The below excerpt was taken from Volkswagen of St. Augustine’s Owner, Joe DiFeo’s, recently published book The Insider’s Guide to Where and How to Buy a Car available on Amazon.com.
“My family’s venture into the business began with my great-great grandfather, Saverio DiFeo, who migrated from Italy with his family in the early 1900s. He got his start in the New World peddling fruits on the streets of Little Italy in New York City. Like many immigrants to this country he was motivated to create a good life for his family –building a foundation for the success of future generations.
Eventually, his son Joseph moved to Jersey City and opened a bakery, DiFeo’s Pastry Shop, in the Italian ghetto, where he and his family lived in the floors above the bakery. The bakery was nothing very fancy, but it was good, and word of mouth spread in the community, as always happens when an outstanding product is delivered at a good price with care for the customer.
In those days, much like today, word of mouth was everything. You couldn’t afford to have dissatisfied customers. The bakery was filled with the best pastries in town, and my grandfather Sam worked there, learning the focus on customer service and satisfaction he would one day bring to his own business …and that’s where the cars come in.
By the late 1940s, looking to strike out on his own, Sam partnered with a friend, Frank, and opened his first used car dealership on Newark Avenue. At the time, he didn’t know a thing about cars, but he knew people. He also knew the secrets to keeping customers so satisfied that when it came time for them to choose a place to spend their hard-earned dollars there was no use risking it with someone who didn’t consider you a part of the family.
I imagine customers felt as comfortable around Sam as all fourteen of us grandchildren did when we’d congregate at his house. Sam and his wife had four children—my dad Joseph, my Uncle Sam, my uncle Dennis, and my aunt Cecilia. You’d think the owner of a big car dealership would be taking his grandchildren for spins around the block in the latest model, but instead we usually enjoyed his homemade strawberry shortcake with whipped cream made from scratch. Even more enticing was his lemon ice maker—this big wooden barrel that you’d have to crank, crank, crank with the salt and ice and eventually be rewarded with the most delicious cold Italian lemon ice in all of Jersey. That was the magic of my grandfather Sam—he made you feel like you were important, at ease, like you mattered.
No doubt he practiced this with every customer that walked through the doors of his dealership also. Sam DiFeo wasn’t just about selling great cars at a great value, he was about helping people and making them smile. Sam brought the lessons he learned at the pastry shop—that community is everything, that word of mouth is invaluable, and that the customer is always right—and applied them to his dealership.
Frank often drove the cars from the lot over to the bakery and there they’d appraise them while enjoying a tasty treat. Plus, Sam was a “yes man.” If a customer had a complaint, he was sure to make it right. Simply, he cared about his customers. They were, after all, his neighbors in the community and he took that very seriously.
Eventually, a manufacturer called Willys-Overland Motors approached them. Willys-Overland was an American company best known for its design and production of military Jeeps and the civilian versions of the same. Soon after, the dealership was rebranded with the Willys-Overland Motors name, and business boomed. Sam and Frank opened their second location, a Plymouth dealership, in nearby Linden, New Jersey. Shortly after, in 1953, they opened a Buick dealership.
When my dad, Joe Sr., graduated from Boston College in 1965, he went on to law school and soon after began practicing law. He also started helping with the family business on the side, mostly with legal matters. But by the early 1970s he’d made the transition, and started working in the car business full time. His brother, my Uncle Sam, wasted no time and started working in the business right after graduation. Not long after my dad started working full time in the car business with them, Toyota approached the two brothers. Toyota was really taking off—it was the seventies and the company was actively looking to expand into new markets. It was seeking to do business with established dealership owners with solid reputations. That’s how the fourth location came to be. My dad and uncle bought a gas station and converted it into the new Toyota franchise.
As if that wasn’t enough, my grandfather had always dreamed of owning a Cadillac dealership. With enough capital and experience under his belt, he opened a Cadillac dealership in the late seventies. While the Plymouth and Willy’s Overland dealerships had been shuttered, the family now had four thriving locations: Pontiac, Buick, Toyota, and Cadillac. By the end of the eighties, four original stores had turned into thirty-five stores, and cars were the official DiFeo family business.
Though they expanded rapidly, they made sure each store operated with the same rules and procedures as the initial stores. Again, it always went back to concern and care for the customer and firm roots in the community. Eventually, Wall Street came knocking. Looking for an established string of close-proximity dealerships with a clean brand and impeccable reputation, United Automotive went public in the nineties, eventually becoming Penske Automotive. The family eventually sold twenty-five dealerships, and kept ten.
It’s hard to say what contributed specifically to such astonishing success. Of course, a lot of hard work and dedication no doubt proved crucial factors. But other owners worked just as long hours with similar devotion and failed to reach such stellar results over the years. So, it had to be more than just that. Our family did things a little differently than dealerships had done in the past. Like in the bakery, once the quality of the goods reached a superior level, the focus widened to superior customer service.
We made up a survey for customers, for example, and asked them when they would most like their car serviced. More than half of those surveyed chose Saturday. Up to that point, no dealership service departments were open Saturdays. Our family dealerships found a way to make it happen and how to make it appealing for the mechanics and other staff as well. After all, if you’re going to be a customer-focused business, it’s imperative that you listen to what the customer is saying.
We believed in giving customers what they wanted. We also established a two-week return policy. It was a different way of looking at things—we viewed everything in the business from the customer’s perspective. Customers, indeed the entire city, eventually responded to such unprecedented attention and service. Jersey City even recognized my grandfather as an extraordinary citizen and named a street, Sam DiFeo Drive, after him.
You may have noticed that this story features five generations of DiFeos from my great-great grandfather to my father, and you may wonder where I come in….” “I’m afraid I was, for a period, the black sheep of the family. Despite all my family’s success and my years’ experience working after school and weekends at dealerships most of my life, after I graduated from college I did what any son of a dealership legacy would do…I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and opened an organic farm.
My life was the typical existence of a small farmer: early mornings, seven days a week, hard work, and quiet, lots of quiet, except for the roaring of tractors now and then. Although I loved working with the soil and producing outstanding fruits and vegetables for the community, the isolation, long hours, and meager profits eventually began taking their toll.
My friends encouraged me to join the family business, but I still wasn’t convinced the car business was for me. Rather than scrap everything, I found a sales job at a local dealership to feel the business out as a regular Joe and see how I’d do. I did exceedingly well, making top salesman right out of the gate. After a year and a half, I met someone on a similar trajectory (does this story sound familiar?), and we joined forces, partnering to open a used car dealership. I was walking in Sam DiFeo’s footsteps, in a new city, on my own. We even branded the dealership (ours was a Thrifty Car Sales location) the way my grandfather had with Willys-Overland so many years before.
Like my grandfather, as owners we made sure the focus remained on the customer, making it a point to help many credit-challenged folks get a good car. We always focused on getting quality cars and selling them at a fair price to make sure that our customers drove away in a car they could trust and not feeling as if they had been financially hobbled. Our focus wasn’t just on selling cars to people, it was on helping people find solutions and improving their credit and transportation situations. Like the men in my family before me, I strongly believe that good business is founded on relationships, not transactions.
The dealership did well, and one day, a gorgeous girl came in looking to buy a car. After the sale, I knew right away I was interested in seeing this customer again very soon. Eventually we got married and continued to live in Asheville running that dealership until another opportunity came along.
My family had a Volkswagen dealership in New Jersey for decades, and Volkswagen invited them to open another one in Florida. In 2011, my family invited me to join my brother Andrew in St. Augustine, Florida, where he ran a successful Hyundai dealership he had opened a few years before. I jumped at the opportunity and my wife and I— expecting twins at the time—packed up and moved to St. Augustine.
I helped my brother expand the used car section of the Hyundai store while we built the Volkswagen dealership across the street. We opened VW for business just before Christmas in 2013. Santa—well, the VW factory—delivered about 100 shiny new VW’s to fill up the blacktop. With our purpose of “Driving Extra-Ordinary Relationships,” we focused on making purchasing and servicing a high-value and positive experience for our guests. That’s the kind of experience I want for you and any customer, particularly those with concerns and hesitations based on lack of available information or unsatisfactory experiences in the past.”
So, there you have it, the story of how VW of St. Augustine came to be …even though I’m sure all you’re thinking about is a homemade Italian lemon ice ( – ;
