An extraordinary opportunist and disrupter

When I heard Wayne Huizenga died, I remembered the time I got to fly from Detroit to New York with the billionaire aboard his corporate jet.

It was around 1997, and I thought the flight would be a golden opportunity to pick the legendary entrepreneur's brain about his vision for transforming automotive retailing.

Huizenga and his top lieutenant, Steve Berrard, had come to Detroit to visit the Automotive News editorial staff and to hold some meetings with carmakers. In those heady days, they seemed to be turning the retail universe upside down, buying car dealerships at lightning speed.

After Huizenga and Berrard met with our staff, they went off to a private dinner in Grosse Pointe at which the guests were Chrysler's Bob Eaton, Ford's Jacques Nasser and General Motors' Rick Wagoner. Such was the clout Huizenga had at the time that powerful Detroit car executives were ready to put aside their competitive differences for an evening to dine with an industry outsider.

After dinner, they were flying to New York for a press conference and they had offered me a ride because I was covering their company, Republic Industries Inc. I was not invited to the private dinner. So I waited in my car at what was then Detroit City Airport for the dinner to end and their car to show up.

Alas, the flight to New York was a journalistic bust. Small talk wasn't Huizenga's thing. After some perfunctory chitchat about the dinner and some attempted questions from me, it became clear he had other business to attend to, though he wasn't rude about it. Rather, he was focused on a pile of documents an assistant had prepared for him to review. Huizenga began reading them with extraordinary swiftness. As he finished each paper, he wadded it up and tossed it onto a pile on the floor of the jet. By the time we reached New York, there was a small mountain of papers on the floor beside his seat and my notebook was largely empty.

I don't recall what the next day's press conference was about. In those days, my job following Huizenga's company and the so-called retail revolution he triggered seemed a blur. I traveled around the country attending endless conferences where consultants and analysts opined about paradigm shifts and transformational business models.

Huizenga was an extraordinary opportunist and a disrupter before the word became popular.

He blitzed through businesses the way he moved through that sheaf of papers. When his used-car superstore business model didn't work, he didn't hesitate to drop it.

Says Bill Wallace, owner of Wallace Automotive in Stuart, Fla., one of the dealership groups Huizenga's Republic Industries bought early in the acquisition spree: "There were dozens of companies he started that folded up and went away. He was not intimidated or frightened when something didn't work. He wasn't sentimental."

He was much more interested in starting businesses than in running them. He made fortunes in seemingly unrelated areas, starting with trash hauling (Waste Management) and moving to video rental (Blockbuster Entertainment) automotive retail (Republic Industries, which changed its name to Auto- Nation in 1999) and professional sports franchises (Miami Dolphins, Florida Marlins and Florida Panthers).

His lack of sentimentality in pursuit of making money hurt Huizenga on occasion, as in 1997 when he ordered management to dismantle the roster of his World Series-winning Florida Marlins baseball team shortly after winning the championship. Huizenga, in the process of selling the club, was pilloried by fans.

What I remember most vividly about Huizenga was his intense, penetrating eyes, what Wallace calls "those steel-blue eyes. They could look right through you."

Those eyes could also spot a business opportunity where others couldn't.

Wallace, who left AutoNation in 2000, buying back one of his stores and rebuilding his dealership group, says Huizenga once told him: "If you want to find a business to be in, find one that nobody else wants to be in." There was no more perfect example than the trash business.

Quoted in The New York Times, Huizenga's son Wayne Jr. said he grew to love the smell of landfills, where he went with his father as a child. "My dad would say, 'It smells like money to me, son.' "

He was indifferent whether he got the credit for the changes he wrought. He was happy to share the spotlight with his business partners. Initially the AutoNation enterprise was headed by Berrard who, like Huizenga, was an auto industry outsider. But Huizenga eventually realized the car business was more complex than video rentals, so he turned it over to industry veterans such as Mike Jackson and Mike Maroone.

"They've tried to change the way the consumer buys a car," Huizenga told me in 2006. "Instead of it being a poor experience, making it a great experience."

Whether Huizenga truly brought about a retail revolution is subject to debate.

Says Wallace: "I don't know that it did anything more dramatic than possibly highlight the true value for retailers. The money they paid [to buy dealerships] set the bar higher. Guys woke up and said, 'Wow these things are worth a lot of money!' " And, Wallace says, AutoNation poured a lot of money into new facilities. "Dealers realized — either put money into your building or get out. The manufacturers love a new building."