Almost one month into the coronavirus pandemic, small-business owners across the country are confused and overwhelmed. Less than a month ago, the unemployment rate was the lowest it’s been in years and lots of businesses were having chart-busting months. For those of us who own small businesses, it feels like someone came in and hit the “destruct” button when we least expected it. Business owners all over the country were blindsided by something they had no control over. Almost overnight, everything we knew about our livelihoods and how to run a successful business ceased to exist.
This is the first in a series of 4 blog posts I’m going to share with you guys over the next several weeks. I wanted to share how Bob Ruth Ford came about, where we’ve been and where we’re going. My hope is to give people a better understanding of why this family run business of thirty seven years means so much to us.
My husband and I own a Ford dealership in a small town in Pennsylvania. My father-in-law purchased the store in the 80s, when my husband, Rob was just a little boy, before you had to be a multimillionaire to acquire a car dealership. Bob had very little monetraily when he bought the store. Just big dreams, his passion for hard work and his drive to leave a legacy for his family.
My husband, Rob quite literally grew up at the store. There used to be an apartment above the showroom that he and his father lived in. My husband would play upstairs or run around the lot, throwing rocks, riding four-wheelers and yelling at his dad to stop smoking. He never did. Bob smoked two packs of cigarettes a day until the day he passed away. I stopped harassing him after 10 years of being married to Rob. One thing about Bob was that he had strong convictions and if he wanted to do something, he did and if he didn’t, he was going to. End of Story.
Bob was the life of the party. You could always count on him for a good time. He’d stay out late with you, dance endlessly, and he’d frequently buy B-52 shots for the whole bar. Getting everyone else drunk while tossing his “bomb” over his shoulder. He just had a way about him that made you have fun. When I was younger, he’d even pick up my girlfriends and me from the bar at 2 a.m, if I asked. We’d usually stumble out to the curb with someone missing a shoe, another girl crying and one more that needed to hang their head out the window for the drive just in case she couldn’t keep her drinks down. He’d laugh at all of us, call me “his favorite daughter-in-law” (I was his only daughter-in-law), and drag us to breakfast at the local diner. I have never met another man who loved diners like Bob did, and I probably never will.
Bob was a character, and one you weren’t likely to forget. Rob and I still run into people around town and get to hear the stories of Bob and his many adventures. They’re always hilarious and have an element of “WTF?” to them. We usually walk away from the conversations saying “yep, that’s totally something your dad would say/do”.
The man was a senior citizen and ran circles around everyone. We even threw him a 70th birthday party in Atlantic City at a nightclub where we all stayed out ’til the lights came on at almost 5am and they kicked us out. Bob beat us out of bed three hours later and woke us to get breakfast. He had a “thing” for waking people up after long nights out. He thoroughly enjoyed making fun of you for being “young” and “not able to hang”. In modern day terms, the man was a savage.
Still, while Bob was young at heart, he was very old-school in how he ran his business. He was tough, and he was definitely tough on Rob growing up, too. Rob had to be independent and his dad ran a pretty tight ship. Owning a PA car dealership and knowing how to run a successful small business means lots of hours, lots of stress and little time for much else. Especially in the early days of ownership. He knew how to build work ethic and taught my husband so much about the value of hard work. That working 16 hours a day was no big deal and if you worked less, you weren’t working hard enough.
Bob grew up with nothing and worked hard for everything he earned. His story was the quintessential American Dream. He wasn’t going to let that dream be lost on Rob because Bob himself had “made it.” He had no intention of letting Rob take the easy road. If Rob wanted to be a part of the dealership he knew from his upbringing that nothing was going to be handed to him.
Bob didn’t believe in handouts and being a part of the dealership was no exception. There were no freebies along the way. Bob’s motto, which is inscribed on the back of Rob’s watch he got for college graduation says “Hard work pays off”. Rob spent his summers during college selling cars at the dealership, making money for the following school year. His dad gave him a car to drive as long as he stayed in school and told him he’d pay for his tuition if it was earned with Rob getting good grades.
Rob graduated from Clemson University in 1999 (GO TIGERS!) and decided to get a job in Charlotte. He was young and determined to do his “own thing”. Less than a year later, in 2000, Rob came home to what was instilled in him since he was a kindergartner who spent his days running around the store. He came back to do what he knew best, work at the dealership.
Rob purchased his first 10% of Bob Ruth Ford from his dad right before we got married in 2002. I say “purchased” because many people believe my husband was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Everything that Rob and I have to this day was bought with money he earned.
When Rob and I got married, Bob Ruth Ford was a solid business. Bob had learned how to start a car dealership that was set to do well in those years before Rob came back to his roots. The store was selling around 50-60 cars a month. Rob started out selling cars, then a manager was let go and Rob took his place. Bob took the same approach to training a new manager that his bosses in the past had taken with him. Some like to call it “baptism by fire.” Basically, he told Rob what he needed to get done and to do it quickly. Rob used his good work ethic instilled from his father and got it done, learning as he went.
The days were very long, including every Saturday, and he was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. His phone would ring at all hours of the night. When our daughter Gianna was born in the fall of 2006, Rob was home for 36 hours and went back to work. Right around that time they hit the 100 cars sold in a month mark. Then 150 cars, then 175, and the numbers just kept going up. Rob started adding more staff and the store just kept growing. It grew because Rob was grinding and hustling. He worked his ass off.
Rob won’t always admit it, but a lot of his drive and ambition comes from wanting or even having a need for approval from his dad. Rob’s dad had a way of him feeling like he needed to prove himself. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but spoken or not, it was a driving force in Rob’s work ethic.
Without saying it directly, Bob would make Rob feel guilty about leaving work for a family event or to go to one of my OB appointments when I was pregnant with the kids. Again, it wasn’t malicious; he was just very old school. He believed men worked long hard hours and went out for drinks after work, and women stayed home to take care of the house and kids. It didn’t make Bob a bad guy, but Rob didn’t share his version of old-school or traditional family values, and it could cause tension from time to time.
Bob’s father passed away when he was just a little boy, something he never talked about. His mother was a widow and became a bartender to support herself and her three boys. I think Bob and his brothers were left home alone often. He learned from an early age to fend for himself, and that was ingrained in him. It taught him self-reliance, but it also prevented him from asking others for help even when he could have used it.
Bob came from very humble beginnings, went through traumatic events at a very young age and was born in a generation where you just didn’t talk about things like feelings and emotions. Things just were the way they were and you buried it and moved on. I think this greatly affected his ability to really connect with anyone beyond a surface level, which impacted a lot of his closer relationships.
Relationships with our parents as we get older are complicated. Figuring out how to make your dad proud is a common goal and the need for approval never quite goes away. Rob’s relationship with his dad is no exception. The two of them were very close, but Bob always struggled with being “too close” to the people he should have been the closest to.
During the housing market crash and resulting recession in 2008, Bob Ruth Ford grew. People would ask, “is owning a used car dealership profitable at a time like this?” But when dealerships were closing their doors all around us, we were prospering. It wasn’t dumb luck. Bob, now in his sixties, had become semi-retired at this point. Rob had a really good handle on things at the store and his dad trusted his judgement; Rob had proven that with his track record. Rob has always been ahead of the curve as a car dealer. He’s really great at following trends and he sees things that other operators just don’t. He’s always several steps ahead of them. He put things into motion prior to the crash that set them up for a period of massive growth by really zeroing in on the used car market.
In 2009, during one of the worst real estate markets, Rob and I custom built our dream home just five miles from the dealership. We were 32 years old. I was at the beach with the kids the summer before we moved in and Rob (he stayed home to work) sent me a video of the kitchen that was just about done. I remember showing my extended family the video and thinking “Is this really my life?”
Many people looked at Rob’s and my life then, and even now, and think that we’re “lucky” or that we “acquired daddy’s dealership.” Maybe we made things look too easy over the years, but I assure you it wasn’t easy. Rob had an amazing opportunity given to him by his father and he took it and ran with it.
Rob and my father-in-law worked really well together over many years. Running a business as a family is not always easy to navigate, but for the most part they both worked equally to make an impact on the success and growth of our family business. This year the dealership has been in our family for 37 years. This is our small legacy and that has never and will never be lost on any of us.
That’s why I’m sharing this post and one more a week for the next three weeks in a four-part series all about our journey as business owners. How our childhoods, especially the influence of our fathers, affected our thoughts about good work ethic, money and business. How we have chosen to change the perception of car dealers in the community at large and the struggles we’re now facing during this pandemic. There’s always a good story behind every entrepreneur and business owner. We are no different.
