By Alysha Webb, Editor and Publisher
Randy Powell started out working on cars for fun, became a technician apprentice for Mercedes-Benz, and is now general manager and equity partner at Mercedes-Benz of Birmingham, part of Dream Motor Group.
Even as the cost of buying dealerships rises, new paths to owning a dealership are opening for hard-working general managers and other dealership managers. Powell’s story is a great example of that trend.
“There are lots of reasons qualified people who spend their entire career in the car business and never get a chance to be a dealer,” Joe Agresti, CEO of Dream Motor Group, tells Automotive Buy Sell Report in an email. “We find those people and give them the chance they deserve.”
The road for Powell to becoming an equity partner in a dealership began in 1975. Powell was going to community college in Ft. Myers, Fla. and working on cars for fun.
Randy Powell, Dream Motor Group
“I realized people got paid” to work on cars, Powell, tells Automotive Buy Sell Report.
He quit college to work as a mechanic and in 1977 the 19-year old Powell began working as a technician apprentice at Overseas Motors Mercedes-Benz dealership in Ft. Myers. (The dealership was later acquired by Sonic Automotive and now operates as Mercedes-Benz of Ft. Myers.)
He rose to the position of service manager at Overseas Motors, then in 1987 got an offer to become service manager at Precision Motor Cars in Tampa, Florida. At the time, it was the largest Mercedes-Benz service facility in the southeast, says Powell.
Soon after making the move to Precision, Powell and his wife both decided to go back to college to instill the importance of education in their children. They took turns, each going to school and working for a semester while the other took up the slack looking after the couple’s by then three children. Powell earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. His wife also earned two degrees and now works as a professor.
Powell was service manager and director at Precision Motor Cars until 1999, when opportunity came knocking again. John Ellis, owner of RBM of Atlanta Mercedes-Benz asked Powell to become his fixed operations manager. Powell went to work for Ellis.
The move really paid off when, in 2006, Mercedes-Benz awarded Ellis an extra point 15 miles north of Atlanta in Alpharetta, Ga. Ellis asked Powell to help him build and staff the dealership that would become RBM North.
What started out as a great opportunity – Alpharetta was in an area with rising incomes and multiple corporate headquarters — quickly soured as the economy began to wilt in 2008. Powell, who became the dealership’s general manager, was determined not to lay off his newly-hired staff.
Powell turned to the internet to boost his dealership’s marketing and business development. That also helped grow the dealership’s service reputation, and was a big help in growing certified pre-owned vehicle sales through third party sites. RBM North weathered the downturn well and earned Mercedes-Benz’s prestigious Best of the Best Award just a couple of years later.
By 2014, Powell was happily working for John Ellis as GM of RBM North and helping prepare the Ellis children for taking over the family business.
“I had no intention of leaving. John Ellis was and is a great man,” says Powell.
Then, he got a call from Agresti.
Mercedes-Benz had offered Nick Saban, the legendary football coach at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, an open dealership point in Birmingham, Ala. Saban, who had no experience running a dealership and was busy winning national championships, approached Agresti for help. Agresti was busy building a Mercedes dealership in Houston and asked Powell to come on board to run the dealership. Powell went for it.
Getting the new dealership built wasn’t simple. There was already a second Mercedes-Benz dealership in the area, owned by Crown Automobiles of Hoover. Crown sued to stop the new Mercedes dealership. As part of the eventual settlement, Saban, Agresti, and Powell bought out Crown’s Mercedes franchise and a nearby Infiniti franchise.
They also agreed to build a new Mercedes facility in Birmingham. Construction on the new facility has just begun. It will sell and service new and pre-owned passenger cars. The former Crown facility will sell Mercedes’ Sprinter and other commercial brand vehicles and service commercial and passenger cars.
As part of the agreement to move to Dream Motors, Powell became an equity partner in Mercedes-Benz of Birmingham. Most of Agresti’s general managers are equity partners.
Agresti says he sees offering an equity stake to his managers as a responsibility. “In my mind, the general managers in our group deserve this opportunity, and not providing it for them feels wrong,” he says.
The responsibility extends to the dealership’s employees and customers, says Agresti. “They need the daily attention from someone who owns the store.”
He looks for candidates who believe in the Dream Motor culture and understand all elements of the dealership business including “a robust sense of civic responsibility.”
Choosing to partner with Powell was “one of the easiest decisions I have ever made,” says Agresti,
