Posted 9:30 pm Sunday, November 29, 2009
Hagan Dives Into Franchising After Working At Trane
When Lisa Hagan was growing up in Tyler, Trane was more than just a place where her father went off to work.
Social life revolved around the air-conditioner maker. Workers became friends. Workers' wives became friends, and their offspring became childhood companions as well.
Eventually, Mrs. Hagan went to work for Trane and spent two decades with the company. Her father, Gary Cluck, spent 40 years with Trane, working in human resources.
Today, Mrs. Hagan co-owns a Fresh Fruit Bouquet Co. franchise with Mary Myrtis Smith, a RE/MAX realtor.
Mrs. Hagan is a lifelong Tyler resident. She attended Clarkston Elementary, Moore Middle School and Robert E. Lee High School, where she graduated in 1980.
She studied business at Stephen F. Austin State University but decided to return to Tyler after two years and get into the work force, starting a job with the Manpower employment agency.
"I just decided I was ready to move back to Tyler," Mrs. Hagan said. "I got married not too long after that. I decided to go to work instead of school."
In 1984, she followed in her father's footsteps at Trane, which had given her so many fond memories.
"I remember going to Christmas parties," Mrs. Hagan said. "They had children's Christmas parties. It was a good place to work. It was like a big family. My dad had worked there. A lot of his friends worked there. I had always wanted to work there. That's where everybody in Tyler wanted to work."
She started as a drafting-department secretary and worked in that role in engineering and pricing before becoming a pricing specialist.
Mrs. Hagan made a minor news splash around 1987 when she fell into a well at the home of her husband's grandmother in Marshall. She noticed a "smushy spot" on the front porch, and while trying to avoid that spot by leaping over it, she didn't jump far enough and fell through.
The porch was built over an old well, and Mrs. Hagan fell 35 feet into the watery bottom. What she thought was a snake swam across her arm.
"I started hollering," she said.
Uninjured, Mrs. Hagan was able to climb her way out, and the incident resulted in a newspaper brief.
Uninjured, Mrs. Hagan was able to climb her way out, and the incident resulted in a newspaper brief.
"It said, 'A woman allegedly fell in a well,'" she said. "There was no allegedly to it."
As a Trane pricing specialist, Mrs. Hagan handled bidding to supply air-conditioner units to projects, primarily apartment complexes, on the East and West Coasts. She helped the company supply units to projects in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania to the east and California, Oregon and Washington to the west.
Mrs. Hagan worked for Trane until 2006, when she launched her search for a franchise opportunity. "I decided I was ready to do something different," she said.
The New York-based Fresh Fruit Bouquet Co. designs and builds fruit bouquets and arrangements, according to the company Web site.
The company has nine outlets nationwide, with Mrs. Hagan's franchise the only one in Texas.
The company also has franchises in California, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Michigan and North Carolina.
"We had looked at different franchises and just picked this one," Mrs. Hagan said. "They seemed to be a little more free than some of the other franchises we looked at.
"Tyler didn't have anything like this at the time. I thought this was something that Tyler needed. They had cookie bouquets and a couple of things like that. I thought that fruit would be a good, healthy alternative."
Located at 111 E. Seventh St. in the Bergfeld Center, the franchise has catered to notable events, such as Tyler Cattle Barons' parties and the party for Tyler Junior College's "Nutcracker" cast.
Mrs. Hagan said two standouts for her were catering a 95th birthday party for a Henderson woman and a coming-home party for a soldier returning from Iraq.
Surprise deliveries are fun, she added.
"I like delivering," she said. "That's my favorite part. Everybody is always glad to see me when I come. It's usually something they have not gotten before."
"I like delivering," she said. "That's my favorite part. Everybody is always glad to see me when I come. It's usually something they have not gotten before."
Making sure there is enough - and not too much - fresh fruit in stock poses the greatest challenge, she said.
"We don't know from day to day what kind of orders we'll actually have," Mrs. Hagan said. "It's always hard to tell what somebody is going to want and when they want it."
In her free time, she enjoys working in the yard, cooking, hanging out by the pool in the summer and going "to lots of movies," particularly comedies.
Mrs. Hagan, 47, and her husband, Mark, whom she met at Trane, have four adult children between them.
"And he still works there, thank goodness," she said.
Subjects for this column come from business cards drawn from a briefcase. Send cards to Business Editor Brian Pearson, P.O. Box 2030, Tyler, Texas, 75702.
