Many companies, including dealerships, tend to tout company culture as part of their recipe for success.

Not very many, however, tend to survive three generations of familial torch bearing and reap the rewards quite in the same way as Ohio’s Ricart Automotive Group.

It started with Paul Ricart on Independence Day in 1953 as a single-point Ford franchise in Canal Winchester, Ohio — with four cars and one garage.

And these days? In late 2015, the dealer group was expecting to have retailed roughly 8,500 used vehicles out of its Ricart Used Car Factory by the end of the year.

As part of this year’s “Leading Dealer Groups” issue, Auto Remarketing spent some time talking with Rick Ricart, third-generation member of the group as well as its current vice president of sales and marketing, to see if he could share some sales tips.

Cutting straight to the issue, we asked Ricart what his group’s overall sales strategy is, distilled down into one statement.

“We are very, very consistent with everything we do. We have consistent training. We have a consistent culture,” Ricart said. “But we are dynamic when it comes to each individual customer as we engage them because there are so many types of buyer today depending on how much research they’ve done and everything.

“I would say our strategy is, ‘sustainable growth through consistent processes, by treating each individual customer based on their needs and demands.’”

Well, that seems to make sense — consistent culture, dynamic approach to customer service — but how is that achieved? To start off, Ricart says one key to obtaining quality sales men and women for his new and used stores is to, well, not hire people who have done it before.

“Four years ago now, I adopted a policy where we don’t hire car salesmen,” he said.

How does that work? For starters, Ricart says they don’t hire the “transient” car salesmen that tend to bounce around from dealership to dealership, spending six months or so at one business before moving on to the next — an issue that he says has plagued the Columbus area in the past.

“What we decided was we were sick of hiring people that had been taught bad habits, that had been taught to lie, cheat and steal,” Ricart said. “What we really need are people that are focused on customer service and that don’t have the entitlement of a lot of millennials that refuse to work 40 hours a week, or work weekends, or work nights. So four years ago we took a strategic move and started hiring from the service industry.”

That’s right — former servers, bartenders, hotel front-desk staff, valets — that’s the Ricart sales staff’s bread and butter.

“We found people that have the personality, the customer service training, the character — and brought them into the car business,” he said.

To Ricart, today’s business isn’t about learning how to be a salesman. It’s about letting the customer, who, more often than not, has come into the store following an incredible amount of research, take the reins and have the sales staff simply help them find what they’re looking for.

In fact, that’s exactly how Ricart’s management phrases it to their sales staff. Of Ricart’s 550 employees across its new and used stores, 62 are sales people in the Ricart Used Car Factory. And they’re not allowed to sell anything.

“That’s what we tell them all the time, ‘you’re not to sell a car today. But you’re to let two or three people buy a car that you meet,’” Ricart said.

‘Family owned and people driven’

That “internal tagline” is what Ricart attributes to his company’s cohesive culture — the reasoning behind its ability to retain many of its employees long term and give them a feeling of openness and honesty.

“We are very employee-centric. We don’t shun them for sharing ideas, criticism,” he said. “We let our employees take ownership in their job and the dealership itself. And we have a lot of long-term employees that help reiterate all of those culture-based programs that we do. And we actually have an in-store employee engagement director.”

In an environment where employees take ownership of their positions and care for the overall well-being of the business, Ricart says this helps make his job easier.

“It allows me to do my job better because I’m not worried about what I say, because everything is very honest and transparent and open with everyone,” he said. “Management truly defends the employees, as well.”

Another tip that Ricart gave for dealers is that if you want to build a fan base for your dealership, you have to start with your own employees.

“We learned years ago when we started our culture change that if the employees aren’t advocates of the dealership the customers never will be,” he said “That sounds crazy, but I remember five years ago there’d be someone that worked in the service department that didn’t want to buy a car from the company they worked for because they didn’t get along well with the used-car department.

“It gave us a lot of opportunity to improve those things. You need to make sure that every employee is proud of where they work.”

Success of the used-car recon department

Speaking with Auto Remarketing in late December, Ricart said the turn-time that week in the Ricart Used Car Factory’s reconditioning department was currently 5.2 days, with its peak at one point as low as 3.9 days. The recon team, which utilizes the Motor Trend Certified Vehicle program, tries to get each vehicle show-ready in less than four days so it can go into the “photo lab,” where each vehicle gains 27 high-quality photos and is put online for sale.

Ricart says he enjoys the program because, instead of having six different teams, one for each make, he has one team certifying all of the Factory’s vehicles. That one team, with 20 technicians designated to used vehicles, shares 14 service bays and performs the same inspection on each vehicle. He says the recon department has come a long way — when they first started tracking turn time on vehicles, they stood at 11 days.

The goal of “sustainable growth” is exactly what is reflected in his Used Car Factory’s sales figures. At the end of November, it had sold exactly 7,787 used vehicles in 2015, an over 700-vehicle increase over the first 11 months in 2014 (7,054 used-units retailed) and roughly tying the overall sales figure for 2014. Speaking conservatively, Ricart says the Factory was expected to end the year at 8,400 to 8,500 used units retailed, a 10-percent jump over last year’s figures.

Ricart says he knows the Factory could retail quite a bit more — but the focus is currently on quality over quantity.

“We’re looking for sustainable growth,” he said. “We could go buy a whole bunch of cars as cheap as we can and lose money to market them and say, ‘Hey, we sold 10,000 cars this year.’ But if you don’t sell 10,000 or more next year, then it was false pride, or whatever you call that.”