Las Vegas Dealership Profile
Tim Keenan Ward's Dealer Business, Dec 1, 1999 12:00 PM

His dad said work elsewhere, so he learned from a master It's no accident that Gary Ackerman's Ford Cou-ntry store in the Valley Auto Mall in Las Vegas markedly resembles Galpin Ford of North Hills, CA. It was part of Mr. Ackerman's master plan.

That blue print started to take shape when Mr. Ackerman went to work at Galpin Ford in the early 1970s. Mr. Ackerman's father, Don, told him that before he could work at the family's Gaudin Ford store in Las Vegas, he had to get experience elsewhere. That's a family tradition. The same thing happened to Don Ackerman when he wanted to work for his father-in-law, George Gaudin.

After graduating from the University of the Pacific, Gary Ackerman was working as a salesman at the old Gaudin Ford on Las Vegas Blvd. when he got the news. "I was back about three months and my dad informed me of a family rule," Mr. Ackerman recalls. "That was that I had to go find a job somewhere else."

Father told son that he had many things to learn about the business that he couldn't really learn as the "boss's kid." "I was just absolutely in shock," Mr. Ackerman remembers during an interview in his office filled with NASCAR and other racing memorabilia. "I was also angry and highly motivated."

So he moved to southern California and got a sales job at Galpin Ford, where he spent four years learning from an industry master, H.F. "Bert" Boeckmann II.

"I kept notes the whole time I was there and put them in a file, which I still have," says Mr. Ackerman. "I call it my master plan. It's handwritten notes of the way he laid out his lots, how the lot boys were organized, the way the paperwork flowed.

"I promised myself if I ever got to build Gary Ackerman's store, that I'd pull my master file out and to the best of my ability, copy everything he taught me," he says.

It would be a while before he got the chance to build his own store, but he returned to Las Vegas to build the current Gaudin Ford complex on Sahara, which opened in March of 1979.

Gaudin Ford sits on 20 acres and has a 130,000-sq.-ft. facility with 125 service bays. The store does $200 million in annual gross revenue. The dealership is among Ford's top 20 stores, selling 5,500 new and 2,400 used vehicles each year.

"It's grown beyond our wildest expectations, like the city has," says Mr. Ackerman, who in April of 1983 took over the company when his father had stroke, which all but put him out of the business.

Mr. Ackerman's leadership and the Las Vegas market's growth led to the Ford Country store in the Valley Auto Mall (see story on next page).

"I can't tell you how much of our success in Las Vegas I owe to Bert Boeckmann," says Mr. Ackerman. "If you walk around our Ford Country you'll see an awful lot of cues from his dealership, like the diner, our logo (it's Galpin's upside down) and the color schemes.

"This store is remarkably similar in layout, in approach, in systems and processes to the Galpin Ford of the 1970s," he explains. "And with the exception of computers and the Internet coming into our industry, that really is the only radical thing we have changed."

After only three years, Ford Country Ford sells about 4,000 new and used vehicles per year. It sits on 10 acres of the Valley Auto Mall and has 84,000 sq.-ft., including Mustang Sally's Diner.

In addition to the two Ford dealerships, the Gaudin Automotive Group consists of Jaguar-Porsche of Las Vegas, slated to open Jan. 15; Gaudin Used Car & Truck and Auto Credit of Nevada, which cater to the subprime market; and Gaudin Body & Paint.

Two things that Mr. Ackerman says differentiate his company from others is its focus on owner loyalty and a commitment to short-term leasing, which were either learned or refined at Galpin Ford.

"Every year we're in the top 10% of owner loyalty, because there's always been a family member physically in the building," he says. "The customers know that. And I'd say that 80% of our customers know my name.

"The second thing is our focus on short-term leasing," Mr. Ackerman continues. "In this market, with all this disposable income and all this neon and glitz, people love to be in new shiny cars. Leasing just went off like an atomic bomb in Las Vegas."

The Las Vegas area has many shopping malls. There's The Fashion Mall, more strip malls than you can count and stores at Caesar's Palace and just about every other new casino resort. But no mall has more potential for sales than Valley Auto Mall in Henderson.

Opened with one store in 1995, this automotive shopping center now has 13 facilities and 22 franchises covering 125 acres along U.S.-95 in this rapidly expanding area of the Southwest. And more dealerships are planned.

Valley Auto Mall recorded sales of 364 new and used vehicles in January of 1996. Sales figures have been increasing steadily ever since. September 1999 sales hit 2,616.

"Our sales numbers are increasing monthly and I think you'd find that all around the mall," says Ed Reed, general manager of AutoNation's Desert Pontiac-Buick-GMC.

In addition to Desert Pontiac-Buick-GMC, other Valley Auto Mall residents include Findlay Oldsmobile- SAAB, Findlay Toyota, Towbin Nissan, Towbin Dodge, Chaisson BMW, Chapman Chrysler-Plymouth- Jeep, Shack Findlay Honda, Henderson Chevrolet, Saturn of Henderson, Courtesy Mitsubishi-Kia-Isuzu- Suzuki and Ford Country.

Gary Ackerman, Ford Country's owner, was one of four founding fathers of Valley Auto Mall. He says the idea took off from the very beginning.

"We sold 100 acres in 14 months and had a business plan for five years," recalls Mr. Ackerman. "It just went 'boom!'So we bought an additional 25 acres and sold all of that."

He says the auto mall owners didn't "play games" with the real estate prices. All they wanted to do was sell out the place.

"The more dealers, the more traffic they're going to draw," says Mr. Ackerman. "The more traffic we draw, the more cars we're going to sell. And traffic, like sales, is increasing every month."

But it took a while for the business to pick up, says Mr. Reed. "We were the first dealership in the mall in 1995," he relates. "Being in a mall is a mixed bag. It's rough getting started because the traffic isn't as much as on (a street like) Sahara, but in the long term it should be good."

Competition also is fierce in the close confines of a mall.

"Our competition is the other stores in the mall, no doubt," states Mr. Reed. "It makes us fine tune our approach. We focus on the basics and are meticulous about tracking customers."

Mr. Ackerman says any competitive issues are secondary to creating a place where customers can enjoy shopping for vehicles.

"In the very beginning, it was pressure-packed," he recalls. "But we realized very quickly that because it was something the customer liked, collectively it would be good for all of us."