I am touched that Traverse City Business News named my mom, Louise Hagerty, to its local “Business Legends Hall of Fame.” She deserves it. She was a co-founder of Hagerty. Not a helper. A founder.

She and my dad started the company in April 1984 out of the basement of our home on Old Mission Peninsula in Traverse City, Michigan. They had one phone line and an answering machine. My dad was the salesman—outward-facing, relational, a natural storyteller. My mom was the operator. She built the machine that made his promises real.

If you want to understand Hagerty, you have to understand that division of labor. Dad had vision. Mom made it work. She was the one who brought in the key early talent, who insisted on systems and discipline before we even knew we needed them, and who understood—earlier than anyone—that technology wasn’t optional if we wanted to scale service without losing quality. She wasn’t loud about any of this. The standard just exuded from her. You felt it in how the work was done.

When someone asked her once why the business worked so well, she had a one-line answer: “People take good care of their toys.” That’s my mom. Simple, true, and it contains the entire business model in seven words. Where there’s passion, there’s care. Where there’s care, there’s better risk.

She didn’t manage through confrontation. She set clear expectations, built good process, and then let people perform. If something wasn’t working, she didn’t make it a personality issue—she made it a structure issue. Clear ownership, clear goals, accountability. She didn’t have patience for people who talked and talked and talked. She respected preparation and results.

She was also very polite—and that wasn’t incidental. Manners and decorum mattered to her. She saw politeness as an equalizer: it set a standard for how people should treat each other regardless of title or role. That worked together with everything else—the process, the discipline, the expectations. Standards weren’t just about output. They were about how you conducted yourself.
A lot of our best early employees came through her network. She trusted family and friends, and many of the people she hired were the children of her close friends—not as favors, but because she knew their character. That was her lens: hire people you can trust, then build the structure that lets them do their best work.

She also believed that rituals matter. Holiday parties, all-company picnics with families, gift exchanges—those weren’t optional extras to her. They were part of how you build a real culture. Process holds a company together. Rituals make it feel like something worth belonging to.

One thing people may not know about her is how competitive she was. She was an MSU Spartan through and through. She watched basketball religiously. In her later years she took up fishing in Florida, and she didn’t just fish—she became a Master Angler. In 2019 she caught a 40-inch Snook in Boca Grande. Her guide, Jesse, can tell you: she usually caught the most fish in the group. That same edge showed up in how she led. Results matter.

Community wasn’t separate from the business for her—it was part of the point. She served on the boards of the City Opera House, Traverse City State Bank (she was the only woman on the founding board), and Central Day Care. The Hagerty Center gifts at NMC were especially meaningful to her. In 2007 she received the Athena Award for helping other women reach their potential. That wasn’t a trophy to her—it was evidence the work was real.

The lessons I carry from her are simple but not easy: High standards can be quiet—and still be non-negotiable. Good process is a form of respect. Trust good people, then expect them to be worthy of it. And if you’re going to build something meant to last, invest in the community around it, not just the company.

She inspired Soon and me to start the Boundless Futures Foundation. That work is an extension of how she lived.

Until the end, she was very proud of the business she helped found and run for so many years. When she retired, she really retired. But like with her Spartans, she remained Hagerty’s biggest fan. How lucky was I to work alongside her—and alongside my two sisters and my dad. But let’s be honest: mothers are special.