Dan & Tricia Fisher built – & sold – a company with legendary culture. Now semi-retired from rent-to-own, they’re hoping to keep that magic working into their next chapter.
Dan and Tricia Fisher are, for the first time ever, just hanging out in the in-between. They are doing some traveling, building a new house in their hometown of Lititz, Pennsylvania, helping their kids settle into their nearby homes. But for these few months at the close of 2024, they are mostly just trying to relax, reflect, and catch their collective breath following Dan’s four decades and Tricia’s nine years building a leading-edge company in the rent-to-own industry – Majik Enterprises International Inc. dba Majik Rent-To-Own – which culminated in its sale to Blue Ocean Brands, LLC, earlier this year.
Tricia and Dan have shared a lot – some of it even before they knew one another. They both grew up in working-class Pennsylvania families; they both married, had kids, and divorced before they met; and they’re both “people persons,” though in different ways. Oh – and, unbeknownst to both Tricia and Dan until much later, Tricia was a loyal video-rental customer at Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s Movies Galore – the family business that Dan and his dad eventually turned into Majik Rent-To-Own.
Dan Fisher was born and grew up in Lancaster, the middle child of three to a Certified Nursing Assistant mom and a dad who was a production manager at a local valve-manufacturing company. Dan was an athletic kid, playing soccer and running track – a fine student, and, as it turns out, a chip off the old block.
“My dad, Dave, always had an entrepreneurial drive inside him,” Dan recalls. “He’d dabble in things, experiment with stuff. When I was 15, he bought a video rental store as a side hustle. Movies Galore was just a one-man show in a tiny corner room of a local hotel. When we purchased it in 1984, most folks didn’t own their own VCRs, so we had rental VCRs, which people rented for the weekend along with a few movies, lugged them home, hooked them up, unhooked them, and lugged them back to us. So Dad had the idea, ‘Let’s have people pay us $10 a week, they can keep the VCR, and when they’ve paid a certain amount, then they own it.’”
Dan began working at the family business as a teen, continued while he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration at Lancaster’s Franklin & Marshall College, and afterward. The movie-rental business struggled financially, but the consistent income from the rented VCRs gave Dan an idea of his own: expanding the store’s rent-to-own items to TVs, stereos, camcorders, etc.
“The company was barely breaking even, and my parents didn’t have the money to invest in more RTO items,” remembers Dan. “While banks wouldn’t lend us money at the time, credit cards were easy to get. One of our best customers wanted a specific, rather expensive camcorder, and we knew they would pay, so I got a credit card, bought the camcorder, and they paid per week for it. I began getting more and more credit cards, buying more and more stuff, and next thing you know, we had TVs and stereos and camcorders and washers and dryers and furniture.
“My parents and I racked up about $450k worth of credit-card debt to finance this rent-to-own business, and I also recruited my brother’s family for further investment,” he continues. “I just did the math and said, eventually, we’ll make money on this and it will work out. It took a long time and a lot of credit-card juggling, but eventually, it did.”
While the RTO business boomed, the video-rental side struggled, and within a few years, the company consolidated its five video stores down to two, and turned one of them into a rent-to-ownonly store.
“It was 1991, and as soon as it opened, it was gangbusters,” effuses Dan. “And that was Majik.”
The company slowly grew to four RTO stores, at which point Majik leadership had to make a choice: either continue to grow and also add the necessary home-office infrastructure to manage that, or agree to cap the business at four stores. They decided to keep going, and open up two new stores per year for the next two years.
“Then we had an opportunity to buy a small chain of five stores that were failing, and we also bought a 43,000-square-foot warehouse building,” Dan says. “So we went from four stores to 13 locations within about two years. We had this dramatic growth, and at the same time, we lost several of our longtime managers who had become complacent. It was definitely a crazy time in my life.”
Enter Tricia.
Tricia Fisher (née Onufro) was born and raised in the small coalmining town of Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania. Her dad was a coalminer until the mines closed, then pivoted to electrical engineering; her mom was a hairdresser who had her own beauty salon. Tricia was a social kid, a cheerleader and involved in student government. She went to college for cardiovascular technology, and landed a job in Lancaster – where she became a regular customer at Movies Galore.
Many, many moons later, in 2013, Tricia was a divorced mom of two who wanted to go to an upcoming concert by Bryan Adams (a popular 80s/90s singer-songwriter). Her son, Zac, didn’t want to go with her, but his friend, Maria Fisher, mentioned that her (also divorced) dad liked Bryan Adams (he didn’t/doesn’t). So Maria’s dad, Dan, and Tricia shared a few meals, went to a Bryan Adams concert, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“We were both very genuine,” Tricia says of the couple’s courtship. “We weren’t playing any games. Whatever we felt like talking about, we did. If it worked, fine; if it didn’t work, fine. So it was just very easy.”
While the personal relationship might have been easy, Dan’s professional life at the time was not. But Tricia’s presence in his life felt like a godsend to Dan during such a difficult period.
“Tricia helped me through an extremely tough space professionally,” he recalls. “Tricia is naturally gifted in terms of reading and understanding people, and she helped me read people I was dealing with to some extent, but also she just read me. She gave me the peace I desperately needed in my life.”
“I also told him to never settle for mediocrity,” adds Tricia. “I had been working in echocardiography for 25 years, and coming from the medical field, mediocrity is not an option; you have to be at the top of your game all the time. I said he should have that, too. I challenged him to challenge others, because when people are challenged, they rise to the occasion, they feel better about themselves, they succeed, and it helps everyone improve.”
The couple wed in 2015, and Tricia left her first career to join Dan at Majik.
“I had been working a lot of on-call weekends, holidays, etc., and I wanted to shift away from all that,” Tricia explains. “He needed some help on the office staff, so I jumped in.”
Majik gained some other people who would play key roles for the future of the company as well – particularly Chief Operating Officer Mike Simoncini and Sales Director Joe Luczak.
“Those two, along with many great managers we hired along the way, helped turn things around for us,” declares Dan. “We were struggling to find and keep high-quality employees, and we realized with our fast-paced growth and infrastructure implementation, the company had become too ‘professional’ – very cold and process-driven. We had done a great job of formalizing our business practices, but we had to get back to our family roots.”
Thus began the great Majik cultural reboot – a thoughtful, intentional process undertaken by Dan and his leadership team that A) almost doubled the company’s sales over a five-year span without opening a single new store, and B) became almost legendary among the rent-to-own community. They started by identifying why their most loyal customers feel that way about Majik.
“They feel they’re part of something special, and that we treat them as we want to be treated,” Dan attests. “If my mom came into the store, how would I treat her? That’s the way I would love for our customers to be treated. The only way I felt we could successfully do that was if our employees felt like they were part of something special. So we made a conscious decision to become employee-centric, believing that would filter down to a customer focus, and customers being taken care of they way we envisioned.”
Dan also discovered a book – The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni – and listened to the audio version of it seven times in a row as he drove from store to store. He got a physical copy, and turned the book into Majik’s first strategic planning session.
“We identified what our company core values are, what made us feel special over the past 25 years, and what made us unique that we needed to reconnect with,” affirms Dan. “Then we came up with a plan to slowly but surely return to our roots and put that culture into place. It was a series of quarterly offsite meetings to strategize – based upon information and insights gathered from our own experience, books, and other rental dealers – then weekly meetings to implement those strategies.”
Over time, they developed The Majik Way – a company culture concentrated around employee care, attention, appreciation, and celebration.
“I came into the business as an event planner,” Tricia says. “We launched our holiday banquet – closing all stores early on a Saturday, inviting every employee and their significant others to a central location, and recognizing and rewarding them with gifts, perks and vacations for levels of achievement. Then we finished off the event with something fun, like a casino night or karaoke contest.”
Majik also launched an annual company meeting every October, closing all stores for a day, paying employees’ way, and conducting an all-day training – primarily RTO-related, but also offering “electives,” like how to improve their credit or buy a house.
Dan and Tricia – whose position evolved into Director of Company Culture – hit the road to visit every store a few times a year, and sit down with each Majik employee for 15-45 minutes to talk about what was important to them and what management could do better.
“We also conducted two-question employee surveys,” adds Dan. “‘What’s something you really like that we should keep on doing, and what’s something we should change?’ Then we shared and responded to every single comment, explaining whether we were going to do it or not, and why. And we gave random rewards to show employees that we saw what they were doing and how hard they were working. Tricia’s ability to come up with great gifts was extraordinary.”
Tricia notes two other game-changing initiatives Majik introduced: a profit-sharing program that provided employees with bonuses in addition to their salaries, and personality profiling through a combination of Lencioni’s Six Working Genius Model and The Predic-tive Index.
“The personality profiling helps individuals in the stores learn more about themselves and understand their team members, as well as help create a more cohesive work environment,” she states. “We did rearrange some people based upon their preferences – if they were in the wrong seat on the bus, then we put them into the right seat, and sometimes, it made a world of difference.”
Majik’s cultural reboot, with Dan and Tricia at the lead, began in late 2016. In late 2017, Dan’s youngest daughter from his first marriage, 18-year-old Maria, was tragically hit by a car and killed during her freshman year of college. Dan and Tricia were both devastated by the loss.
“In retrospect, I think the loss of Maria probably helped drive a lot of the changes at Majik,” Dan muses. “I was emotionally numb, and needed to find meaning in her loss. I think pouring myself into the company – and especially trying to ensure every co-worker felt included and a sense of belonging – helped me believe Maria would be proud of our work.”
But after some years of success with the cultural turnaround, Dan realized small setbacks were interfering with his focus, stifling Majik’s potential growth.
“Everything became harder emotionally,” Dan affirms. “The little things most people think of as the cost of doing business always affected me more, because I tried so hard to have this awesome culture and to connect with everyone. But when there’s a bogus workers’ comp claim, or an employee threatening a lawsuit, those things happen when you have over 100 employees. But I always took them personally, and losing Maria made those emotional challenges harder and harder to deal with.”
“It wasn’t an immediate impact professionally for Dan; he was trudging along for quite a while,” attests Tricia. “The company was doing well, and Dan was doing everything he should be doing, trying to take the business to the next level. But something was missing that he thought he should be doing – honoring Maria’s memory. We developed the [Maria Fisher Foundation], but really didn’t do much with it. And Dan gradually got to where he wanted to focus more on it for his inner peace and emotional wellbeing.”
Which is how Majik got sold to Blue Ocean. With none of their kids interested in the family business, an exit plan was inevitable, and Dan says he had always had an open mind when it came to the possibility of selling.
“For 25 years, when someone was buying companies, I’d explore it a little – partly because I was curious, partly because I thought if the right opportunity came about, then maybe I’d consider it,” he confesses. “But it was always not the right amount of money, or not the right situation for what I pictured for the future of the company or how I wanted to leave our employees.”
Within the past couple of years, Dan got serious about selling, and connected with Blue Ocean CEO Bill Short. Short wanted to keep the Majik team intact, and showed an intense interest in the company’s culture and how it had produced results. Dan felt it was the perfect fit.
“Once the sale was announced, people asked me about my concerns in terms of my legacy with Majik,” says Dan. “Of course, I love the Majik name, I love our history, and I love our huge community presence. But it’s not the name I care about – it’s the people who helped build this company and made us who we are through our culture. And I know if Blue Ocean keeps our people and takes care of them, then the customers are going to be taken care of, too.”
The sale was finalized last May, and indeed, aside from a few people who have left voluntarily, Blue Ocean has retained every Majik employee – including Simoncini and Luczak – with their pay, benefits, and perks all precisely intact. They even moved their headquarters to the Majik home offices in Lancaster.
“I give Bill a lot of credit,” Dan says of his successor, “because to date, he’s lived up to everything he’s promised, which is not always the case with deals like this.”
So with the deal done, the magic (pun intended) question for the Fishers now is, What’s next?
Like many semi-retired couples, Dan and Tricia intend to travel – a trip to the lavender fields of Provence, France, last year was a bucket-list item – and spend time with Tricia’s kids from her first marriage, Zac and Allee. Zac, 26, is an architect doing industrial kitchen design and sales, and Allee, 24, is using her psychology degree to make a killing in car sales. Dan still loves to play soccer in local “old-man leagues,” he and Tricia have recently taken up pickleball, and both are avid readers.
Though no longer involved in dayto- day operations, Dan is still part of the company and the rent-to-own industry; he owns just under 10 percent of Blue Ocean and serves on its Board of Directors. He also continues to serve as 1st Vice President on the APRO Board of Directors, and as a TRIB Group board member.
And as 2025 gets underway, Dan and Tricia plan to get specific about how to move forward with Maria’s foundation. They’re both passionate about the mental health of young people, and want to find ways to help kids who want to pursue no-college-required professional careers and young adults who find themselves out on the street without guidance once they turn 18.
“We’re also considering maybe starting a small business that would fund the foundation,” adds Dan. “I don’t love asking people for money, so rather than fundraising, we might open a business to continuously support the organization.”
Dan also wants to put his and Tricia’s years of company-culture experience and expertise to work as consultants. Regardless of whether they work within the rent-to-own industry, with other industries, or both, Dan feels a sense of duty to share his professional wisdom – much as his RTO colleagues did for him during his 40 years with Majik.
“I’m passionate about helping people with leadership and culture-building,” Dan confirms. “I see so many people who have such a great business idea, a great product, but they haven’t figured the strategic planning and culture part of it out. I’ve learned so much from people like Mike Tissot, Shannon Strunk, Lyn Leach, Gary Ferriman, and many others; I feel it’s my obligation to give back.
“I’ve presented about company culture many times,” concludes Dan, “and having someone come up and say, ‘I’m having such success using what you taught me; can you help me with this other thing?’ or ‘We’re using that thing you recommended, and it’s changed our company dynamics’ – man, that is just the best feeling.”
Kristen Card has been a contributing writer for RTOHQ: The Magazine for more than 20 years.
