An auto dealer with drive - Sam Johnson

Nation's Business, April, 1988 by Ron Chepesiuk

Talk with auto dealer Sam Johnson about business, and one word keeps popping up. Service, says Johnson, owner and president of Sam Johnson Lincoln Mercury Merkur, Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., is the key to his success. "I spend 50 percent of my time in the service department," he says. "I want to make sure my customers are treated right."

Johnson's style has paid off. He has built a group of businesses whose sales totaled around $85 million in 1987.

In addition to his dealership, Johnson owns a rental-car business at the Charlotte/Douglas International Airport and a Ford dealership in Richmond, Va., and he is co-owner of another Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Charlotte.

It has taken Johnson about 15 years to amass his business empire. "During this period," he says proudly, "I have never had a year when I lost money."

Born one of 11 children to sharecropping parents in Arkansas, the 47-year-old auto dealer recalls the poverty of his early childhood. "I guess those memories have driven me," Johnson says. "I don't want to be poor like that again."

Johnson started at the bottom of the auto-sales business in 1959. He made $25 a week washing cars and doing odd jobs for a Buick dealer in St. Louis. Two years later, Johnson started accepting cars on consignment from his boss and selling them on the side.

Johnson became a salesman for the Buick dealer in 1965. During the next seven years, he built a reputation in the St. Louis area buy selling about 300 cars a year. The average for a good car salesman--then and now-- is about 150.

In 1973, Johnson paid $250,000 for a near-bankrupt Ford dealership in a tough inner-city neighborhood in East St. Louis. Ill. He didn't see his investment as a risk: "I had been selling 300 cars annually at the Buick dealership. Knew that with four or five salespeople I could sell twice as many cars as that."

Johnson's mathematics proved accurate, and by 1977 he had saved enough money to open his dealership in Charlotte; he put up 20 percent of the $700,000 investment required, and Ford Motor Company put up the rest. Johnson closed his East St. Louis dealership in 1979 and bought out Ford's interest in his Charlotte operation in 1981.

Even though the auto industry had made strides in recruiting minorities a dealers, Johnson believes a lot more can be done. He was instrumental in organizing the Black Ford-Lincoln-Mercury Dealer Association in 1979. Today the association, which includes about 1`1 black dealers, works closely with Ford in helping to identify and train qualified black dealer candidates.

"Hopefully," Johnson says, "we will be able to find success-oriented people who will help keep alive the partnership we have worked so hard to forge with the company."

Ron Chepesiuk