On the Case: Rita and Rick Case have built an automotive empire from here to Ohio on the premise that obsessing over customers is a good thing

South Florida CEO, March, 2005 by William Plasencia

Several years ago, Rita and Rick Case saw details of a series of gruesome automobile accidents played out on South Florida media. The car crash victims drowned in canals, trapped in cars whose electrical systems were rendered useless by the murky waters. A simple tool to smash open a window and provide a mode of escape could have saved their lives.

"When people were crashing into these canals and drowning, I knew we had to do something about this," Rick Case says.

The 62-year-old CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based Rick Case Enterprises Inc. and his wife and business partner Rita, 49, commissioned a search for an emergency escape hammer that trapped accident victims could use to smash open their car windows from the inside. The partners paid for thousands to be manufactured. Then they began giving them away.

"We gave them free to anyone in South Florida who wanted one," Rick Case says. "We gave 7,000 to the Broward County Sheriff's Office, gave them to all our employees, to the fire departments, to anyone who walked through the door of the dealerships."

The Cases say the gesture was "good for the customer, and it saved lives," though neither will disclose how much it cost the company to produce the life-saving item. Few question the couple's philanthropic bent--Rita Case herself is deeply involved in donating and raising millions of dollars for local charity--but more skeptical observers say the move is just another example of how Rita and Rick Case shrewdly tap current consumer trends and concerns to promote care sales at their three South Florida dealerships. The altruism seems to be paying off.

Rick Case Enterprises last May was ranked the No. 53 Mega Dealer in the nation by auto industry publication Ward's Dealer Business. The company has approximately 900 employees working at 12 dealerships in Florida, Georgia and Ohio. According to Ward's, the company saw total revenue of $546.7 million on volume of 31,865 units for 2003, the most recent data available.

The company's South Florida Honda and Acura dealerships are regularly near the top of the national list in terms of sales. In 2003, the Davie Rick Case Honda dealership booked $188.7 million of sales, making it the largest Honda dealer in the state, according to Ward's. Only two dealerships, California-based Norm Reeves Honda Super-store and Power Toyota Cerritos, saw more dollar volume, and they have been operating several years longer than Rick Case Honda, which opened three years ago.

The massive Davie dealership has a half-million square feet of space and 1,500 cars under its roof in a gleaming six-story garage and sales center--giving it the distinction of being the largest, in sheer size, of any auto dealership in the world. It sells every product that Honda manufactures, from motor scooters to lawnmowers and generators to cars and motorcycles. Salespeople and customers access the huge, climate-controlled parking deck by elevators. Pneumatic tubes weave through the facility and deliver things such as vehicle keys for test drives. Each car is tracked by a security system to make sure vehicles are not stolen. The Cases says they regularly host auto industry visitors who come to see the dealership, which cost $25 million to construct.

"We were planning on making it the largest in the world in terms of sales, but we weren't trying to make it the largest in terms of physical size," Rick Case jokes. "What we found was that once you start selling all these cars you needed to have room for inventory, and we had bought all the land that was available where we were, so the only thing we could do was build this parking deck."

He adds that having so much storage and sales space also helps boost sales volume because it solves one of "the biggest hassles to sell cars in South Florida, because you have to walk around out in the sun or the rain."

Rain notwithstanding; Florida is the No. 2 state in the nation for volume of auto sales, behind only California, with its larger population and drier, year-round pleasant climate. And Case is unabashedly proud of the volume business his dealerships do. He claims that Honda corporate sales statistics made his dealership the largest in Florida during 2003, outselling even other makes such as Chevrolet; his Acura dealership has been the world's top-seller of the make for the past three years.

"In the first month we opened the Honda store, in March of 2002, we became the largest dealer ... we outsold the largest dealer out in California, which had been in operation for 30 years," Case riffs. "We outsold them in the first month we were open: 734 Hondas sold in that month. We set the all-time record for Hondas sold out of one dealership in August of 2002, 1,221 new Hondas in one month."

The high volumes of car sales have made Rita and Rick Case wealthy, though the two keep their personal net worth a closely guarded secret. What the couple do not shy from talking about is their obsessive customer service-driven marketing, which has made Rick Case a brand name unto himself in South Florida. Customers regularly drive miles from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties to purchase Hondas, Acuras and Hyundai automobiles from him, judging from an informal poll of cars bearing the Case logo along a three-county stretch of Florida's Turnpike and I-95.