DigitalDealer.com recently had the pleasure of interviewing Darin Wade, General Manager of Rich Ford. Wade has over 30 years of dealership experience, starting as an invoice filer at Rich Ford when he was just 18 years old. He is an expert at turning around failing dealerships, helping grow other stores in the Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Woodstock, GA, markets before returning to where he started at Rich Ford in 2020.
For 64 years, Rich Ford has been Albuquerque’s source for new and used Ford cars, trucks, SUV, parts, service and more. Their goal is to always provide the best possible service to their customers and make sure the car buying experience is second to none. The store is the largest Ford dealership in Albuquerque, NM with over 250 employees and 25,000 square feet of showroom space.
Wade has continued to grow Rich Ford since taking over as General Manager and leads the store with a focus on both people and process.
Digital Dealer: Can you provide an overview of who you are, your dealership’s location?
Darin Wade: I’m the president and the General Manager of Rich Ford, and our parent company is Richardson Investments out of Albuquerque, NM. Rich Richardson was the original owner of Rich Ford, and this was his flagship store. He passed away more than 20 years ago, but it is still important to the entire team here that his legacy lives on. I’ve been part of this organization for 25 years now, starting as an invoice filer at 18 years old, and I have sat in every seat in the dealership. Rich Ford is technically the second oldest dealership in New Mexico, the oldest Ford store in the state, and the largest store by volume. We are a top 100 Ford store in volume and have been for almost every year that we’ve been in existence.
Digital Dealer: Is there anything that makes running a dealership in New Mexico unique, especially compared to other markets you’ve worked in?
Wade: We’ve got an unusual demographic and geographic situation here in Albuquerque. You can fit Germany almost three times into the state of New Mexico, but we’ve only got a little over 2 million people in the entire state. It is by far the biggest city in New Mexico, so we have people that drive from all over the state to come in to purchase vehicles from our store. It is our fiduciary responsibility to take care of our repeat and referral business. This store has more repeat referral business than any store I’ve ever run, and I’ve touched about 13 stores in my career.
Digital Dealer: What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you? Did you always see yourself having a career in automotive?
Wade: At 18 I answered an ad in the Albuquerque Journal for an invoice filer position at Rich Ford, the store I run today. At the time I was teaching tennis and soccer and wanted to find something that would get me out of the sun. I went into the interview in a suit and tie and the Controller took a liking to me. Back in those days, we were filing hard copies of payroll checks, and I began seeing the pay some of the sales team members were making, so I pitched myself to the General Sales Manager. And immediately was kicked out of his office. But I didn’t let it deter me, and I continued to pitch myself to him and others, continually getting kicked out of offices multiple times. After two and a half years of doing support staff assignments, I think I finally wore them all down. I made an offer to the General Sales Manager and said, “Look don’t pay me. I’ll work for free, and if I sell a car, just give me the commission.” By the end of that summer, I had made $30,000 in commission.
Digital Dealer: What is your background and professional experience and how has it helped lead to your current role?
Wade: I began working for Rich Ford during my time in college, I graduated, stayed at the dealership, now as a part of the Sales team, and along the way I got a second degree through a program where Ford Motor Company offered to pay for a portion of the learning experience. At the time, I had young kids, and I was still doing 10 to 12 hours a day at the dealership, so the only time to do that was like 10 pm to 2 am. It was through Northwood University and was an automotive marketing degree. I wanted to hone my craft—I wasn’t looking for the next position, I was looking at who was the best in the position. And I wanted to try to beat whatever those numbers happened to be.
I don’t think that most people, in my opinion, are successful from what they learn from a book. They’re successful from what they learn from their business experience. My passion is to put together teams that win and I think when your team knows that you’ve sat in their chairs, you can mobilize them as a unit and as a team. The experience in each chair has taught me you can’t fake a lot of these roles if you’re going to be successful.
Leadership Style
Digital Dealer: What has been the most rewarding part of running Rich Ford?
Wade: What gets me up in the morning, and what gets me fired up, is I love to watch the lightbulbs go off in the people that we lead. I love watching them learn something new and make more money than they’ve ever made in their entire life. It allows our team members to take care of their family in ways that they never dreamed possible. That’s the stuff that gets me excited, and that’s what is super rewarding.
Digital Dealer: How would you describe your leadership style, and how has it contributed to the dealership’s success?
Wade: Well, I will say I’ve been accused of taking too long to make tough decisions when it comes to employment. When you hire somebody, you take personal responsibility for that hire. That is your responsibility. You saw something in them. You hired them for a specific position. So, if they’re not performing to the standard that you expect, number one, you have to tell them and number two, you have to train, train, train, train. And then if they’re still not meeting the standard, that’s when you release the person.
It’s easy to fire someone, but it’s way harder to build them up. I’m also really big on setting a standard of expectation and in our industry, numbers are the way to do it. You know, there’s a number of cars that we’re going to forecast, that we’re going to expect to hit, there’s a number of gross I expect to hit, there’s expense control on what’s left over, on our selling gross lines for every department. So, I’m going to push our management team and together we’re going to press to make sure that we get there. I also require each new hire to go through culture boards with me the day they are hired, and I make them commit to our standard.
Digital Dealer: As a leader, how do you foster an inclusive culture within a business of over 200 employees?
Wade: I love to give the fence line, set the expectations, and then let my team run. The most talented people do not need somebody staring over their shoulders. As long as they get the results, then I let them go. In order to maintain a number one leadership position, it comes down to people and process. In my experience with turnaround stores, the process can get you from a red ink position to a black ink position. But if you want to be world class, if you want to be the number one dealership, it’s all about the people.
Digital Dealer: Who is a mentor who has been critical in your career? How did they help you grow? How do you mentor others?
Wade: I’ve become a better operator because I’ve been in multiple markets, I’ve worked for different dealers, fortunate that I’ve had amazing mentors, and I’ve tried to take whatever I possibly can from every person that I’ve met.
The dealer that I worked with in Georgia had a completely different skill set, a completely different mindset, and I learned a lot of things from him in a lot of categories where I may have been weak. And then the dealer that I worked with in Las Vegas, Nevada, also completely different, completely different skill sets and mindsets. I would not be able to be successful if it wasn’t for all the people that I learned from along the way, and fortunately, they happen to be, in my opinion, some of the best of the best. My number one mentor who taught me how to operate was a guy named Mike Blair, he was my General Sales Manager, and he went on to run all of the Phil Long stores. In fact, the person who took over from Mike, Kevin Shaughnessy, is a guy I grew up with and worked side by side in finance together and remains one of the smartest guys I know.
Every time I got promoted, every time I got put into the next position, there was no learning curve because so much had been shared with me as I moved my way up. One General Manager, Dennis Snyder, would pull his General Sales Manager into every business meeting so the person could learn from the experience. In the end, as I look back, it was all of the managers pulling me into situations in order for me to learn from them, and I may not have even known it at the time.
Dealership Turnaround
Digital Dealer: You have experience helping turnaround struggling dealerships, what’s the key to starting that process? How do you make sure profitability sticks after initial changes are made?
Wade: You never get an opportunity to run a store if it’s doing well. Nobody ever says, “Hey, our business is doing so well, we just want to give you a piece of it.” I became a dealer partner through a turnaround store. The store happened to be in the same market as Rich Ford and was actually a direct competitor. When I went in the store was in the negative —12 months later we did a 200 percent turnaround. The most important thing to know about turning around stores is that process is the number one thing that makes a business successful, with the people being number two. If you really want to be successful long term, it’s all about the people. There are two reasons businesses fail, no process and the wrong people.
I have a funny story about that turnaround store. Day One I’m getting a walk around from the Finance Director and I see a bunch of things that could be changed instantly, stuff like used cars in a side building when they should be marketed out front. So during the tour, the guy showing me around he says, “I’ll introduce you to the chicken.” I’m thinking maybe there’s a picture of a chicken, or a statue of a chicken. No, there is an actual rooster on the lot. And beside this rooster, my Reconditioning Manager is feeding and watering this rooster! So, no process, no people being productive. The rooster was a prime example.
In most underperforming stores you find broken processes, and in those circumstances, I adhere to a crawl, walk, run philosophy. If you’re not doing anything, just crawling is a success, and then once you get to crawl status, what does walking look like? And once you get to walking, then you celebrate because you can’t expect to be running with a failed store. But at the end of the day you need to look at whether you’re growing the business overall. Are the numbers growing? And if they’re not growing, then you’re not fixing stores.
BDC and Innovations
Digital Dealer: What are some of the technologies or innovations in automotive that excite you the most right now?
Wade: In the early 2000s, we built our own internal BDC, and we were so successful, we had more than 800 dealers throughout the country come through and see our process. We married the virtual store with the brick-and-mortar store. The reason why I will always do a business development center is I don’t want to have to guess or feel, I know exactly how many phone calls a day I get. I know exactly how many internet leads a day I get. I know exactly how many chats that we get. If you get really efficient with these numbers, you know where to spend your advertising dollars, and you know what’s working and what’s not working, whether it’s digital space or it’s the seven major media.
Digital Dealer: What innovative marketing/advertising strategies does the dealership employ to attract customers?
Wade: The crazy thing about this market is that just when you think that you know everything, it changes. You have to test market everything— we actually do a little bit of television, and a lot of radio. We have number one share of voice in our tier three market and isn’t that what every dealer goes for? So, if you’ve got that, you don’t want to give that up.
Now, when you’re doing a failed store, you don’t have that kind of budget. But if you’re not tracking and measuring, you don’t know. I’ll give you an example— how do you track a radio ad? I’ll tell you how you do it. I’ll literally throw out a $500 incentive to anybody who’s listening to the station for the weekend, if they come in and say that they heard it on the radio station, and sure enough, twenty minutes later, someone is walking into the showroom mentioning that deal. That’s how I know it works. Track everything.
You know, obviously we’re really good at tagging our Google Analytics, and there’s all kinds of things that go into that. But, in addition, I have created a one pager that we look at on a monthly basis. We will look at how much that we spend on every third-party lead provider, what the lead sources were, how many sales that we got off of that deal. I take the website expense; I even do a broad-brush calculation on the percentages that we pay our sales people on those units. I put all the salaries and bonuses of the Business Development Center employees against that department.
We take all of these digital expenses, we take all of the personnel that are involved, including the sales people that sold those cars and we track the leads by virtual and brick and mortar. When we started tracking in this way, about 15 years ago, 20 percent of our total sales were coming from virtual. Today, it’s 40 percent and moving closer to 50 percent of our total sales in this market. By tracking the marketing data in this way and tweaking it based on the results, we have been profitable every month after our initial month, every year since.
Digital Dealer: What are some of your future plans or aspirations, both personally and professionally?
Wade: Rich Ford has given me so many opportunities so professionally, I’d like to see myself growing this legacy store to a level of success it’s never been at before. We’ve hit some records in just the past couple of years in this store that represent more than what has been accomplished in its past.
On a personal level, my passion is growing teams and growing people to where they can run their own stores. I want to make a difference in someone else’s life, like really make a difference for them. How fun would it be to have someone in the future talking about me the way I’ve talked about all of my mentors in this article? Does it get any better than that?
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