40 Under 40

Chrissy Monaco DiMauro loved to answer the phones on Saturdays at her family’s dealership when she was a teenager. 

Today, DiMauro, along with her brother Mike Monaco, are running the business founded by their great-grandfather: Monaco Ford in Glastonbury, Conn.

The siblings expanded the business in 2021, buying a nearby Ford dealership in Niantic, which they renamed Monaco Ford of Niantic.

“It was just growth of our footprint,” DiMauro told Automotive News. “We could just take what we were already doing in Glastonbury and expand the radius in Connecticut of where we’re doing it.”

After graduating from the University of Connecticut in 2008, DiMauro started working outside of the dealership but was laid off during the Great Recession. 

In May 2009, she began working with her father — now semiretired from the Glastonbury dealership — helping with Internet sales before moving into roles as title clerk and wholesale parts sales. She became part-owner of the Glastonbury store in January 2017. 

Before the coronavirus pandemic began, DiMauro put into motion efforts to boost finance and insurance profit growth at the dealership. Her efforts — and that of her team — have paid off. So far in 2022, Monaco Ford in Glastonbury is pacing for 92 percent growth in total F&I department profit compared with 2018. 

“We went back to the grassroots and just really focused on training and focused on fulfilling the needs of the customer,” DiMauro said, adding that she set monthly, quarterly and annual goals and monitored progress along the way. 

DiMauro also has worked to grow the Glastonbury store’s average monthly wholesale parts business, up 26 percent from 2018 to 2021, while maintaining gross profit percentages. “It’s a huge accomplishment,” she said. 

DiMauro is active in several automotive groups such as Ford Credit’s dealer advisory board and is secretary of the Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association.

She was active with that association in lobbying this year to stop a state Senate bill that would have allowed electric vehicle manufacturers to sell EVs directly to consumers.

“We were successful in involving ourselves in the hearings and talking to any of the legislators and senators and kind of informing them on the importance of the dealer model and why we feel if a Tesla or a Rivian wants to do business in our state, they need to follow those rules,” DiMauro said.

— Melissa Burden