First time buyer from the TV industry falls in love with retail automotive

First-time owner Jay McGraw in August acquired McGraw Ford in Aransas Pass, TX. The experienced TV producer sees similarities in his current role as a dealer principal and his work in the TV industry.

Though the dealership business feels familiar in some ways, however, the acquisition process was foreign, he tells Getting to Go! Sound advice along the way was crucial.

“The process is in a lot of ways like changing your tires while you’re driving down the highway,” he says. “You just kind of got to figure it out as you go for a first time buyer.”

As not only a first time buyer but also a newcomer to the retail automotive world, he found it was “kind of a closed-circle world,” McGraw says. “It’s hard, if you will, to find a deal, and it’s hard to find any kind of insight into the process.”

Once he was actually in the circle everyone was very friendly and helpful, “but they don’t even know that you’re looking for them until you find them,” he adds.

McGraw learned that the Ford dealership in Texas was available through a lawyer friend who was representing the sellers, a group of families who had owned the dealership for nearly a century. “It was just kind of time for them to transition out of the ownership role and so it was a good fit for us,” McGraw said.

He hired Bel Air Partners to vet the Aransas Pass opportunity and several others, ultimately deciding to acquire the Aransas Pass store, Willie Beck, co-managing partner at Bel Air Partners, tells Getting to Go!

The Ford store was the right one for McGraw, Beck says. “It was a relatively low cost of entry since it is in a secondary market, which was his preference, and he was particularly targeting Ford or Chevy given Texas and the appetite for trucks and SUVs,” Beck says.

Accounting for every nickel

The transition was a cash deal, so McGraw didn’t face the financing hurdle many first time buyers do. He is flooring with Ford Motor Credit, which has been “great to work with,” McGraw said.

The process of obtaining the manufacturer’s approval to buy the dealership was arduous, McGraw says. “As a first time buyer you are wondering why all the questions why all the vetting, you realize they are doing it for you not to you,” he says.

Once he started operating the dealership and realized how many moving parts there are, all the vetting “really makes a lot of sense,” McGraw says.

Running a dealership requires a system for everything from the pricing structure related to aging inventory to where to assign service technicians based on skill set and the labor rate, he says.

Dealership profit margins are not high, McGraw says, so “you gotta make sure that you’re not letting, you know, nickels fall through the cracks, and (that you are) taking advantage of the opportunity you have.”

Feels like home

Being an outsider was a different feeling for McGraw. The son of famed TV psychologist “Dr. Phil” McGraw, Jay McGraw, 46, is famous in his own right as an Emmy-winning TV producer and best-selling author.

He decided to go into the dealership business because he likes doing things he hasn’t done before, McGraw said. Also, the car business reminded him of things he loves about the TV community, McGraw says.

Cars are part of people’s everyday lives and “usually a passion,” he said, and everyone knows about them. In the TV business, you hope everyone knows about your show and that watchers feel excited to tell friends about a new TV show they found, McGraw says.

Then there’s the people. There’s a real sales attitude in the television production world, he says. At the annual Ford meeting and NADA, it felt a bit like being at NAPTE, a global content marketplace for buying and selling TV programming, McGraw says.

“I was kind of looking around for the (NAPTE) guys, and I had to remind myself, well, this is actually a different convention,” he says, “But it feels very similar and so I just kind of feel at home with it.”

Blasting through U300

McGraw brought in a new general manager with a wealth of experience with the Ford brand, he says. The store was underperforming, selling fewer than 300 units annually. “We will go from what would be called a U300 to not a U300 dealership,” McGraw says.

He has boosted the marketing – focusing on grassroots such as events with the local high school first but with plans to grow digital marketing as well.

“I think digital is where people are looking for cars these days,” McGraw says, “So we’re definitely leaning into the aggregators, if you will, and also traditional search advertising.”

It’s working. November was the highest volume sales the store had done “in a long time,” he says.

The building is not image compliant and McGraw says he is excited to begin work on Ford’s new Signature 2.0 image program.

McGraw has fallen in love with the retail automotive world and aims to acquire additional franchises.

For first time buyers such as himself, his main piece of advice is to find advisors who know the dealership buy sell world well. “Finding Bel Air Partners was definitely the best decision in the process,” he says.

The process includes too many unknowns for a first-timer to navigate without sound counsel, McGraw says.