's website, do you get rid of Haggerty insurance, you know, underneath there? So Google keeps searching. It is that it's Haggerty. I understand there was a core business years ago around Bloomberg, but nobody sits there and says, Oh, Bloomberg, the data services company, you know, it's Bloomberg. It does a lot of different things. And that's, I had to convince people that it was okay just to be Haggerty and that we're an automotive brand and we're a membership organization that happens to sell a lot of insurance. And it was a lot of that redefinition that continues to going on. Go on today. In fact, I was in a lot of meetings about this over the week. Like, how do we really finish this job? Like when does the transformation it, does it ever end it? And maybe it doesn't, but that's okay. All the dials, all the lights are blinking green for us, so good stuff is happening.
Speaker 0 00:17:09 It's very exciting as an outsider who had a small role in that transformation to see kind of where you were and where you are. And while there certainly is more to be done, a lot of the book, the cultural transformation, and also the operational heavy lifting, the technology infrastructure and the team, having the right people on team, all of that, you've really done an extraordinary job, I think of continuing to deliver on your core value and also expanding to continue on the journey with your esta members in terms of,
Speaker 1 00:17:41 Well, thank you. It's really been extraordinary and we've gained confidence in it every day, but it, you know, it's, it's, uh, there are a lot of pieces in it. I've, you know, even we are, we're not a public company. I've had a board of directors for over 15 years of independent, almost all independent directors, because I wanted to be held accountable for my ideas, not just to be sort of romanced by them. And it's a challenge, even with them sometimes to realize like, there is no business model that looks exactly like ours. We're creating one that, you know, we're going to use pieces of different things that we see that we think will work in this space. We think we understand it better than anyone, but I can't point you neatly to one other model as an exact corollary to what it is we're doing. And I like being out there on that high wire act. But if you're one of my board members and you're new to it, I'd be like, wait a minute. Wow. This media thing's really expensive. You're sure you're getting the ROI for it. And it's yes, yes. We can explain it, but it's, uh, it's really not that new business model. Right. But in our way of its expression, it's not been done exactly this way. So you know what? I have a lot of fun doing it, so it's okay.
Speaker 0 00:18:46 Yeah. You are always having fun. You're so high energy and enthusiastic, you know, one of my guests from last season, Hunter made Lee, the CEO of Vienna, which is a software as a service company, talked about this issue of there not being a real playbook. And even for him who was somebody who had been at multiple SAS companies, Salesforce, HubSpot, and so on, he said, you know, it's not like I can just take what we did there and bring it to an organization and just HubSpot it up. Right. Right. Every company has their own DNA. And there's certainly things that you can take from other membership models from other subscription-based businesses. But at its core, Haggerty is a unique entity. And so that's the first thing that you have to understand. And then the other thing that I guess your constituents, whether it's your employees, your board directors, your customers need to understand also is that while it is a unique entity, many of the principles and the trends that are happening in the broader world can be applied at Haggerty to allow the organization to more fully achieve the goals and solve the problems of your member.
Speaker 1 00:19:48 Well, I think that's right. And I think, you know, really there's, it's not like a big hidden strategy, but I think, you know, certainly there are things that we don't broadly broadcast, but I'm pretty clear just coming on a podcast like this and explaining, you know, this is our model, it's a membership business model, recurring revenue bundle. That includes a lot of insurance, includes a lot of other features, but it's really the execution. That is probably what, as you so clearly and helped us understand. It's, it's how people feel about you. It's not just what you say. It's not just what you sell. It's not what you offer. It's how they feel. And different companies just have been able to express that really, really well. You know, we look at a lot of, for example, Peloton, which I'm sure everybody talks about. And as you know, I mean, if you don't think every other fitness manufacturer didn't think about putting a screen on their exercise bike or a rowing machine or treadmill and say, wow, we're, we're connected to the internet, wouldn't it be great. That's not what they did. I mean, there's so many little differences with the Peloton way that they build community. And plus just, just a heaping load of really creative digital product, which is not easy and just put a badge on it or add some little feature and say, Hey, I'm just adding another revenue line and we'll call a membership. It really takes something more. It's a journey now. And it will never end.
Speaker 0 00:21:00 And a lot of this journey has been, I mean, you've been very fortunate or there's some challenges with it too, of having what I call super users. These incredibly intensely engaged customers who go beyond being customers, subscribers members, and want to devote their own resources to being a bigger part of your brand. In some cases, that means they spend their own money. In some cases, that means they spend a lot of time toward the wellbeing of the community and the brand. I know that Haggerty has more super users than nearly any organization that I've ever worked with. And in terms of the intensity and passion that they feel toward, uh, toward the organization, maybe you can share an example or two of, uh, of some of the super users that you've gotten to know whether they're the Indian sufferable know at all category or in one of the other kinds of personas. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:21:47 Yeah. It's really the kind of delicious mix of the car world, where you just get these fantastic stories. You know, one of the super simple marketing tricks that we did early on as we were launching our membership model was we were kind of known at events for having these specific type of bag that we'd hand out. And we would just carpet bomb events with these well-designed bags and they were kind of a cloth kind of, you see them everywhere now. And when you'd start seeing people come back the year later with that, they had taken 10 of them and had sewn together, a raincoat out of our Haggerty bags or made a car cover out of them. Or we started randomly seeing people travel around the world and send us photos from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro to Tierra Del Fuego, to all the pyramids in Egypt, standing there with a Haggerty bag like these, just these fan stories or people wanting to write in the magazine or workforce for free or create a Haggerty event in their town.
Speaker 0 00:22:43 Another organization that you are very involved with that is known for its super users is YPO young presidents organization, where you served as a global chair, I think in 2016, is that right? 2016, 17, yes. 2016 and 17. Both organizations have, have been very successful at building super users, people who go beyond just being paying members to contribute their own time and resources for the good of the community. What has been your experience with YPO and why you, I mean, you're an incredibly busy guy you're running this business, you just talked about how you're growing it. You're entering all these new markets, you're expanding your capabilities. I think you told me you traveled 180 days during your term, your one-year term, uh, as chair of YPO, what made you contribute so much of your own time and resources for the good of, of an organization where you were a paying member?
Speaker 1 00:23:32 Well, clearly mental illness that travel that much, but no, I was, it was really an honor to serve as global chairman of YPO. For those who don't know, it's the really, the world's largest CEO or organization for kind of medium and businesses. So it's not for just entrepreneurial startups. You have to have a minimum of 50 employees and revenue numbers. And we have almost 30,000 CEO members in over 90 countries and a hundred chapters in over 90 countries. So big global organization, super interesting for me, I love to travel. So I knew I would do some travel, but you know, YPO, his model is that yeah, you pay dues and there thousands of dollars a year, in some cases, a lot more than that based on kind of local fees that people add into the model. But the real beauty of it is that the value comes from members contributing time and talent and their own resources.
Speaker 1 00:24:21 So from almost the very, my very first experience in YPO, when I joined, it was the incredible generosity of fellow members to say, Hey, let me fly up and see you. You're working on a, something, you have an issue in your family business or something you're working on. I have an idea for you and you just, you couldn't pay him. You couldn't afford to pay them if you tried. And so it was really built on this virtuous cycle of each member giving to each other. And the name that YPO uses for these people is champions. When you are not just a member, but you actually create value with you create an event and I've created hundreds of events now, but just think I've created YPO events in the car world, where in all invite YPO members to come to a unique automotive experience. So I'm, I'm the champion of that event.
Speaker 1 00:25:02 I'm not getting paid for it. I don't get anything from it. It's just, it's a way to share my knowledge and insight or access to something unique with my fellow YPO members. So the beauty of YPO was that it's almost becomes a like one upsmanship. What more can I give and not just to get praise because you do get praise, but you know, we're also, as you said, really, really busy people. And I just became enamored with this fact of this incredibly busy group of people who could just give so much time and yet flourish in their business lives. And it's not just about making money even in their business lives. I think it's the quality of the person that does well in that organization. They also tend to have pretty good family relationships. They tend to do a lot of community work. They tend to have pretty good relationships with their family.
Speaker 1 00:25:45 So I think it draws people who want to be creators in their space, but who are willing to give a lot of their time. I think he might've had a conversation with our long time CEO, Scott Martel, great friend of mine and great contributor to the organization. As you know, he did the calculation of my gosh, if you ever had to pay for the champion time that YPO gets, it'd be, it costs you a million dollars a month to join, to join the organization. So, and I think that's, it's inspired me to think about our back to Haggerty, that whole idea of build community through involving people inviting them in to be part of the mix, invite them in to contribute more. So it's a model.
Speaker 0 00:26:22 Yeah, it really does. And I was struck as you were talking about YPO and yes, indeed. I'm Scott Mardel. I was able to interview him and people that are interested. You can link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1 00:26:32 Great thinker, a great thinker, incredibly artistic.
Speaker 0 00:26:35 Yeah. I really enjoyed talking to him, but I am struck by this shared thing that there's so much value in the community. And I feel like Haggerty's enjoyed that for a long time organically, but with your HDC, you're just sort of getting into that, tapping into the energy and the passion to let your members help each other, which is often honestly, you know, hashtag pro tip. If you're building a membership model, the most valuable thing is most likely to be the members themselves helping each other
Speaker 1 00:27:05 From the experts, uh, wisdom you are. I think you're absolutely right. And I've experienced it so much, both in YPO and on our development of our membership offerings at Haggerty. And we're actually in the process of launching a whole new membership tier, I'll be a completely separate group at Haggerty for our kind of ultra high net worth space. And yeah, those have been done a lot. You know, you think of the Amex black card type offerings, but it will be very community-based. It will be a very, very community driven in a group of people willing to grant access to special things, but only to each other. And I think that that's really critical,
Speaker 0 00:27:39 Interesting, but often those people that a lot of want to be membership organizations say, you know, I could never reach that person, or they would never want to share. If you can create an environment that is safe, that is well facilitated. And that has the right people in it. People will talk and they will devote their time. And you might even get them to give you 180 days a year if you provide that value because it's such a unique resource for people, those connections are tremendously valuable. Now I want to close out for someone to get your advice for people, especially people who've run successful businesses for a long time that are now in the process of rethinking what's possible and expanding to kind of refocus on the member's journey, as opposed to just the products we've always sold in the past. What would be your advice for organizations that find themselves in kind of a similar position to the one that you might might've been in? Maybe let's say five years,
Speaker 1 00:28:33 First and foremost, you have to think longterm, this would be very hard to do from like a public company quarter by quarter perspective, because I just think, unless you're Jeff Bezos who can stare down his entire board and shareholder group and say, you will sit tight and make money. When I say you're going to make money. Most people don't have that luxury because it's not that you won't make money. In fact, you could make money in so many new ways. And in fact, I believe reinforce the revenue streams that you have in your more transactional business models. So you've got to think long-term, and don't whether it's with your board or your finance team or whoever, or with yourself, don't get yourself back into the corner of this. I got to make money on this in the first six months. So thinking really longterm, I think is really important.
Speaker 1 00:29:14 Second piece is be prepared to test yourself out across a broad range of activities that you didn't think you'd have to be good at before. You know, I mentioned media, I mentioned the data side of our business. I've, you know, mentioned that, you know, some of the new offerings that we're starting to roll out is that you're going to become inventors of new things, and you're going to want to set them up as experiments. And, you know, Jim Collins bulletin, cannibals, but you're going to be launching a lot of new things and not all of those soldiers will make it back from the front line. So you just have to be willing to be ready to do some things that you'd never thought possible in this digital world though. I think that this idea of, you know, you talked about the customer to member journey is that the disciplines around digital product design are just going to become ever more important in this space.
Speaker 1 00:30:00 And there are an awful lot of people that have a good idea for a business or a good idea of even how to translate the business into something that looks more subscription or membership model, but they really don't dive into the weeds of that customer experience. Do you actually click through every page of your website or your mobile app or your listen to your, you know, what the menus sound like on your phone? Have you looked at the, what, all the correspondence that, I mean, business like ours, we send out all this correspondence and you know, Robbie, a lot of it just sucked. I mean, a lot of it was horrific compliance-based insurance stuff never mentioned what we were all about. And yet there was somewhere some department in our organization that thought they had to send it out and it had to look exactly like that.
Speaker 1 00:30:38 So be prepared to become a product leader and especially in the digital world, if you're going to go into this, you gotta be willing to go into the weeds and make sure like, Oh wow, that's, that's not very member alike. That's not very subscription. Like you have to be willing to go really deep and challenge kind of a lot of the orthodoxies of your industry to really kind of soften it up, make it more welcoming, make people feel like they're treated as a guest in your home. And if you're willing to do all of those things, it's really a transformational journey. And I can't recommend it enough
Speaker 0 00:31:08 That your point around, you know, the organizations that have been around a long time often have a lot of depth of stuff that you have to kind of Wade through and things that have been done that way, because they've always been done that way and how hard and slow going it can be to just get through the slog of all of that history. You know, when I first started working with traditional businesses that were transitioning to subscription models, you know, my career was all with subscription natives and digital natives. Up until that point, one of the metaphors that was really helpful for me was, you know, people always say, Oh, startups, you know, they're like speed boats. And you're like this slow cargo ship. That's like barely moving, you know, old company. But then you say, well, the reason that the startup can be a speed boat is because nobody's on the boat. They have no cargo. They have no people, like they can go very fast cause nobody's depending on them. Right. And when you have this big boat that has all this history and all these customers and all of this revenue riding on it, changing direction is just a harder task that requires.
Speaker 1 00:32:07 Yes. And you know, you'll find yourself kind of feeling like that, you know, school teacher with the rule around the knuckles a lot, if you want to go to that level, you just, you cannot relent. I mentioned this whole thing about the Haggerty insurance, go to Google maps and look up what our headquarters says on Google maps. It says I already insurance. I can't figure out how to get that thing off of there. You know? So it's just like, it, it will just like, there'll be things like that that just drive you insane. And yet it's just part of the journey. And so unless you're, you know, really hotheaded you'll make it, you're going to have to have a lot of patients to make the transformation and have it feel real again in the minds and hearts of your members.
Speaker 0 00:32:45 I want to close with a speed round. If you're up for it. Couple of fun questions, first subscription you ever had Broden track magazine, favorite subscription right now, goodness, monocle magazine, a time you felt like a member like you really belonged. That's your question that you helped me with for sure.
Speaker 1 00:33:01 It's been YPO. I mean, just, you know, YPO, I mean, just from the beginning, I felt like I was with my people.
Speaker 0 00:33:07 And your favorite way to recognize a super-user
Speaker 1 00:33:12 Is when they print up their own business cards with your logo on it. So, um, yeah, I get that all the time. I'll walk into some, somebody will hand me a business card with my logo on it and I'm like, huh, you don't work for us, but they do or they'll make up clothing with your logo on it, which is also awesome. T-shirts that sort of thing. So it's all about brand identity and yes, it drives the legal department nuts, but I think it's a sign of a super user.
Speaker 0 00:33:36 Yeah, absolutely. You know, your members love you when they have the business card and the t-shirt to prove it.
Speaker 1 00:33:42 Oh yes, yes. You've won. You've won self-made business cards and t-shirts so
Speaker 0 00:33:47 Thank you so much McKeel for being a guest on subscription stories. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1 00:33:52 Thank you, Robbie. You have been an important part of our subscription and membership transformation and I'm a super fan of your work and look forward to watching all your success in the future.
Speaker 0 00:34:09 That was Maciel Haggerty, CEO of Haggerty. For more information about Haggerty, go to haggerty.com and for more about subscription stories, as well as a transcript of my conversation with McKeel, go to Robbie Kellman, baxter.com/podcast. Also, if you like what you heard, please take a moment to write a review and give us a rating and mention McKeil's interview with you. Especially enjoyed it, reviews matter so much in helping others find us. Thanks for your support. And thanks for listening to subscription stories.
