Young, inexperienced and very successful

Rick Case Fiat's top salesman is a 19-year-old from Jamaica.

The finance and insurance manager is a 24-year-old former cashier with no previous dealership experience.

The oldest employee is a 40-year-old service technician.

But the dealership last year was the top-selling Fiat store in its region and No. 4 in the nation, Chrysler Group says. And the local newspaper honored the dealership last year as one of the top places for young professionals to work in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area.

Rick Case Fiat in Davie, Fla., is about 20 miles west of Fort Lauderdale. It opened July 1, 2011, and sells about 660 new and used Fiats annually.

The dealership faces challenges: Six other Fiat stores are within 60 miles and its 14 staff members, most of whom have no previous dealership experience, have a heavy workload.

But Rick Case Fiat gets an edge from its youthful and energetic staff, a general manager eager to hire and train staffers from outside automotive retailing, lots of community face time and a love for Fiat cars that makes selling them fun.

The store is part of Rick Case Automotive Group, which ranks No. 21 on the Automotive News list of the top 125 dealership groups in the United States with retail sales of 21,154 new vehicles in 2012.

General Manager Raquel Case, 28, the daughter of Rick and Rita Case who own the group, likes to defy convention.

Despite growing up in an automotive retailing family and receiving a degree in automotive marketing and management from Northwood University in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2006, Raquel Case moved to Nantucket, Mass., to work as a professional chef in May 2008.

Just eight months later, she returned to the auto industry as a sales and finance and insurance staff member at Rick Case Automotive Group's Smart dealership in Davie, which today is Rick Case Fiat. About a year later, she became the store's general manager.

"I loved being a chef. It was a blast," Case says. "But the car business was definitely where it was at for me. I just love it and every day is a new day."

Case grew up listening to her parents recap their workdays at the dinner table.

"They discussed every aspect of the business and as I grew so did the company," Case wrote in an e-mail. "It was the most priceless learning experience and I believe the dinner table talk is what has molded me into the passionate businessperson I am today."

The family's car business also lets Case give opportunities to others. Two years ago, for instance, Case hired Cynthia Toro-Azicri out of college as a cashier when the store was still a Smart dealership.

"Then, I taught her to sell cars and she was good at it," Case says. "She helped me build Fiat, doing a lot of our creative advertising, our fliers and banners. She came to me one day and said, 'I want to make more money.' I said, 'OK. What do you want to do?' She wanted to learn F&I."

For two months, Case taught the woman about F&I, she said.

"No one else in any dealership would have given her an opportunity like that," Case says. "She would not be an F&I manager at age 24."

The youthful staff's energy makes the atmosphere more like a fun studio than a car dealership, employees say.

"We're young," Case says. "Older salespeople, who have been in the business for a long time, probably wouldn't want to work here. We're loud, we run around and joke -- we still work, but it would be overwhelming for people who are not fast-paced."

For instance, Case put a fun spin on an old sales spiff called a pull-board. Typically, a pull-board has envelopes with money inside. Each time a salesperson sells a certain number of vehicles, the staffer pulls an envelope from the board and receives the money inside.

Instead of envelopes, Case put balloons on the board. The qualifying salesperson throws darts at the balloons. When a balloon pops, a cash prize ranging from $1 to $100 is revealed.

She also held a scavenger hunt in which salespeople won prizes by racing between Rick Case Fiat and the Rick Case Hyundai store next door to retrieve items such as contracts and customer orders.

Case also takes the fun out on the town.

Dealership staff members are regulars at local art fairs, tennis tournaments and high school football games, where they display the cars and talk to consumers.

Case regularly posts photos and updates on the store's Facebook page and interacts with customers there too.

"We are out in the community a lot. We don't wait for people to come through our door," she says.

Case Fiat's customers range in age from 16 to 91. And when they enter the store, they're likely to meet Shane Kelly, a laid-back and personable 19-year-old Jamaican.

Kelly came to the United States in June 2009. By 2011, he planned to study marketing. But a chance encounter on the highway that summer led him into automotive retailing.

"I saw a Fiat drive by me and I'd never seen one before," Kelly says. "I'm a fast driver so for a little car to fly past me, that got my attention."

Later, he searched on the Internet for Fiat, found Rick Case Fiat's Web site and applied for a sales job. Applying for the job was mostly on a lark, Kelly says. He had sold clothes for two years at a store in a local shopping mall but thought he was too young and inexperienced to be hired at Rick Case Fiat.

But Raquel Case saw an "exceptional person" who was "not a typical 19-year-old," she says.

"He's very smart, very driven and he knows what he wants and goes after it," Case says.

Kelly, a full-time student considering a career in sales, works every other day. He sells about 20 new cars a month, more than the three other salespeople on staff.

Kelly says he enjoys working at Rick Case Fiat because of the fun and collegial atmosphere and the relationships he forms with customers.

He especially loves to drive that fast little car that passed him once on the highway.

"I love it, I love it, I love it," says Kelly. "I think of every customer as a friend. And you have to love your product, not know your product, but love your product."