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Episode 9: Takeaways from a Conversation w/ Scott Bieler of West Herr Automotive Group
32 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Episode 9! Today we have a cool conversation with Matt Watson about a neat opportunity Matt recently had to participate in a conversation with Scott Bieler, President and an owner of West Herr Automotive Group.
Even though West Herr is a very different business to ours here at HFW, Scott talked about a lot of great lessons that have helped turn West Herr into a $3.2 billion revenue business. These are applicable to any business! Spoiler alert: a lot of it has to do with treating your people exceedingly well.
There is a lot to be inspired by in Scott's presentation, and it was nice to sit down and hear Matt discuss his key takeaways.
As always, thanks for listening! If you have an idea for the podcast or would like to be on, let Jack know!
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Transcript
Introduction of Guest
00:00:11
Speaker
Okay. Welcome back to the HFW shop talk podcast. This is episode nine have Matt Watson, my dad back on podcast. Welcome dad. Hello.
00:00:25
Speaker
So today, a little bit different of an episode as to what we've been doing or compared to what we've been doing the last couple episodes.
Growth of West Herr Automotive
00:00:34
Speaker
This past week, my dad had a neat opportunity to go to a talk presented by Scott Beeler who is
00:00:48
Speaker
the president and one of the leaders and owners of Wester Automotive Group, which I'm sure most people are familiar with at this point, but is the largest dealership in Western New York, obviously, but then also actually one of the even one of the biggest automotive groups in the country.
00:01:08
Speaker
Um, and you know, so it might seem like they've been around for a long time and, um, that this is a multi-generation business, but, um, you know, talking with my grandfather, he remembered the days when West her was one dealership and Hamburg. So I thought it was a really interesting conversation. Um,
00:01:28
Speaker
I guess without further ado, can you just talk about what you took away from it and some of the neat points you got from Scott? Well, I was just really impressed with the size of the business.
00:01:44
Speaker
Knew they had a lot of dealerships. I don't think I realized they had 39 dealerships all in Western New York, mostly Buffalo, some in Rochester. I think he said one in Syracuse. And I certainly, if someone asked me to tell them how much in sales Western did last year, I sure would not have guessed
00:02:08
Speaker
what they did, but they did about, Scott said about 3.2 billion in sales last
Employee Engagement Focus
00:02:14
Speaker
year. So that was kind of surprising me and that's also nice to see a local company do well in Buffalo. Yeah, and I think
00:02:28
Speaker
based on the conversation that you had and the notes that you took, they seem to do it the right way too, right? It seems to be, which I think a lot of people, obviously, all of us as, I guess, we would all be customers of Western, you don't necessarily see the other side of it as an employee. But dad Scott talked a lot about that and what that means and how that's contributed to their success.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, they're really, you know, a couple of the main points I got is they're, at least right now, and it sounds like for the last little bit, they've been really focused on recruiting talent and grooming talent. And they have a survey that they take and it basically lists out the percentage of employees that are highly engaged, moderately gauged.
00:03:26
Speaker
barely engaged and disengaged.
Core Values and Employee Care
00:03:28
Speaker
And Scott presented us, I took a picture and the national average for highly engaged employees is 25%. For West Terror, this is 78%. And then moderately gauge, the national average is 40%.
00:03:46
Speaker
moderately engaged and there at 17 barely engaged national average is 30% for West her it's a little bit under 4% disengaged 5% nationally and for West her it's under 1% so.
00:04:02
Speaker
They really have worked on making that the employer of choice if you're in the auto retailing business and his philosophy is that. If you have good people your priorities to take care of their people.
00:04:22
Speaker
And they will therefore take care of your customers. So, you know, he was saying cut, you know, customers are employees. Number one, a customer is second in line. And basically it means if you have happy employees, they will take good care of your customers. So, um, you know, that's one, one of the things he emphasized and just, you know, he listed out their core values, which.
00:04:48
Speaker
I think a lot of people have core values like this.
00:04:55
Speaker
Really, it comes down to just treating people well, trying to recruit high quality people and treating your customers well.
Recruitment and Post-COVID Strategy
00:05:07
Speaker
He presented to a room of about 40 some people. He said, I'm not telling you anything you already don't know, but
00:05:20
Speaker
companies excel when they become very disciplined doing a couple of things so he's not telling us anything that we don't already know. It's just they've taken a really disciplined approach at recruiting and really working with their people. I think more so in the last couple years because of COVID, they've really kind of
00:05:45
Speaker
worked on the employee experience and even got a corporate life coach who they have work with certain employees if they're going through a tough time. So I was truly impressed to say the least.
00:06:00
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of what you just mentioned follows closely with some things we already are doing and some things we want to do at HFW. And I think it's, well, one, it's inspiring because like we talked about, you know, West her in what, like the fifties and sixties was still one dealership.
Expansion and Overcoming Challenges
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. They were, they were one, I think they were started in,
00:06:26
Speaker
I don't know, right around 1950, somewhere around there, and they were one dealership until 1987, and he documented a couple of different stages and number of dealerships, so it's really been the last 20 years that they've really grown and really scaled. He said the toughest time for him was
00:06:51
Speaker
when they had about 12 dealerships. He said it was easy to manage the business when they had one or two dealerships.
00:06:58
Speaker
But when they had about 12, he felt like they were in no man's land. And obviously they did some things different, got more dealerships, and then you start getting economies of scale and things really start rolling. So just very impressed and also he's very big in getting out there and talking to his employees and also talking to the customers.
00:07:26
Speaker
And a very unassuming guy, he's not one of these rah rah, or at least didn't come off like that to me, very salt of the earth, down the earth type of guy.
00:07:42
Speaker
I think it's inspiring. We've faced some of the challenges that he discussed as we're looking to grow and looking to do a lot of the same things that he's done. Like you said, it all comes down to basics. I thought it was interesting too that you had mentioned
00:08:01
Speaker
that he brought up, the extent of his education was going to Erie Community College. He's not one of these people that went to a very high-end school. He went to ECC and learned a lot on the job and learned the basics of treating people, both customers and employees really, really well. It's worked tremendously for their business.
00:08:26
Speaker
No, that's correct. He joked about the fact he didn't have a four-year degree, but as I said, a lot of this is pretty common sense stuff, but he's definitely learned a way to scale his business.
Innovation and Avoiding Obsolescence
00:08:50
Speaker
I'm hoping the
00:08:52
Speaker
I'm hoping to take a little bit away from his talk the other night because we definitely want to grow and get into some new applications.
00:09:05
Speaker
I'm a big believer. You always have to try and innovate and not get stale and not do the same thing year in and year out. I think if you do that, you're at risk of becoming obsolete someday when things change. Applications come and go. Customers come and go. You just have to keep pushing the envelope.
00:09:32
Speaker
Well, I think that's why we talked about how we apply this to, uh, okay. So we had a brief intrusion. Uh, we're recording this at home and, um, our dog Murphy decided that he would like to be on the podcast.
Applying Lessons to Own Business
00:09:50
Speaker
Uh, but diving back into what we were talking about, uh, when we're looking at applying what
00:09:55
Speaker
Obviously, on the surface, a car dealership is very different from our business. Like Scott said, this isn't rocket science, it's not specific to their industry. When you look at, we've, I think in the last couple years, refined what we're all about and how we want to treat our people. These things are all fairly simple, but will help get us to that next level and we need everyone's
00:10:21
Speaker
We need everyone's involvement in order to be able to do that. You have to treat people really well and get that engagement, right? Yeah, I know. He said they are really focused on getting highly engaged people and that comes with creating a good corporate culture. He does a lot of recruiting.
00:10:42
Speaker
He's always talking to other dealerships and potential employees that try and sell them on why come to work for Wester and when your time to retire, why should you sell your business to Wester and it just comes back to really trying to focus on people and trying to find
00:11:07
Speaker
You know highly engaged people or even moderately gauge people as he said and and what he's doing. The numbers he presented he said we're on par with Toyota. He said he just met someone I don't know if it was the CEO or someone high up from.
00:11:25
Speaker
Toyota and I think they're now they're comparing numbers and their engagement numbers were very similar to Toyota. So just just very impressed by what he's doing. It just comes down to, you know, just it doesn't matter if you're a car business or your machine shop or restaurant, whatever, if you have
00:11:47
Speaker
you know, highly engaged employees, that's gonna translate to, you know, in most cases, success. Because those highly engaged employees will, you know, engage with your customers and treat them well, and that's a recipe for success.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, and so I guess the point of this podcast was one just to talk about a business that I think we all are familiar with at a basic level and explain what's been the science behind their success. And I guess obviously the spoilers that it wasn't really that complex.
00:12:23
Speaker
But also like as we look for examples of how we want to grow as a business both i would say financially obviously going from one dealership to three point two billion dollars in sales.
00:12:39
Speaker
replicating that to some degree in our industry is I think what our long-term really big goal would be. But then with people as well, I think we've talked about it in some of our marketing materials when we go to speak to prospective employees at job fairs and in interviews and what we're
00:13:00
Speaker
telling everyone is we really want to be the employer of choice for skilled machinists while there's operators, engineers, pretty much anyone that interacts with our business. We want to make sure that people are extremely happy. And being a smaller business, I think we can be more attuned to individual people's needs.
Reflection and Future Goals
00:13:23
Speaker
And this is something that's high on our priority list. So I thought it was
00:13:27
Speaker
It was cool that you got to see someone who's, I guess he himself is a little bit behind the scenes, but obviously Westerners is a staple of Western New York business. So cool to see, I think, how that relates and what we can apply from your takeaways from Scott. No, I was very impressed. So it was definitely worthwhile.
00:13:50
Speaker
All right, so I think that's it for today. We just want to do a brief overview and I think communicate some of what our goals are and, you know, companies that are doing great work and that we want to emulate in some degree. And certainly, Western and Scott Bieler are a great example of that. And so without further ado, thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next one. Thanks.