CARY, N.C. -

Auto Remarketing is recognizing its 11th annual CPO Dealer of the Year, and receiving the honors in 2020 is Ford dealer Jerry Mullinax, whose group includes five Mullinax Ford stores in Florida, one in Mobile, Ala., and another in Olympia, Wash. The group also includes a Hyundai store in the Orlando, Fla., area.

Mullinax has roots in auto industry going back 50 years when his father, the late Ed Mullinax, got into the car business in Ohio. As elementary schoolers, Jerry Mullinax and his brother Larry started doing odd jobs at the family’s dealership.

“Typical kid growing up in the Midwest, our first job was picking the rocks out of the front yard (of the dealership), because we bought it and the previous owner didn’t really bother to pick the rocks out of the front yard, so that’s what we did,” Jerry Mullinax said.

“We cleaned the service department floors, and mowed the grass … I said to myself when I was a kid, if I can ever afford to pay somebody to mow my grass, I will never mow grass again — not unlike a lot of kids,” Mullinax said.

“As we got older, we started cleaning cars and those types of things,” he said. “Once we could drive, we started actually getting more of the learning about the business.”

And helping the family business grow.

Ed Mullinax grew the business to five Ford dealerships, Jerry said, eventually selling to AutoNation in 1996. His father was credited by many as the inventor of one-price selling, Jerry said, which was the business model AutoNation was aiming to use, he said.

Jerry Mullinax ended up working for AutoNation for three years before deciding to go out on his own. In 2000, he restarted his dealership business from scratch.

Mullinax, now in his late 50s, has been in the car business for a half-century, the last 20 years of which have been running his own stores.

While he doesn’t “want to sound like one of these 80-year-old men,” Mullinax has seen it all, and has firsthand experience in the car business from the ground level as a youngster doing odd jobs on up.

“It’s very hard to replace just being around and just seeing what happens. I’m 58 and so I’ve been working around a dealership for 50 years,” he said.

But for the auto industry at large, and many other industries, few if any of those years have been quite like 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted seemingly every aspect of daily life and business.

As for the Mullinax stores, “It’s kind of a mixed bag,” Mullinax said.

“Most of our stores, it’s been a pretty good year … Car dealers in Florida are considered an essential business, so we never had to close,” he said. “Of course, when COVID came along first, it affected business negatively and then when the manufacturers put 0% (financing) on, we sold a lot of trucks and did pretty well.

“Now we have a store in Olympia, Washington that the state mandated that we close there and certainly that affected that store very negatively. But overall, most of our stores are up,” Mullinax said.

And most have seen used-car growth. In the mid-September interview, Mullinax mentioned a few Florida stores with used sales up between 2% and 9%, plus a 40% gain in pre-owned at its Vero Beach, Fla., store.

“So overall, with the exception of our Washington store, we’re up in used cars this year. Our new is down slightly, but again in Olympia, it’s down the most out of any of our stores,” Mullinax said.

“Looks like our average store is probably, on new, is probably off about 5% or less. So overall, it’s not been a bad year,” he said.

Mullinax said the group is “fortunate” in Florida, as he looks around the country and sees other areas with stronger dips.

CPO sales for Mullinax stores have been similar to used overall, he said. One challenge, however, has been the high demand for 1- to 3-year-old vehicles that are the bread-and-butter of certified inventory.

Doing the math on various costs, fees and profitability, the Mullinax stores have not been able to purchase as many vehicles in this age bracket that they typically would.

So, what about alternative methods to sourcing CPO vehicles?

“I don’t think we’ve done enough, certainly we’ve gone out a lot further. And I think a lot of dealers do this now, but we’ll go out 1,200 miles to find, sometimes even further, to find the inventory,” Mullinax said. “So, I guess I’d say searching further away has been one thing that we’ve done. Looking at trying to find other auction sources, like ACV … Our buyers a lot of times spent a lot of time on the Ford factory sales. They still do, but looking other places as well. They’ve spent more time looking at other places, as well, to try to get enough inventory on the ground.”

Another odd year for the auto industry, of course, was 2008, during the height of the Great Recession. With the new-vehicle industry crashing, Mullinax ramped up its focus on used and “started getting better at them.”

Based on his data, Mullinax doesn’t find that gross on CPO cars is higher, but he has found that they turn quicker.

“That’s half the equation, is how fast you sell them, and typically we sell a CPO faster than we sell a non-certified,” he said.

Certified also tends to help out the service business, Mullinax has found. Not only do the Ford CPO vehicles come with the respective warranties of that program, Mullinax said that “we sell a lot of wraps as well … The wrap is when you cover the other components on top of the powertrain. And those cars end up in the shop a lot faster than a new car.  And the customer, since they have a warranty, they don’t want to go someplace else. They’ve got the warranty here and they bring their car here.

“And I think that’s probably one of the biggest things about CPO that we appreciate is, we turn the cars faster and we see them back in our service lane a lot more. That may also ultimately lead to more customer loyalty, as well,” he said. 

“If that car’s not a CPO and they go take it down to a local repair shop, you don’t have that same interaction with the customer. And it’s kind of proven the more interaction you have with a customer, the more likely they are to come back.”

As the 2020 CPO Dealer of the Year, Mullinax will be recognized during the Pre-Owned Con portion (Dec. 7-11) of the all-digital Used Car Week. Stay tuned to Auto Remarketing enewsletters and UsedCarWeek.biz for more information.

This is the award’s 11th year. Previous winners of the CPO Dealer of the Year award include:

2019: Cavender Toyota
2018: Trophy Nissan
2017: Kia of Irvine
2016: Fletcher Jones Motorcars
2015: Bill Luke Chrysler Jeep Dodge & Ram
2014: Hyundai of New Port Richey
2013: Galpin Ford
2012: Longo Toyota
2011: Karl Chevrolet
2010: Paragon Honda/Paragon Acura