John Smith traded in his Mazda CX-9 for a Ford Expedition on Wednesday.
Gotta support the team.
On the heels of selling Mazda dealerships in New Glasgow and Moncton, Smith this week took possession of the Fairley and Stevens Ford dealership in Dartmouth.
“The whole point of selling those was to free up the money to make this deal; this is our major focus, this store,” Smith said. “We’re not looking to expand past this at any point in the near future.”
Smith sold the two Mazda stores to Rob Steele of Steele Auto Group, as part of a family decision to focus their business on Halifax, though they continue to own the Mazda shop in Truro.
“Most of my family is in Halifax at this point, my kids are older and we have six grandkids in the city,” he said. “I’m not retired, but obviously (his son is) going to be the main guy running things, so we were looking for something in the Halifax area. This was available, which I found out through some connections, it wasn’t public.”
A mutual friend put him together with the now-former owner of Fairley and Stevens. Smith said there were no other bidders, but he did have to get the approval of Ford of Canada.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a big piece of it,” he said. “When you sell these sorts of businesses there’s really two aspects you have to look at. You need somebody, obviously, who has the ability to afford it, but you have to look at it from the…manufacturer’s perspective. They need somebody that they’re happy to have run it. That’s not the easiest combination or there’d be a lot more people doing it. That’s why you see groups, because they have the expertise that’s required, along with the money. In this case, we had the capital and we had the expertise level. Ford was terrific to deal with. I was approved as dealer principle in — I don’t know if it was record time — but it was pretty quick.”
Smith, who started in the car business 36 years ago as the manager of a Ford store, said he feels there is an opportunity to make Fairley and Stevens a much bigger player in the used car business.
“The location we have in Metro is spectacular. We run a huge parts and service business here because of our close proximity to Burnside. We have one of the biggest service departments, frankly, in Canada,” he said. “Ford is doing some great things going forward. The brand new F-150, the new Bronco coming, the Mach-E in the electric field, there’s a lot of upside to the blue oval at this stage of the game.”
