Commentary: Turning her first car into a career

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Aug 11, 2006 by Neil Young

Jenny Trostel's first car was a 1963 Saab. Her father gave it to her in 1977 when she was 18 years old. Before she could drive it, she had to rebuild the front end.

It was one of the early Saab's with the two-stroke engine, she recalls. You had to carry cans of oil in your trunk, and people always thought I was crazy when I would put the oil in the fuel tank before I filled it up. The Saab's were one of the first cars to come out with front-wheel drive, so rebuilding the front end was no easy job.

Today, Jenny Trostel is owner and president of Saab of Baltimore. She is one of the very few women Saab dealers in the country.

Her Saab pedigree goes way back. Her father, John Jacobson, was a Saab dealer in Wilmington, Del., from 1961 to 1972. Jenny's first job was working for him during high school, keeping the books. Later, she worked at a bank, going to college at night, where she earned a degree in accounting.

In 1985, the state of Delaware took over her father's business property to turn it into an expressway off-ramp and he retired, turning the business over to Jenny's brother, Bill. She left the bank and went to work for her brother managing the office and keeping the books. The business grew.

In 1997, General Motors, which owned Saab, along with a potential partner, approached her brother to open a Saab store in the Baltimore area. Because Jenny was such an important part of the operation in Wilmington, he asked her to work for him at the new dealership.

I was an integral part of Bill's business, Jenny says. I thought about it and finally told him, 'If you want me involved, I want to be a partner.'

Jenny and her brother opened the dealership with a third partner in 1999, and Jenny served as controller.

In 2004, General Motors asked Jenny to enroll in their Women's Retail Initiative, a program designed to help women become successful car dealers.

It was exciting to be accepted into this program, she says. The training was fascinating. I had to do a business plan for a fictitious Chevy dealership. We had never done a real business plan before. I learned a lot from this exercise.

She succeeded in the program and, in October 2004, GM helped her buy out her two partners and she became president and owner of Hunt Valley Saab, now Saab of Baltimore.

Even though Saab has some of the best customer loyalty in the industry, having a Saab dealership doesn't guarantee customers will come through the door, she points out. Getting new customers to consider a Saab is a real challenge. A lot of people tend to mentally connect Saabs with college professors who still carry slide rules.

This is where the training from the Women's Retail Initiative really paid off.

When I opened Hunt Valley Saab, I realized I needed to carefully develop a realistic business plan to see me through, she says. Having a good business plan and following it is essential for any business owner. However, you have to realize that a business plan is merely a road map; sometimes you have to make detours. I do a business plan every year along with a monthly business plan.

Her business plan showed her that she had to do a lot more than rely on repeat buyers, so she set up a prepaid maintenance program.

Today's cars can easily run over 100,000 miles as long as they are properly maintained, explains Trostel. However, if you want your car to last a long time, you have to maintain it regularly. Our prepaid maintenance is extremely popular with our customers. We keep an extensive database of all our customers so we can service their cars properly.

Jenny Trostel is a firm believer of looking forward in your business and planning for unintended consequences.

Last year when GM had their employee incentive buying plan, we sold more cars than we ever had before, she says. We planned ahead with staffing because we knew this year we'd have all these cars coming in for their yearly maintenance. If we hadn't had the foresight to make sure we had enough service technicians, we wouldn't have been able to handle the volume and some customers would have gone somewhere else.

Being a business owner can be lonely. One of the things that Trostel says has helped her is surrounding herself with a great staff and also with great business peers like the Inner Circle of Baltimore. The Inner Circle of Baltimore is a small group of local business owners that meets on a regular basis.

Inner Circle is a great group for me. When you go from being a 'worker bee' to a business owner, your relationship with your friends changes, especially if they're still 'worker bees.' Inner Circle gives me a group of peers to whom I can talk, share problems and get answers.

According to Paul Riecks, Inner Circle's president and facilitator of her group, it's a two-way street.

Jenny has been a strong contributor to her Inner Circle group through her observations and advice to others and the issues she has raised about her business, he says.

Trostel will tell you she loves running her business with its challenges and triumphs.