Pub. 9 2021-2022 Issue 2

5 Fall 2021 our Chevrolet store. It’s an important position, and he is the car guy of the group. My daughter, Leah, is our compliance person. She makes sure we are obeying all the crazy rules. Your mission statement says, “We are dedicated to a tradition of courtesy, honesty and continuous improvement in our work. We take great pride in ourselves, our community and the delivery of value to our customers.” What’s the story behind your mission statement? In the early 1990s, before vision statements were part of the game, we got all our managers together in a banquet room at a local hotel where we had breakfast and brainstormed about what we all felt Sierra’s culture should be. My father led the meeting. We came up with a mission statement. We circulated it among all employees, got their feedback and finalized it accordingly. We’ve embraced it ever since. So, as you approach the closing of the sale of your family’s business, what goes through your mind? As dealers, we are embedded in the communities we serve. We owe our employees a good income and a productive working environment, our customers a fair, open and information-rich sales and service experience and our factories, banks and vendors a fair return on the relationship. New vehicle sales are different from used vehicle sales. Service is a completely different business, and the parts department is like running a hardware store. In California, we operate in an irrationally hostile business environment, and our factories add layers of complexity to our business that I suspect are somewhat unique. It is a very complicated business that most dealers do extremely well. Stepping out from under that five-ball juggle is something of a relief. But I’ve been doing this for 33 years. I know and admire a lot of people in this business and have a great relationship with some amazing co-workers. Being one of the 800 or 900 dealers in California isn’t something you think about much until you are contemplating not being one of them. Dealers are the local arm of an amazingly complicated global industry. That industry is essential to any first-world country’s economic and strategic well-being. We are an important part of that. But automotive retailers are also very important to their communities and their customers — we are the consumer interface for the purchase and ownership of an expensive and necessary asset. Our industry is now confronting a number of exciting and risky transitions. The accelerating drift into electric cars and trucks is dependent on many things coming together — charging accessibility for nonhomeowners, grid capacity, consumer acceptance of range and likely utility limitations, battery availability (and reliability and safety), and fixing the global supply network that is now so challenged. How will transportation issues generally play into solutions for climate change? Of course, there is dealer consolidation (of which our sale is a part), but we also have the drift away from brick and mortar as the internet world consumes us; the move to online transactions — which is impeded in California by the legislature’s absolutely unforgivable refusal to delete the prohibition against e-contracting in the sale of vehicles. What does the future of ride-sharing mean to private ownership of vehicles? There are evolving forms of currency and changing factory strategies for pricing and selling vehicles which seem to be moving aggressively to cast the dealer as a delivery agent rather than a traditional retailer. We are experiencing a broader competitive landscape with differently regulated, online-focused, no dealer models feeling their way into the marketplace with losses that no dealer could compete against, supported by stock prices that sustain practices that used to look more like dumping than competing. And then there’s social media. The only saving grace with a communication platform that can mobilize thousands to attack people and companies relentlessly with little or no facts or understanding is that it has an incredibly short attention span. All of this is exciting and important and presents challenges that I would enjoy being a part of addressing, but I also enjoy the quote from King George (the movie): It is easier to whisper advice from the shadows than to bear its merits at the point of attack. Why is it important to be a GLANCDA member? What makes it beneficial? GLANCDA is the public voice of LA dealers. Many things I just spoke about will be resolved with the input and assistance of dealers acting through GLANCDA. An association can speak for dealers and press for solutions that might be awkward or impossible for an individual dealer to do. Because of their roots in almost every community in the state, dealers do have some power. I think our associations have also represented us well over the years, advocating not  HOFFMAN — continued on page 6