Nothing’s linear. We like it to look linear and maybe over a long period of time, you know, if you stretch that timeline out long enough, it’s smoothes out the bumps and looks pretty linear, but in the moment it’s anything but.
Brad Tucker, Look Ahead Business Consulting
Josh Melton: How did you become an entrepreneur? Did you just know all your life or did it sneak up on you somehow?
Brad Tucker: Sometime during my time in college I realized that I wanted to own my own business. I loved being in sales and I wanted to be in a sales environment. I’ve always been a car nut and I wanted it to be something involved with automobiles. So I thought about that for a while and decided I wanted to go into the retail automobile business. And that’s what I did.
Chad Brown: Did your parents own their own business or was that something you just had to go do on your own and pave your own way?
Brad: My father was a fortune 500 executive. He spent his entire life in corporate America and was very successful. He taught me a ton of things. Among other things, he taught me that I didn’t want to be in corporate America. I always liked that small business space and the interpersonal relationship that I could have with my customers.
So I got interviews with these two dealerships in Durham, North Carolina. And I said to myself, I’ll go to work with whoever hires me first. And so I got hired first by a dealership that sold a variety of cars. And they were just the first people that called, right?
Today the man that owned that dealership is my best friend besides my wife. And he’s the one who brought me to Athens and was my business partner here for 11 years. He hired me in 1983.
That blind luck decision wound up leading to a career-long and lifelong relationship.
The guy at the second dealership that didn’t hire me got hauled out of the dealership in handcuffs. So if the other guys had called first, my career would look a lot different than it does.
Chad: How did you go from selling cars like hundreds of thousands of other people to leveraging a partnership and everything in between?
Brad: I began with the end in mind. I wanted to own a car dealership. So I said, okay, if that’s the end, how do I get there? Within the first six months to a year, I had understood enough about the business to know what the path looked like. Then I found out how to get there and I made it a priority to understand the process. And then I could start walking down that path.
Josh: So how did it go for you? You have this 20 year plan, which is super uncommon for someone in their early twenties to have lined up. How did you learn the lessons that you needed to learn to get on that journey and scale up?
Brad: Well, on my 40th birthday, I was buying stock in the company to be a partner. So it took the length of time that I had said it was going to take.
And right before I moved to the Athens, GA dealership that I eventually bought stock in, I had decided to move away from working for other dealerships and start a used car lot on my own. That was the beginning of four years of grinding with no vacation, until I decided to sell it and take a job with my first boss down here in Athens.
You asked me what I could tell myself 20 years later? I would tell myself today, go back to 1995 when Michael Gerber released the E-Myth Revisited and read that book. It’s still just as relevant today as it was when it came out.
Josh: So question for you. Was that four years of grinding the education you needed for the next steps in your dealership life? or when you look back on that, you’re like, man, I should have handled those four years way different?
Brad: You know, I think we can all agree that we learn a lot more from our challenges and our struggles than we do from our wins. And from that experience I learned two great lessons.
- Number one: learn how to say no and make it stick.
When you’re spending somebody else’s money, you can be worn down. When you’re spending your own money, you learn how to stick to your no.
- Number two: there is an absolute limit to the amount of income that one person working on their own can generate.
No business I really wanted to own that would help me achieve my goals could be a one person show. They weren’t capable of generating the kind of revenue that I was looking for, which meant I had to learn how to lead and manage people.
My former business partner says that in every town, there are business people that have a street named after them. And the name of the street is “One Way.” They only know one way how to do business and they’re going to run it that way until the day they go broke. So I’ve worked to make sure that none of the businesses I have ever owned have ever looked the same at the time I exited than they did at entry.
Chad: So fast forward. You’re in Athens, Georgia now. You have realized your 20-year dream of being a part of a dealership. What does that look like now? Are you thinking about what it looks like when you turn in the key and walk out the door?
Brad: Probably the best professional thing that ever happened to me was coming to Athens, Georgia. Probably the worst professional thing that happened to me was how I handled that 10 year period between 40 and 50.
These are the lessons that taught me to begin with the end in mind and always have a plan. Have a goal, don’t ever stop, even when you’ve gotten where you want to go. So at 40 years old, I was blessed in that professionally, I had achieved my goal. I woke up at 40 and my life looked exactly the way I had envisioned it at 20. Now I was just going to do the job and wait for this generational transition, which was my partner passing on and leaving me full ownership. It was a terrible mistake, because I got stale.
I worked hard to have the business and its employees be successful. I worked hard for our customers to value the relationship and be treated well and all the things that are important to me as a philosophy of interacting with employees and customers. But I stopped growing.
We wound up selling the dealership in 2011. And so at that point, I’m 50 years old. And my partner had enough confidence in me to let me lead the sale. But at 50 I had to figure out what to do, because I didn’t have enough money and I was too young to retire. That forced me to go back to the drawing board and start thinking about what the future looked like.
Chad: Where were you at from a confidence level?
Brad: I’ve never thought of it in terms of confidence. And people have said that’s really risky going into business for yourself. I’ve never thought of it as being risky. It’s not a question of extreme confidence in my abilities.
What you have to do is look at the model, look at what it’s capable of doing, look at your market and ask, “Can this business properly run and generate the kind of return that I need?”
If I, as the CEO, am worried about the process, I think I’m worried about the wrong things. I think that my operations people need to be worried about the process. I’m married to outcomes, not processes.
So what I’ve learned to do:
- Here’s the goal.
- Here are the key performance indicators.
- This is what we need to achieve.
- Here’s the company’s philosophy.
This is non negotiable; how we treat customers, how we treat employees, how we face the community. Simon Sinek’s “Why.” Non negotiable.
As long as you get us to these results and maintain the integrity of our key philosophy, how you do it, you handle that. And because of that, I’m willing to let the company grow and evolve and do what it needs to do. My ego’s not involved.
I think we can learn something from everybody with whom we come in contact.
Sometimes we learn how to do things. Sometimes we learn how not to do things. We had a consultant at one point in the dealership and his phrase was, “Don’t get mad at your money.”
That’s not intuitive. It doesn’t make obvious sense. But what he meant by that is don’t let emotion drive financial decisions about your business.
I’m a huge believer in the 24 hour rule. Give every financial decision 24 hours to percolate before you respond, because your first response is going to be gut-level. It’s going to be more emotional than it should be. And a day later you’ve had time to let that emotional wave wash over you and had time to think about it a little bit.
Chad: I live on the conservative side of the spectrum financially, but I get emotional and excited too. That 24 hour rule has saved me so much money for all of my business ventures. All of my partnerships, everything I’m involved in… if it’s an item over $500 I put a 24 hour rule on it. Can’t write a check. Can’t spend, can’t agree to a contract. Anything over $500, apply the 24 hour rule and 80% of the time after 24 hours, we decide to pass on it.
So you’re 50 and you are out of the dealership. Where do you go from there? How do you take all of this that you’ve learned and turn it into the success story that you have now?
Brad: I spent the first 30 years of my career as an operations person, as an integrator. And I always said I’m not good at the vision thing. I’ve left that to other people. At 50, I became a visionary because of the nature of the next business I took on and my relative lack of specific operational knowledge.
So we were selling the dealership in the later stages of the recession. In the middle of the process, one of our potential purchasers did not want to include our collision center. And my partner told me to figure out what to do with this thing. So I started taking a look at it and ran the numbers. The math looked good.
When I broke down the financial statement, it was a business that at that scale and location in that market could do what we needed it to do.
I bought that business at 50 to sell it at 65, always keeping the end in mind.
Chad: That’s huge. It took you 30 years to get to the point of what you think is probably the most valuable thing you’ve gotten out of 40 years of entrepreneurial life.
Brad: And it turned out to be a cathartic thing. The next few years were the absolute best years of my professional life. Most enjoyable, most rewarding.
You asked me a question a little while back. How did I get from selling cars to being a partner? Not because I was the best at each level of the organization.
I out-worked everybody else, I outlasted everybody else, and I did the work that nobody else wanted to do. And when you do that for long enough, you’re the last one standing.
Chad: How did you make that pivot or transition from a partner working day-to-day in the business and how were you able to see that pivoting out of that was the future for being able to sell this business?
Brad: One of the worst things I think that can happen to a business person is when they catch the smartest person in the room syndrome. As you get more experienced and rise in organizations, you may know more about what you do than anybody else in the organization, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing it.
And so all of a sudden at 50, I went from being in my own mind, the smartest person in the room as the operating partner of a dealership with 28 years of experience, to absolutely not the smartest person in the room. I knew about running a business, but I didn’t know anything about collision repair. I had to trust my people and re-focus myself on three things:
- I was responsible for making sure the business had the capital and the resources to operate.
- I was responsible for setting the philosophy, culture and work environment.
- I was the face of the business to the community.
Chad: How intentional were you in structuring a culture building process?
Brad: We made it very clear what the company goals were, and then we acted on them. I didn’t want any customer to leave our business unhappy. So I really reinforced that with our people and I empowered them to do what was necessary to make sure that was the case. You did not have to ask my permission to do something extra for a customer. And anytime there’s a gray area, I was coming down on the customer’s side.
Chad: So you have a team member that you’ve built a culture around and you trust who has performed work the client’s not happy about, but you’re siding in ways to make the customer happy. Does that team member feel neglected or feel like you’re going against them at that point?
Brad: I set out immediately, was very intentional about this, and I reinforced it constantly. To the last day, we are going to be the best organization from a quality standpoint in this market. And that was the goal on every car. So when we had a failure, it was typically a failure to communicate with our customers, not a failure of the quality of the work or the repair process.
I made it an absolute point of pride in our organization. We are going to be the best. And if you’re going to work here, you’re going to be the best. We’re going to train you. We will never stop training you. We will pay you to be the best. We will treat you like an adult. We will make sure you have the opportunity to grow personally, professionally, and financially.
They bought into that. They were proud to work in an organization that was that committed.
When you have good people and you tell them, “we want you to be good,” they’ll rise to that expectation.
Chad: So you always had revenue and profit goals. You had financial goals, and then you had culture as well. How do you push profit and revenue and employee pay and opportunity from a financial standpoint and still deliver culture and quality products?
Brad: If our people didn’t execute, if they didn’t believe it, if they didn’t make it happen, it wasn’t going to happen. So it has very little to do with me. All I did was set the course to the execution and the fact that all of those outcomes were achieved were the result of our outstanding people.
Everybody works their pay plan. Every employee gets a pay plan and figures out in short order, “how do I make the most money I can make on this pay point?” And that’s very human. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. So it’s incumbent upon the people drawing up the pay plan to incentivize the behaviors that they want to get.
We structured incentive-based pay plans that rewarded productivity and quality. And we always paid our customer-facing people out of one pot.
The entire organization got paid out of the same pot because I never wanted any of my employees to say, “That’s not my customer. That’s not my responsibility.” We rose and fell together as a team, not as individuals.
Josh: What were you building into that 15 year plan and what shifted? I know the Brad Tucker that built this company and sold it. But you were planning for 15 years to sell it. You sold it at 7 years. So you sold twice as fast as you thought. What changed? And what can you tell our listener about what to do to successfully build a company that you can exit?
Brad: As a professional, initially you’re paid for what you can do. Then at the next level, you’re paid for what you know. And then at the top level, you’re paid for what you can grow.
We were very blessed. We grew Georgia Square Collision 61% in six years from a top line revenue standpoint. My philosophy has always been I want to grow the business until I can’t grow it anymore, then I want to figure out why I can’t, fix that, and keep growing the business.
Buy it or start it, then run it with the idea that you’re not going to be there forever.
The first thing you need to do to have any kind of an exit strategy is build a business that does not require your day to day involvement. I would even go so far as to say, you should not name the business after yourself.
The second thing is, starting from the first day, go into it with a good tight set of books and keep them that way. Because anybody who’s interested in buying your business needs to be able to see that your results are actual, verifiable, and documentable.
The third and final thing is, run it like somebody could come in tomorrow and buy it from you, because that’s exactly what happened.
I had no intentions of exiting the business at 57, but I had a set of financial goals that I wanted to achieve. And a major national player came along seven years after I started and offered me the numbers I was looking for.
Chad: What did they value most about your business? Was it the bottom line? Was it the culture? Was it the happy customers? Was it the quality product? Why did they come knock on your door?
Brad: We were the largest player in the market. This would be my assumption. They desired to enter the Athens market, we were the only slice of the Atlanta Metro Area where they weren’t present. They had a choice coming into town; buy me or compete with me.
Which circles back to the point you made earlier for the entrepreneur, start with the end in mind, but be flexible with the journey along the way.
Chad: Any regrets, anything you would do differently in that collision shop start, sell, seven year process?
Brad: This is not the answer to your question, but I’m going to say this because this is one of the most fundamental lessons I’ve learned about entrepreneurship and ownership.
Until you own at least 51% of something, you are an employee with a pay plan.
You may be an “owner,” but the difference between the person who owns over 50% firing you and firing the most entry level employee in your organization is that they have to write a check to fire you for your stock. Other than that, you’re on a 24 hour contract.
Every employee in your organization can leave you and they will work next week or next month. Same thing with your customers. They can find similar services elsewhere. If they left, I’d be broke a week later.
The minute you understand that, as a business owner, you really understand what servant leadership is about. I needed my employees more than they needed me and I needed my customers more than they needed me.
All in all, I feel really blessed with the experience and there’s probably not a lot that I would have done differently, but I got there because I made so many mistakes the times before.
Resources:
“Start With Why,” by Simon Sinek
“The E-Myth Revisited,” by Michael Gerber
“Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business,” by Gino Wickman
Get in touch with Brad on https://www.lookaheadbusinessconsulting.com!
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