Village Motors Prepares to Rev Up Sales in N.C.

Dealer Business Journal regularly features one Leedom and Associates, LLC successful Twenty Group members to showcase their dealership. We take a close look at their history, vision, goals, operations, best practices, lessons learned and their secrets to success. By sharing knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned, everyone improves. This is the fundamental key for our Twenty Group success and the reason we exist – To Improve your Profits, Your People and Your Business.

This month we feature Bruce Roffey, general manager of Village Motors in Conover, N.C. Don Wimbish, owner of a chain of buy here-pay here stores, E-Z Way Auto Sales Inc., and a related finance company, based in Hickory, N.C., purchased Village Motors in 2006. Wimbish has been a Leedom Twenty Group member for many years, and he insisted the Village Motors’ leadership join a Twenty Group.

Carl Dwiggins opened Village Motors in a small, rural community of Conover in 1969. His son-in-law, Bruce Roffey, has worked at the store since 1990, and remains the general manage, along with his brother-in-law Eddie Dwiggins for Wimbish. Village Motors keeps about 75 cars on the small lot and moves 30 straight retail units a month. Last year Village Motors opened a showroom at the nearby Valley Hills Mall and keeps about 15 units at the location.

By Peter A. Salinas

DBJ: Why did you get into the car business?

Roffey: I was a computer programmer for a Fortune 500 company, and my wife, Angie and I wanted to live in a small community and raise our children. My father-in-law Carl had done very well with his dealership, so I took a job with him. I had been wearing a shirt and tie everyday, and took over as the store’s lot attendant. It was my choice, I wanted to learn the business from the ground up. We love this little town. It has an Andy and Opie Taylor feel to it. Our house is 1,000 yards down the street, and Don, one of my customers, cuts my hair in his barbershop a block and half down the road. You never know if Ned or Dale Jarrett will come in for a haircut, and one day Morgan Shepherd came in to borrow a car from me when his vehicle got a flat.

DBJ: Did you learn the business quickly?

Roffey: It wasn’t as tough as you might think. I was 15 years old, when I first heard Zig Ziglar speak and I truly believe that you can get everything you want in life, if your help enough other people get what they want!” I have always been a salesman of sorts. The hardest part of the business is appraising the vehicles and selling them at the right price. As long as you treat your customers right and help them solve their problems, you’re fine. Once they cut me loose and I started making decisions on my own, I learned much more quickly. If you make your own mistakes, you learn fast.

DBJ: What’s your biggest success story?

Roffey: Professionally, I’d say it is still being in business in this area where we have had many manufacturers leave the area. We had a very large Hispanic community in the area, and they are just gone, as are several cable equipment, textile and furniture manufacturers. There are several stores out of business, but we’re growing, if more slowly than before the economic troubles hit our area.

Personally, I would say my greatest success is being married to my Angie for 20 years this month and raising two beautiful children. Also being involved in our community. I am active with our church, church school and the Boy Scouts.

DBJ: What’s been your biggest obstacle to success?

Roffey: Again it’s the local economy. I know all the leaders and Twenty Group moderators tell you to focus on the things you can control, but when half of the customers you used to serve are gone, it’s reality. Since being purchased by Mr. Wimbish, we’ve decided to work on what we can control. He had us join the Twenty Group and that has been a huge inspiration. I didn’t know something like that was out there. We weren’t doing any training, we’d just focus on trying to sell another car. Now I see what we’ve been missing. That’s probably another obstacle. We didn’t see the value in training and Twenty Groups, and now we do. It’s making a huge difference in our business. Last month four of our salesmen and I attended a four-day training seminar with Joe Verde in Atlanta. We would never have done this in the past. It really gets you fired up and helps build teamwork and camaraderie.

DBJ: How is the off-site location at the mall doing?

Roffey: Very well. It really expands our reach. The mall gets thousands of visitors a day, and we have vehicles in the mall as well as our mall showroom. The showroom is decorated very well, and we have a great stereo system inside. We get people who come down from the nearby mountain communities to shop. They may not have even heard of Conover, let alone Village Motors. If they buy a car from the Mall, they get a $200 gas card. It more than pays for itself, and gives us terrific exposure. We got a very good deal from the facility operator. It helps to know the right people. We plan to add a computer kiosk, so customers can look at all of our inventory. I just checked out some technology, where we’ll have a camera on our lot that the customer can control to look over the inventory. How cool is that?

DBJ: We understand you’re expanding the lot.

Roffey: It’s a big project. We are going to more than double our lot space. We will not necessarily make huge increases to our inventory, but we will be able to merchandise what we carry much better. We had some problems during construction last week. The backhoe operator took out our phone lines twice. We were working off of cell phones for a couple of days.

DBJ: What has been your Twenty Group experience thus far?

Roffey: It’s just been phenomenal. My biggest regret is not joining a Twenty Group years ago. Even though the local dealers in the area are friends, you are reserved when talking business with them. You have to be. When you’re in a Twenty Group, these people are in the same business as you, and the ideas, the problems and solutions just flow. I’ve only been to one meeting so far, but I’ve already made some major improvements to the operation. My brother-in-law Eddie and I are going to take turns attending the meetings. Going over the numbers and seeing where you have to improve and challenging each other to attain benchmark status is great, but so are the dinners. You learn just as much at dinner as you do in the meetings. We have some great operators in our group, and I can call them up at any time. I have one dealer in the group who is on the Nextel speed dial, and we talk all the time.

DBJ: Any advice for other dealers?

Roffey: Show up to work every day to work. Believe in your customers, help them, service them and they’ll stay with you. If you don’t someone else will.

DBJ: What are your goals for the store?

Roffey: Our short-term goal is to move from 30 units a month to 60. It is very attainable, and we have a plan to get there. As for the long-term, we could have four-stores in the next five years, but we’ll have to see how things go.