Seven up

Tropical Storm Debby, the June 2012 squall that deluged half of Florida, delivered the first crisis for Jacqui Al-Nasser in her unusual entrepreneurial career shift.

It was only one year earlier that Al-Nasser, 47, traded in a busy nurse practitioner job to become a 7-Eleven franchisee. Al-Nasser previously ran a women's clothing boutique, and she and her husband also co-owned a Subway store in Dunedin. “We had dabbled a bit,” in franchises, Al-Nasser says. “We liked the way 7-Eleven did things.”

That experience and admiration, however, didn't do much for Al-Nasser when she arrived at the 7-Eleven she ran on Seven Springs Boulevard in New Port Richey a few hours after the storm. She had to park a mile away, for starters, given the flood. And water was so deep people from the neighborhood, Al-Nasser recalls, went tubing through a nearby apartment complex parking lot.