Creativity, Hard Work, and Family: The Maine Story Behind Agren’s Success

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Hello, I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. Today I have with me Jason Agren. He is the president and owner of Agren Main's largest independent appliance and mattress retailer. Very intriguing, and I know that you've had a lot of family excitement around this industry for many, many years, so I'm happy to have you come in today. Jason.

Jason Agren:

Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, you mentioned that the start of Agren. Interesting story. My dad, when we moved up here from New Hampshire, he started repairing appliances out of a van and that was his full-time job as we moved up. And he built up a customer base, he did a hard worker, did a really good job, and it was a comment from a customer that said, instead of fixing these, you should also sell appliances. So that's when he decided to start his first retail shop on Turner Street in Auburn back in 1969. And so that's how the retail portion of Agren started. Kind of interesting story.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

He sounds like a hardworking guy.

Jason Agren:

Very hard. Yeah, I remember my dad wasn't around too much because he was working. He'd start at 6:00 AM running service calls, then he'd actually go into the retail store, work till about six, then he'd go on the road again and service appliances till nine 10 at night and come home. So he worked, worked his tail off for sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So knowing that he was such a hard worker when he was the owner of Agren appliances, you still decided that you wanted to come back and buy the business and do this at the age of 30 yourself. I mean, it didn't deter you that this was something that was very kind of time consuming and energy intensive.

Jason Agren:

It did. I received a call, I was actually working as the finance director and fundraiser for the Boy Scouts of America at the time, and that was a field I was interested in. I had actually gotten a job offer from another company to go work in fundraising, and about that time my dad had called me and said, would you like to come back in the business? And I grew up in it. I knew going back to work, working with him and for him might be interesting, but I decided to do it. I worked with him for about four years and that was an interesting time in my life. I did learn a lot. And finally he said, Jason, I'd like you to take it over. And that's about the time I purchased it. And he moved down to Florida and I inherited a business where I didn't really know what I was doing. Hard work took a lot of chances, a lot of risk, and it happened to work out for me. But it ended up being the people that I hired. I hired really good people. We built a good staff, and that's how you grow a company.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You went to the University of Maine where you played football, and you also did graduate studies at the University of Northern Colorado. Were you focused on business as part of your education?

Jason Agren:

Yeah, my undergrad was at University of Maine, played football as you mentioned. I ended up going to the University of Northern Colorado to get my master's in sport administration. I thought that was in an area that interested me that I wanted to get into. From there, I did an internship with the Richmond Braves in Richmond, Virginia. It was the AAA affiliate of the Atlanta Braves. So I was interested in stadium operations, so I worked there, had an internship for about a year and a half. I had some job offers in minor league baseball, but it was at that point where I did move back to Maine and join the scouts on the fundraising side of it. So interesting how I peeled off and came back.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I do find this really fascinating because as I think the Portland Art Gallery, we all work together as a family. I mean, Emma's not in our family and neither is Jess, but Kevin Thomas is the owner, and Sean Thomas is the manager. And I do work with this. And in working in a family business, it has some really great opportunities. And also these are people that you still want to maintain a relationship with. So if there are ever situations where you're not entirely in agreement, you have to work through them with a very different goal in mind. So does any of this in any way spark thoughts for you? As was we're talking

Jason Agren:

The family dynamic of the business is that I own it and my brother works for the company and we have a fantastic relationship. He helps my company immensely with different projects, moving it forward and the technology and ai, but not having ownership. It works out well. We work great as a team, and so that relationship has been really important and has helped the company grow, to be honest, since we're on the same page.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what about with your dad? When you come in as somebody who's 30 and you have a very different educational background, different professional background, and he invites you back, what did that look like for you?

Jason Agren:

It was exciting. At the same time, in the very beginning, I had realized there were a lot of problems with the company. He had kind of backed off a little bit. Times were changing, especially in this business, you reach a point in your career where you're just not quite as effective, and times have changed. The industry's changing. So when I came into it, there was a lot of work to do, but kudos to him. He let me do it. He let me take risks, he let me make changes. Sometimes he'd pull his hair out, but most of the time he let me. A lot of those chances I took, I failed miserably. I started a store down in Augusta. I thought that was a great idea to start a store in a mall, which I learned pretty quickly. You never start a appliance retail location in a mall in Maine. It's tough. So fell flat on my face, but I learned a lot from that experience, and that's building stores moving forward. I had an idea of what I needed to do to succeed, but he was great. He let me take chances, and that was hard for him, hard to let the business go, but he just came up to visit last week. He hadn't been up here for eight years. And it was really cool to go around and show him the progress of the company, and he's just super proud. So it's worked out well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My understanding is you now have 160 employees.

Jason Agren:

Yeah, about 168. It's a moving target.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's a pretty good size business, especially for Maine. As somebody who went through and did this whole other way of being educated in business and this whole other approach, how have you kind of learned what you needed to do to be a leader in a company of that size?

Jason Agren:

It's a great question. So it was, yeah, we've grown a lot. We've had significant growth over the last 10 years, both in the size and scope of the company, employees, store locations, that kind of thing. It is hard to manage when you have that many people. What I'll always say is that I've hired the right people, the right people in the right places, and I was having a conversation before we came on the air. And it's so important when you grow to have the right culture, to have the right people in place so that the entire team is on board. Because if you do have a faction of people that aren't on board, it's kind of moving against you. It's very difficult. So we've really prided ourselves in hiring the right people, taking care of our people, creating a culture where every job is as important as say my job. And we've really instilled that in our employees and it's worked. We have a lot of tenured employees, a lot of people that will never leave us because we take such good care of 'em and vice versa. And I think that's how we've been able to grow and continue to be successful.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So my father was a football player at the University of Maine back in the day.

Jason Agren:

Really?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, during the time that they went to the Tangerine Bowl. And in fact, up until he passed away a year and a half ago, he was still getting together with his Tangerine Bowl friends. There's fewer and fewer of them unfortunately. But it always spoke to me, the power of relationships, the relationships that were built during that time when he was playing football, but also that got them to that high level. And I believe they were the last team that actually went to a bowl game, which says a lot. It was a long time ago now. So things have changed, but it says a lot. Do you feel like there are things that you learned by being a member of a team like the Black Bear football team that have translated into the work that you do now?

Jason Agren:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm sure your dad probably told you a lot of stories and probably still has. Great. Hopefully dad's still alive.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Unfortunately he passed.

Jason Agren:

My apologies. But I'm sure he's told you stories about just the relationships he's had and how it impacted him. It was the same. Yeah, football is in all sports. I'm a big proponent of playing sports because of that, the teamwork aspect of it. So I've developed a lot of great relationships. One of my coaches actually is now the head coach at Tennessee Tech, and I still have a great relationship with him. I've been out to see games there, still talk a lot of friends on the team that don't live around here anymore. But yeah, that team aspect is super important. It shows you how to with differences and differences of opinions and that kind of thing, it does teach you how to continue to work together and work through that stuff because you have to as a team to move forward to be successful. And so yeah, I learned a lot from that experience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what about the scouts? Were you a scout growing up?

Jason Agren:

I was not. No. It was interesting. I was very interested in fundraising and organizing special events, and it was a position that they had needed at the time. So when I had moved back to Maine, I saw that applied and got it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, was never a scout, but again, fundraising was something of interest to me. And so I took the position and really enjoyed it, met a lot of great people.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And did you carry anything from mean fundraising and business that don't necessarily? Usually I think of fundraising as more of a nonprofit thing. You want to raise funds in business, but it's usually because there's a product that you're putting out to market. So was there any crossover there?

Jason Agren:

Relationship building really helped fundraising. It's all about building relationships and meeting people and asking the right questions and learned a lot about that. And it's the same in this business. We have relationships with our manufacturers, builders, designers, super important to build those relationships, especially in a small state like Maine, you need to have great relationships. And that's one of the things that I learned from that career.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, that is one of the things that you said. You weren't naturally creative when we asked you about yourself prior to coming on. And to me, anybody that works in a business, particularly a business that has sustained growth, does have to be creative. Just maybe you don't have your sketch pad out like doing figurative drawings, maybe not that kind of creative, but really the creativity that you're describing where you do have to understand people, you do have to understand what drives them and how to motivate them. So talk to me about how creativity actually manifests in your current world.

Jason Agren:

I would say most importantly now, our business is changing all of the time. And technology is a big piece of that. And Amazon has certainly shaped the way customers perceive how they think things should be done. It's immediate. They do such a great job. Obviously we all buy things from Amazon all the time. So when we talk about creativity, that's one of the things we're looking in. Our business always is how do we become Amazon or how do come close to being Amazon? And so the creativity of serving customers, serving them quickly, serving efficiently, it's something that we're really focused on and it's one of the things that my brother does a really good job at, but that's where we try to get creative is how can we continue to revolutionize this business to make sure that we're keeping up with technology. And so that creativity really comes into play there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It seems like I've heard a lot from probably 2020 through now of shifting, particularly in the appliance industry and with things like changes in government and the approach to tariffs. And it just seems like there's been a lot of things that you've been thrown that perhaps when you first came into the organization you wouldn't have had to deal with. But I'm just guessing this is that true or

Jason Agren:

Yeah, there's regulations that every year there's, there's something new that we notice that we need to change our practices or shape the business around them. But you speak of tariffs, that's one of the things that we're closely watching right now. It's already impacting the business. We've seen prices in appliance, in appliance world, prices go up three to 5% every year no matter what. But we're seeing anywhere from five to 11% now. Hasn't been as much as I thought, but we're closely watching that. That could impact the business more than we think. But it's just one of those things we just don't know yet. But again, it's something we're keeping a close eye on, and what we're trying to do is subsidize a lot of that for the customer, using money and getting help from manufacturers, that kind of thing. But it's something that we're really keeping our eyes on.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What are the types of things are you keeping your eyes on?

Jason Agren:

It's the technology piece. AI is a big thing right now, and so we're looking at implementing that into our customer service department. We actually have implemented into cameras on our trucks. Our distribution platform is based on AI now. That's how we track our trucks and schedule and that kind of thing. So we're keeping a close eye on that because that's where the big changes are going to happen in our business.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You grew up in Auburn and went to school in Auburn, and now you've come back and you're in Auburn again. And I'm somebody, I grew up in Yarmouth. I went to medical school away, came back, I'm in Yarmouth, and I raised my kids in Yarmouth. There's been a lot of changes in Yarmouth. I assume the same is true in Auburn and your region, but the one thing that remains very much the same is, as you've already said, relationships and not just relationships with people that are in your business, but also relationships with people in the community. And what does that look like for you as somebody who has spent the majority of his life in Maine? How does that manifest in your life?

Jason Agren:

Maine's a small state as we know, and it's super important to, we're vested in all the communities we're in, so we have eight locations. And so every community that we're in, I think it's super important for us to be involved at some level. There's other charities that we support. I'm a big supporter of downhill 24, the Ronald McDonald House, there's others. But yeah, to me it is really important to make sure that your company's engaged in the communities. You're going to events, you're meeting. People require our managers to go and meet and talk with people, attend events, that kind of thing. It is just, Maine is so small, you need to get out there. You need to let yourself be known, but also help support the community so they know you're supportive of them as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When we think about relationships and relationship building, sometimes we think about them as sort of horizontally. If we think about, we need to get to know the people in our community now because they're there now, we need to know our communities and what they need as what's going on here in the present. But a lot of times, especially if you're going to, let's say be you want somebody to keep buying their dishwasher from you, you need to have a longitudinal relationship. So for you, having that relationship over now, probably decades for some people, because you've lived in Maine that long, what has that meant about the way that you've approached your life?

Jason Agren:

Don't burn any bridges that that's one. Yeah. We try to be fair to everyone, and we do a really good job of taking care of customers. Like in any business, 99.9% of our customers are great. There could be some unreasonable ones, but we treat 'em all the same. We take care of problems. To me, that's the message to my employees is we treat everyone with respect. We take care of everyone no matter what the issue, whether it's their fault, it's our fault. We are going to make them happy at the end of the day. And it is kind of a that we have in our company.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as your company gets bigger, how do you continue to make sure that that culture exists,

Jason Agren:

Getting the right people in place? I'll go back to that again, and it starts with me, but, and all upper level management. It's our job to make sure we're hiring the right people. We're creating that culture because it's easy to get away with. Retail's difficult, and we have a service department and we have people. Things are broken, people are not happy. So it can get difficult in our business, and it really is a mantra that we have is take care of people. We always like to say in the business, we're just selling metal boxes. That's all we're doing. Let's not overcomplicate this. Sell the metal boxes, take care of customers. And we talk about it all the time. And it has to be something that you're doing constantly to make sure you have that culture.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You mentioned something that I hadn't really thought about, but it's certainly true that when people come to see you, there's probably a problem that they're trying to fix. So I know that when our dishwasher has ceased to function, it's really important that we get that dishwasher fixed. And maybe the dishwasher you can kind of do without for a little bit, but not like a refrigerator. You kind of need to have things working. So by the time people reach out to Agren, they're thinking, oh, I have a need and I need it taken care of now. So for the people who are on the front line who are interfacing with the individuals who really have that need that has to get met, do they ever need to think about things like deescalation? They never, ever, when they're meeting customers, where they come from, and I ask this as a physician because I meet people who are often broken at the time, and I need to help work with them in a way that gets us successfully to the next place.

Jason Agren:

We all day, we have a special department that deals with that, so a customer satisfaction department, and every day, and there's multiple calls, whether it's we deliver an appliance and there's a scratch on it, and we need to appease the customer, whether we're going to swap that out or give 'em a credit, the service is the biggest issue. And with regard to our business, we've grown so fast that the hardest thing us been able, the hardest thing has been keeping our service and our installation departments the growth of those to match the scale of the business. And during the summer, we get 500 phone calls into our service department a day. We have 10 customer service representatives that are just on the phones all day scheduling service. So for us, we're good at what we do. We're not perfect. We need to be a lot better. There's a lot of times that we could be two, three weeks out on a service call during the summer, which is unacceptable. We need to be a week. So we're working really hard to grow our service department now to the scale with the growth of the business. And by doing that, these customer resolution problems will go down significantly. But if there was one challenge in my business, I would say it's keeping scale. It's hard to hire technicians. There's not an appliance technician school out there. We have to hire people, train them. We send them away to school. So it's a process. But if I'd say that's our number one focus right now is growing that service department and installation department at keep pace.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And how is the fact that Maine seems to be growing, and particularly in the urban areas, how is that impacting your business? What about new builds or renovations, or are you finding yourself positively impacted by that?

Jason Agren:

We have a builder division and we have a lot of builder projects going on. It kind of blows my mind how many we have going, even with the economy and the rates. Maine is exploding and we see it in our business. We track customers. This past summer, we've seen more, or this past year, we've seen more out of state people move in than we've ever seen before. And typically it's been from the New England area. Well, we're seeing people from Texas and Missouri and people from out western moving to Maine. So you can start to see it. It's a great place. There's four seasons. It's fairly safe. The weather impact isn't as much. So we are seeing a lot of that. And you're seeing the push from Portland as well, going to those other towns, Wyndham and uc. Augusta is really growing, so we are going to try to take advantage of that growth.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What is your personal connection to the art gallery?

Jason Agren:

Through my brother and his wife, I met Emma Wilson, who's a wonderful woman, and she invited us to the art gallery, went and visited my brother, had his wedding there, held there. And while I was there, I bought a couple pieces and talked to Emma, got to know her really well, and it was just really cool. And I am not necessarily an art person. I said, I'm not that creative, but there's some beautiful art pieces in there and I happen to purchase one. And that's how we met. And now I'm a big supporter of the gallery.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And tell me about the pieces that you've, or the piece that you've purchased.

Jason Agren:

So I'm going to be embarrassed and tell you. I don't remember who actually painted it. I just loved the picture. And I said, Emma, can you put that aside and I'll be back next week to purchase it? And I did. It's like a main coastal town. There's a boat in the water and there's lighthouses, and it's just super maney and colorful, and it's a really cool piece.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, there is no need to be embarrassed. I love the fact that you looked at a piece and you said, that really appeals to me, and I would like to have that in my home. I mean, isn't that what it's kind of all about? Yeah, really cool. Is that you've really connected with something visually that reminds you of the state that you've spent so much time in your life.

Jason Agren:

Correct. Yeah, no, very cool. And again, I'll be back to buy more. It was a fun process.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, that's great to hear. Going back to the 30-year-old version of yourself and the decision that you made to come back to Maine to get involved in the family business, to really grow it to where it is now, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Jason Agren:

It's a really good question. I don't know. I think I was too young to know if I would've done anything differently. Like I said, it was a lot of trial and error. It was just a lot of hard work. I spent a lot of time going to visiting other appliance stores to learn, because again, I didn't have a background in the business. No retail experience, no appliances experience, except growing up as a kid and delivering the appliances. So I don't know, as though I'd say I'd do anything different, I would say that I would've tried to grown the business a little bit more when I was a little bit younger. Just had more energy, more time. But really, that's the only thing. I can't complain. I've been very fortunate. I have a great company. I have a lot of great people surrounding me, and I'm proud of what we've done.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I think maybe the question that I should have asked was, what did you do when you were a 30 that enabled you to be where you are now and feel really good about this company? It sounds like it was just put yourself in a position of learning and show up in the places, try to build relationships with people and not focus on what you don't know, but just try to learn.

Jason Agren:

Yeah, that was the most important thing. I made sure that I knew that I didn't know what I was doing. You know what I mean? And so I really did. I took the approach of just learning from other people and making sure that I talked to the right people, put the right people in the right place. And I knew it wasn't, I just didn't know what I was doing. And I learned during the process, and it was a lot of stress. It was a lot of fun at the same time as we saw the growth. But yeah, it was at the age of 30. It was a big task, but I can't complain. It's very fortunate and we've just got a great group of people in a great company.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You're speaking to something that I think is a really important message, and that is that when any of us are 30 or a younger age, or really at any age, actually, sometimes the opportunity just presents itself, wherever it comes from, comes from our family, comes from sports, comes from a relationship. And if you just show up and you say, all right, I don't really know how this is going to work out, but let's see how it goes. And you really can end up going down a path, it can be very rewarding, even though it doesn't seem like the path is laid out for you in particular. I don't want to speak for you, but I think that this is something that more people might, should hear, that if you show up for an opportunity, then sometimes things happen that are unexpected and wonderful.

Jason Agren:

There's no question. It's something I tell my daughter all of the time, she's a junior in college, but I've said it from the moment she was a kid that there's going to be, there's so much opportunity out there, but you have to be prepared to go get it yourself. You have to make the effort. You need to meet people. I say talk to everybody. You never know. A lot of life is who as you probably know. So yeah, there's so much opportunity, but you've got to be willing to go get it. And to me, it's rare to find younger people that have that passion. And so when I see it in someone, especially a new employee, a young employee, I really try to talk to them about that. So you've got a great opportunity here. You can work up through the company. It's there for the taking, but you've got to work at it. You've got to recognize it, and you've got to have good people around you helping you, because when you're that young, you don't necessarily know. So it's something that I've always been a big believer in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, Jason, I know you're a very busy individual, so it's been a pleasure to spend time with you and have this conversation today. How can people learn about Agren appliances?

Jason Agren:

Well, we certainly have a great website. So you can visit our website at www.agrenappliance.com. We have pages, links on the backstory of Agren, and of course all of our products and how to buy. That's probably the best way to learn about us or just come on into one of our showrooms and look around, talk to people. We'll be happy to help you out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Very good. Well, thank you very much.

Jason Agren:

Yeah, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, it's been wonderful. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today I've been speaking with Jason Agren. He is the president and owner of Agren, Maine's largest independent appliance and mattress retailer. I do encourage you to check them out, go to their website. I'm hoping that we can convince Jason to come back to one of our openings on the first Thursday of every month, and then maybe you'll get a chance to talk with him. I know that we certainly have purchased from Agren before, and I can personally vouch to the fact that they do an excellent job with not only the things that they sell, but the way that they service them. So thanks for coming in today, Jason, and thanks for all the great work you do.

Jason Agren:

Thank you very much. Much appreciated.