A journey from struggling dealership to national recognition

TILTON — Thirty years ago, Paul Gaudet purchased a struggling car dealership.

Now, Gaudet’s AutoServ sells hundreds of cars each month and employs his children and grandchildren.

He is among 49 people across the country who have been nominated for a national dealer of the year award.

At age 74, Gaudet has an office upstairs at the busy dealership and no longer goes down to the showroom to sell cars himself. He’d likely be pretty successful if he tried again.

“If everything went to hell in a handbasket, I could still sell cars,” he said Friday above a balloon-laden showroom jammed with customers negotiating to buy vehicles.

Started in Lawrence

He started as a car salesman in 1965 at Nassar Ford in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and rose quickly through the ranks to general manager.

“I was in college and took a job selling cars and was making so much money I just stuck with it,” said Gaudet, who went to the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.

His secret: Be honest with people and work to build business relationships.

“There’s an old saying, ‘You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.’” he said.

His son, Dennis, graduated from college and wanted to get into the car business.

“I wasn’t excited about it, but I let him do it,” Gaudet recalled. “He came to work for us in 1988 and he really fell in love with it.”

Gaudet had been buying rental property in Lawrence. The money he made from that served as a financial launching pad for father and son to open their own car dealership.

Coming to Tilton

“We looked around,” Gaudet said. “We could of ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We could of ended up anywhere. We just needed a deal that somebody was going to finance 99 percent of it.”

It was a time when many car dealers were going out of business and banks were eager to find people to keep these businesses going.

“We ended up here,” Gaudet said. “We ended up buying a little store on the Franklin and Tilton line. I think they had 13 employees and were selling 16 cars a month.”

The dealership sold Ford, Chrysler and Dodge cars and trucks. 

He now also sells vehicles from Jeep, Nissan, Ram, Kia and Volkswagen and employs about 200 people. The dealership currently sells 300 to 400 cars a month. Gaudet said one month it sold 517.

It’s a far cry from meager beginnings.

“This place I bought was so dirty that if you walked from one end of the showroom to the other, your shoes were all black,” he said.

“Actually, I looked at it and I was going to walk away but my attorney just said, ‘You know, you're looking for a deal that you got nothing to lose. You got to take a shot at it.’”

The business grew with an employee base that was committed to making the dealership work and management that was supportive of workers.

Training, training, training

“We have great training programs,” he said. “And the factories offer great training.”

There are two people in the sales department whose primary job is training employees. Workers must gain knowledge of the vehicles and learn successful sales techniques. 

“Your upper management in sales have to be good, they have to be professional, they have to be mentors, and they can help a new sales person get through that whole learning curve,” Gaudet said.

“It’s the same with technicians. Technicians are tough to come by. We start them in our quick lane, and those kids that we see potential in, we continue to send them to training.

“Technicians today are pretty much computer scientists. They have to be really bright and as a result they do really well.

“I have a lot of respect for my technicians and my sales people because those people actually drive the bus. Every nickel that comes in here is pretty much from them. The rest of us are support people. We give them everything they need to do their job.”

He said a number of his technicians and top salesman make over $100,000 per year.

Selling cars

Like everywhere, there is pressure on the staff to make sales.

New-car dealers do not make a great deal of profit on each car they sell, but they receive significant factory incentives tied to achieving monthly sales quotas.

When it gets close to the end of the month, dealers pull out all the stops to make a sale and reach the quota, Gaudet said.

“That old adage that the last two days of the month are a great time to buy a car, there is a lot to that,” he said. “There are times when we will sell a car and maybe lose $2,000 but we have maybe $20,000 hanging there if we don’t get to that quota number. Those are hypothetical numbers, but that’s true.”

Sometimes employees get particularly good deals on cars themselves at the end of the month and end up buying vehicles that will help the dealership meet the quota.

A changing business

Gaudet said cars are built to much higher quality standards than when he first started in the business.

“You can’t survive in today’s market as a manufacturer if you don’t build a really good quality car,” he said. “I look back at some of the stuff we had to sell. I mean we’d have to tow them off the carrier. They wouldn’t start, brand new vehicles.”

Customers are better educated.

“When customers come in here, 90 percent of them, they know everything about that car,” he said. “The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to us.

“People assume we make a lot more money than we do, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. I can remember years and years ago people thought we made $2,000 on every car, when we were making $200 or $300. But you couldn’t convince them of that. The Internet has taken that all away.”

Some customers never set foot on the lot. They buy the car from home and it is delivered to them.

For those that do come to the lot, an old saying holds that, “A guy doesn’t step on the lot lest he wants to buy.”

“I have to believe that,” Gaudet. “First of all, this is the last place they want to go and waste time. I believe that. If they come on the lot and we don’t sell them, I’m sure a good percentage of them, within three or four days, have purchased a vehicle somewhere.”

Multi-faceted business

The dealership has a finance office and an insurance office. The service department is a profit center. There is a used car operation and a parts business.

“There are some people who are a bit credit challenged,” he said. “It’s not because they are bad people. It’s just because they’ve had some hiccups.

“We get these people financed because we send so much business to particular banks that if Jack the Ripper comes in here and he wants to buy a car and we pick up the phone and say, ‘You got a lot of business from us this month? We want this person driving a car’

“And they will do it. And there are people that deserve those chances.”

Leaving a legacy

Gaudet says he gets calls from venture capitalists and public companies asking him if he is interested in selling the dealership. He’s not interested.

“I’m doing this because I want this to go to my next generation and my grandkids,” he said. “I can only eat so many steaks, and I can only play so much golf.”

Dennis, another son, Paul Jr.; and a daughter, Donna Hosmer, are all involved in the business.

“My three kids are in it, their spouses, I have two grandkids in the business. It’s such a joy. And for a period of time I had both my brothers, one has since passed away, who took early retirement and came to work here. I’d see my brothers every day. I look back at those years and say, ‘Special. Special.’”

Dealer of the year

Gaudet and dealers from other states who are nominees for the TIME Dealer of the Year award will be honored at the 103rd annual National Automobile Dealers Association Show in Las Vegas on Feb. 15, 2020.

The announcement of this year’s annual award was made by Susanna Schrobsdorff, chief partnerships officer, TIME, and Doug Timmerman, president of Auto Finance for Ally Financial.

Gaudet was chosen to represent the New Hampshire Automobile Dealers Association in the national competition.

He helped establish and fund a new location for the Boys & Girls Club of the Lakes Region. Other groups he supports include Spaulding Youth Center, Harbor Homes’ Veterans FIRST, Belknap Mill, Lakes Region Mental Health Association, Belknap House, Camp Allen, Meals on Wheels, Make-A-Wish and CASA of New Hampshire.

“Personally, through the dealership and our family foundation, we have given away more than $1 million over the past five years to a myriad of worthy causes – from combating social challenges like addiction and homelessness to children's charities, religious organizations, youth sports and service clubs,” Gaudet said.

The dealership and its employees strive to be integral in the community.

“We are inspired most by the willingness of our team to follow through with our customers and to share their own time and success through community volunteerism,” he said.