Headquarter Automotive Group is in expansion mode and Judy Farcus Serra, the Group’s CFO, is helping lead the charge.
“We are really going to focus on luxury now,” she tells Automotive Buy Sell Report.
Serra has the experience. She has already helped the Group acquire open points and existing franchises for Headquarter, which is based in Miami, Florida.
The minority-owned Group has won Toyota’s Presidents Cabinet Award seven times, among its many accolades. Its flagship Toyota dealership in Miami, Fla. employs 325 associates and does more than $1 million a month in fixed operations, says Serra.
Its staff is 98 percent Hispanic, including some who don’t speak English. “It is not easy to find candidates in this area who speak English fluently,” says Serra, whose husband is Cuban American. The group is piloting an English education program for Spanish speakers to help them succeed and work with all customers.
Besides the Toyota store, Headquarter owns Honda and Hyundai stores. The Group sold 7,753 new and 3,548 used units in 2015.
It acquired a Mazda open point in 2014; that facility is under construction. The Toyota store is in Miami, the others are in central Florida.
“We would love to be in South Florida,” she says, “but it is a tough market. The stores are much overpriced.”
Serra helped develop the pitch to Mazda for the open point, took the lead on the land acquisition, and is overseeing the construction of the dealership. But what she really emphasizes is the need to find the right people to run and staff the dealerships.
“I make it my priority to make sure we have management in place at the stores,” she says. “I recruited the general manager at our Hyundai store.”
Serra then mentors the managers “to help them maximize their talent and management skills to become better managers.”
She offers an example or her mentoring style. One of the group’s managers, a 17-year veteran, got into a pickle when he forgot to remind several sales people to attend a training class. Top management at the Group were very disappointed and their jobs were in jeopardy when the salespeople failed to attend the dealership’s sponsored training. The manager wanted to save their jobs.
She advised the manager to tell top management that it was his fault for not reminding them of the classes at the time. The jobs were saved.
“ I gave the manager the confidence to just say it was his fault,” says Serra.
Saving the jobs was important for the Group as well. “It takes us 100 applicants to find sales people like these individuals,” she says.
The value of mentoring
Mentorship has played an important role in Serra’s career. Her first dealership job was in 1986, as a receptionist and cashier at Maroone Chevrolet in Hollywood, FL. After working with the Maroone family for three years and at different locations, she met her mentor, Phil Lynch, who was the controller at Maroone Dodge in Miami, FL.
“I would always go to him for more work and to learn more about different tasks. I would always finish my tasks quickly and I hated not being busy,” says Serra.
She followed her mentor next to Abraham Chevrolet, where she sat in on the due diligence process when Maroone’s auto group was acquired by AutoNation founder Wayne Huizenga.
In 1997, Lynch next went to work at Headquarter Auto. Serra followed him a few months later.
Serra stuck with Headquarter Auto when Lynch left in 2002. “From there my mentor and role model has been Jeronimo M. Esteve, our CEO,” she says. “He has allowed me to flourish with little or no barricades. He has created an environment for me that has had the perfect formula for my personality to truly develop and become the leader and business person that I am today.”
Headquarter Auto is owned by the Esteve family, and Serra is the only female executive who is not a family member. She is also a women in a male-dominated industry.
She uses her position to promote and mentor women, for example her office manager and controller are woman. Serra tries to teach other women to avoid “pitfalls” in the industry such as getting hung up on petty, career-derailing things such as office gossip.
“Worrying about what other people say or think [can] really debilitate a person,” says Serra.
Headquarter Auto recently pitched for a Porsche open point but wasn’t chosen.
“Our luxury open point opportunities will increase once we have existing top performing luxury stores in our group,” says Serra.
They also pitched for a Lexus point, and were in the final running. But they decided that the market that the point was located in wasn’t the best fit for the Group.
“We decided to continue searching for the right opportunity,” says Serra.