I don’t know about you, but I read a lot of books.

Recently, I was covering for Steve Hall, who had to leave town on business at the end of one of his classes. The class had just started taking their exam. I didn’t have my laptop with me, so I didn’t have anything do for 45 minutes. We have several bookcases at NCM, and one of those is right outside the classroom. So, I walked over to it to see if I could find something interesting to read to keep me occupied while the class finished their evaluations and final exam.

I started scanning the books to see which title or author might jump out at me and I noticed severalMalcolm Gladwell books. For some reason, I picked up Outliers: The Story of Success and began reading. An outlier, by definition, is a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.

As the title suggests, it includes many “stories of success.” There are many stories of success in the retail automotive business. I think, though, that there are more stories of failure.

In many of my classes, I do a little exercise. I ask everyone to go back to their first car sales position and remember all the people who were on that staff or started at a similar time. I ask them where those people might be right now. When they think about it, they all agree that most of them are no longer in the business at all. It’s not that they are all at other dealerships; they must be in some other job or career. They then agree that they (including me) are the lucky few. We somehow liked the car business enough and were good enough that here we are all these years later, still in the business and trying to get better at it.

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