“Just take care of the customer”

Carl Cannon Chevrolet Buick GMC Executive Manager Curt Ballard embodies the guiding principles the business has been running on for sixty years. It might have just taken him awhile to learn it. 

Words by Al Blanton | Image by Blakeney Clouse 

 Less than six months after being hired at Carl Cannon Chevrolet in Jasper, Curt Ballard had a problem. Curt had been a CPA before coming to the car dealership in 2005 and had a certain way of looking at things that, let’s just say, didn’t exactly match the Carl Cannon way of doing things.

 Curt initially struggled in his new managerial role, and when other managers were out of the office, Curt had a hard time making decisions for fear of making a mistake. One day Mr. Cannon called Curt in his office. “He called me in and said, ‘Look, I understand why that concerns you. I understand why you are hesitant. But if you ever get in a position to make a decision and you don’t know what I would want you to do, just take care of the customer,” Curt recalls. 

 The pupil would soon learn that Mr. Cannon wasn’t just giving him advice for the here and now; it was a guiding principle that Curt could carry throughout his working life. 

 Curt eventually began to catch on, and through the years continued to ascend the corporate ladder. Now Curt surveys and directs the entire dealership, which in reality is six unique businesses operating as one entity: an auto parts store, a quick lube operation, a collision center, a service center, a new car dealership, and a preowned dealership. 

“When a guest walks in the door, if we do our job really well, they don’t realize that we have 80 employees all working in sync to take care of their needs,” Curt says. 

 One of the more common misconceptions about the business, Curt says, is that dealers still have significant margin to negotiate on new vehicles. “When I got in this business, the art of negotiating drove the new car business,” Curt notes. “Customers walked on the lot and picked out a vehicle priced five or six thousand dollars more than what they anticipated paying and we did the dance until we settled on a price. As the Internet evolved, dealer pricing had to become more transparent.” 

 Curt says that today, most of the new vehicles on the lot are priced at net invoice, which is much easier for the average customer. “They can pick out a vehicle on the lot and know the real price. We call it the Carl Cannon Price Promise—the price on our website is the price you will pay. Every incentive requirement is detailed and if the masses don’t qualify for a specific incentive, we don’t include it in our price,” he says.  

 Unfortunately, deceptive online practices and other dubious sales tactics have soiled the reputation of car dealers as a whole, Curt will freely admit. At Carl Cannon Chevrolet, however, Curt says that “Mr. Cannon’s business model is customer-driven so we aren’t going to bait-and-switch a customer. That’s simply not the Carl Cannon way of doing business.” 

 Year-in and year-out, the top sellers on the lot are the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra—“In Walker County, you can never go wrong selling full-size pick-up trucks,” Curt says—but there’s a great deal of excitement brewing about the new line of Tahoe/Yukon/Escalade coming later this year and the long-awaited arrival of the C8 Corvette. “For as long as I can remember, there’s been a rumor that GM was going to build a mid-engine Corvette and it just never came to fruition,” Curt says. “This vehicle is unlike anything the industry has ever seen at its price point. We already have 20-plus people on a waiting list and are filling those on a first-come, first-serve basis.” 

 As far as the day-to-day operation of the dealership, Curt says its more organized chaos than routine. “We try to start every day with a sales meeting and end every week with a managers meeting but outside of that, you never know what to expect around here.”

 When asked about his management style, Curt says he tries to avoid micromanaging at all costs. He believes in hiring competent people, tying their pay plans to the goals he wants to achieve and empowering them to do their jobs. “We are blessed. Our average tenure is almost 10 times the industry average,” he says. “We just have an amazing team top to bottom, they do all the heavy lifting and deserve all the credit for our success.” 

 Reflecting on his job and how he initially got to Carl Cannon, Curt understands his boss took a chance when he hired him sixteen years ago. “Mr. Cannon gave me an incredible opportunity and took a huge leap of faith. I was a CPA and had audited some car dealerships and I thought I knew a little about the car business. But he knew better. He knew he was hiring someone who had no idea what he was doing,” Curt says. “So Mr. Cannon had to have a lot of intestinal fortitude to put up with that, because he caught hell from a lot of employees. But he stood by me and saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” 

 Lastly, Curt admits that when he arrived, he wanted to buck everything about the business. Learning a new methodology about drove him crazy, but over the years he’s swung far to Mr. Cannon’s side. 

 “His way was the right way,” Curt says. “Just take care of the customer, and everything will take care of itself.” 78