Pub 9 2021-2022 Issue 1

10  MATT BROWNING — continued from page 6 and worked his way up to eventually purchasing the store he worked at in 1960. Unfortunately, he passed away when I was 12 years old. I don’t have many memories about him, but he was a salesman who knew the car business, knew his employees and knew his numbers. One of my first memories of him was his nickname. He was known in the neighborhood as Mr. Clean, and he believed in cleanliness and order. He would get up at 5 a.m. to clean his driveway and his neighbor’s driveway. I don’t wash driveways at 5 a.m., but we do believe in maintaining a great facility environment for our associates. What about your father, Kent Browning? My father is a CPA by training who came into the business at a difficult time in the 1970s. Doing business was tough because of factors such as the 1973 gas crisis and high interest rates. Despite those challenges, he really expanded our dealership footprint. In 1980, our family owned one of the first dealerships in the Cerritos Auto Square. He was and is a risk-taker, and he’s had a lot of business ventures. He was not afraid of taking a risk, which is often a big part of success. Although he tried on some things that didn’t work, he was right more than he was wrong, and most of those risks turned out really well for him. He focused on numbers, but he also hired people he trusted to work around him. When he wasn’t working, he coached baseball teams, played golf and was just dad. Are either of your two children interested in becoming dealers, or is it too soon to tell? It’s a little premature to see if they will follow me into the family business. I will encourage them to follow their dreams, but I will also show them what I do. Alexander is almost eight, and he is already a car fanatic. He loves supercars and fancy cars, and he has a large car collection. He was born in the right family. I also have an eight-month-old son. How many stores does the Browning Automotive Group have? We have eight stores in Southern California. Three are in the Cerritos Auto Square and are in the GLANCDA footprint: • Browning Mazda • Cerritos Acura • Cerritos Dodge Chrysler Jeep We have four stores in the Victorville market: • Valley-Hi Honda and Valley-Hi Toyota (since 2001) • Valley-Hi Nissan (since 2004) • Valley-Hi Kia (since 2010) In Norco, we have had a Browning Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram (since 2010). What’s the leadership structure within the Browning Automotive Group? At the end of 2020, we had a transition in our business. My brother Peter is also in the business. I already owned a couple of our newer stores with him and a couple of our partners. We purchased a majority interest in the remaining six stores from our father, who retired from the day-to-day business and became the chair. However, he still has an advisory role. Peter is the general manager of the Cerritos Acura store. I am the president and dealer principal. We are developing a new management structure right now, and when we are ready, we will transition to it. Do you plan to expand? That’s a difficult question because the market is expensive right now. We have been looking for opportunities that are mostly elsewhere in the country, but if we don’t find the right ones, we will grow our business with our eight stores. Tell us about restructuring the dealership websites and digital marketing in 2007 and 2008. When I decided to transition back to the dealership business in 2005, I worked for a dealership in northern California called Toyota Sunnyvale. Tom Price and Adam Sims were the store’s co-owners, and I saw how modern that dealership was. I took what I learned at Toyota Sunnyvale, came back to the family dealerships, and realized we were not cutting edge. We only had a little online advertising presence. I took a lot of what I learned at Toyota Sunnyvale and changed how we advertised and also how we handled online customers. We had outside vendors help with the website. I am not a technical person, but I understood the process and knew that we needed to be spending money on digital marketing instead of other kinds of traditional marketing. As a result, our digital marketing dollars eventually went from zero to 90% of the marketing budget. The transition was difficult for some of the managers. Digital marketing was not the way marketing had been done; we’d done traditional marketing forever. But we made a quick transition and kept going. You helped keep the family Acura store open during the Great Recession. How did that experience help you when the pandemic shut down the U.S. economy in March 2020? It taught me to make difficult decisions early. Spend money wisely, grow the business and grow your market share. When necessary, make decisions quickly and don’t pontificate. You