When I was 29 years old, I became the youngest Buick dealer in America. My name was on the GM brand sign on Highway 183 in Irving, Texas, I had achieved something I'd dreamed about since I was a kid working around dealerships, and if you had asked me then whether I knew what I was doing, I'm pretty sure I would have told you I absolutely did.
That's one of the wonderful things about being young. You can possess an incredible amount of confidence without being burdened by an equal amount of experience.
I had already accomplished quite a bit in the car business. I'd started at the bottom, worked my way through different jobs, sold cars, managed people, and become a general manager. I had worked hard, learned quickly, and enjoyed success at a young age. When the opportunity came to become a Buick dealer, I believed I was ready, and in fairness to 29-year-old Jerry, there were good reasons for me to believe that.
What I didn't know was how much I didn't know.
The Buick dealership ultimately failed. By 1992, I was out, and a couple of years later I found myself 33 years old, going through a nightmare divorce, having been fired from another dealership that couldn't afford my salary, and needing to make money. I had previously been a dealership owner and a general manager twice, but none of those titles mattered much at that particular moment. I went to see a friend who was the general manager of Lone Star Cadillac in Dallas and asked him for a job.
He told me he didn't have any management openings.
I told him I didn't want one. I wanted to sell cars.
He looked shocked, gave me a hug, and said, "Welcome to Lone Star Cadillac."
Looking back, that may have been one of the most important moments of my career, although I certainly didn't recognize it as such at the time. I had gone from having my name on the sign to standing on somebody else's showroom floor waiting for an "up." If you'd told 29-year-old Jerry that was where he'd be a few years later, I'm not sure he would have believed you. More importantly, I'm not sure he would have understood how valuable the experience was going to be.
Failure has an amazing ability to teach lessons that success somehow overlooks.
At 29, I thought being successful meant you had figured things out. Today, I know success often means being willing to admit you haven't.
At 29, I thought the title was important. Dealer. General manager. Owner. Those words meant something to me, and I'll admit there was pride attached to them. When you've worked your way up from washing cars and cleaning service bays, seeing your name on a dealership sign is a pretty powerful experience.
At 33, I learned the title doesn't sell the car.
The person does.
I learned that there was absolutely no shame in starting over, although I can assure you it didn't feel that way initially. There is a tremendous difference between understanding something intellectually and having to live it. I knew there was nothing wrong with selling cars for a living; I'd done it before and respected the people who did it well. But going back to the showroom after having been the guy whose name was on the building required me to swallow a pretty healthy dose of pride.
It turned out to be good medicine.
I worked hard at Lone Star Cadillac, made decent money, enjoyed the people, and for the first time in a long while, I wasn't carrying the weight of an entire dealership on my shoulders. I thought I might stay there for years. Then, out of nowhere, I received a phone call from a man who had bought a struggling Ford dealership in Garland. Some of my former employees had gone to work there and told him he needed to talk to me.
After several conversations and several job offers I turned down, I finally accepted a position as sales manager. The dealership was dead last in Dallas-Fort Worth in sales volume when I arrived in the summer of 1990. A little more than two years later, we passed the longtime No. 1 Ford dealer in DFW, and eventually that dealership became No. 1 in Texas. In April 2002, we even outsold Galpin Ford in California and became the No. 1 Ford dealership in the country for that month.
None of that happens in my life without the failure that came first.
That's the part 29-year-old Jerry could never have understood.
If I could sit down with him today, I wouldn't tell him not to buy the Buick dealership. I wouldn't warn him that it was going to fail or tell him how to avoid the pain that followed. I'd be tempted, certainly, but I don't think I'd do it. That failure knocked some things out of me that probably needed knocking out, and it put some things into me that I would need for the rest of my career.
It taught me humility. It taught me that yesterday's success doesn't guarantee anything tomorrow. It taught me that you can make a bad decision without being a failure, and that starting over doesn't erase what you've learned along the way. Most importantly, it taught me that there is a huge difference between being confident in yourself and believing you have all the answers.
I carried those lessons into every dealership I operated afterward. When things were going incredibly well, I never completely forgot what it felt like when they weren't. Years later, when I had hundreds of employees and we were selling thousands of vehicles, I knew how quickly circumstances could change because I'd already watched them change once. When an employee stumbled, I was probably more willing to give him or her another chance because somebody had once given me one. When a young manager was absolutely certain he had everything figured out, I could smile because I recognized the guy.
I'd seen him in the mirror.
Those lessons follow me onto the radio today. After more than 50 years around automobiles, I'm certainly confident in what I know, but I'm also comfortable saying, "I don't know." If a caller asks me something and I don't know the answer, I'll find out. That's a much easier sentence for me to say today than it probably would have been when I was 30.
Age does that to you if you're paying attention.
There are a lot of things I was absolutely sure about when I was 30. I thought I knew what success looked like, how my career would unfold, which decisions would work, and probably quite a few things about life that I had no business being certain about. Some of those beliefs were right, some were spectacularly wrong, and a few probably make me laugh today.
I'm sure there are things I believe just as strongly today that life may still prove wrong. I hope I'm wise enough to recognize that possibility, because one thing I've learned is that life has a way of grading the test long after you've turned it in.
I wouldn't trade the confidence I had at 29. You need a certain amount of it to take risks, build businesses, and chase things other people tell you are impossible. I just wish I could have given that young man a little of the humility he was about to earn the hard way.
Then again, he probably wouldn't have listened.
He was absolutely sure he already knew.
Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.
-Jerry