Recession hit, and she found another 'family'

HIGHLAND, Mich. — At just 5 years old, Nicole Welch was mesmerized by cars and number crunching.

With a general manager for a father, Welch grew up in dealerships.

“I was that little kid that would go in and visit my dad and want to hang out the whole time. My mom has pictures of me sitting in his office … pretending I was crunching numbers,” Welch said.

She’s not pretending anymore. Today, Welch, 36, runs the business development center for 17-store LaFontaine Automotive Group based in Highland, Mich.

She joined a competing Chevrolet-Buick-Pontiac dealership in 2007, where her dad was general manager. He initially resisted hiring her.

“I basically begged him to give me a job,” Welch recalled. “He flat out told me, ‘I will make you work harder than anybody else, and I will fire you before I’ll fire anyone else.’?”

The dealership was just beginning to receive Internet leads when she started as a sales consultant.

“They gave me these Internet leads that no one knew what to do with, and I kind of created a culture with it where I developed a follow-up process. And then eventually I started bringing people their cars to their homes,” she said.

But then the Great Recession hit. Leasing — a staple in Michigan because of automaker and supplier employee discount plans — had vanished. General Motors soon announced it would discontinue Pontiac.

“That was probably the worst time to join the car business,” said Welch. She didn’t see a path to success at that first dealership, but she wanted to stay in the business.

“I was very passionate about it and loved coming to work,” Welch said.

But uncertainty loomed — until she interviewed at LaFontaine in 2009.

“When I came here and interviewed with Ryan [LaFontaine] and had that opportunity, it was kind of like that aha moment where I’m like, ‘I can have a career in this,’?” she said.

Welch started as a representative  at LaFontaine Buick- GMC-Cadillac’s business development center in Highland, where employees make appointments and follow up on phone and Internet leads. A year later, she was promoted to manager of the center, then quickly became BDC manager for all of LaFontaine’s domestic-brand stores. Today, she is corporate BDC manager for the group.

When she started, there were only four employees in the Highland store’s center. With LaFontaine’s rapid expansion — it has added 12 stores since 2012 — the BDC employee count has skyrocketed to more than 30.

The BDC is often the starting point for the customer and sets the tone for his or her experience with LaFontaine. Welch aims to convince customers that the drive to the dealership is worth it.

But many consumers today don’t want to visit in person.

“There are a lot of people that kind of look at everything like Carvana and want to do it all over the phone,” she said, referring to the online used-vehicle retailer. “Obviously we want to get them in the showroom, but we’re not going to lose a guest over pushing them to come in.”

LaFontaine has developed a home delivery specialty that can appeal to those customers. Welch’s brother works at LaFontaine’s Highland store and has been part of the home delivery team.

Welch’s staffers work with the sales team and act as concierges throughout the sales transactions. They make videos — typically a walkaround of the vehicle in which the customer is interested — to build a more personal experience.

“The salesperson is … going to go over all the technical things,” she said. “We’re just there as kind of a safety net, backup to make sure that there’s no lost communication.”

Welch credits much of her career success to the guidance of many mentors at LaFontaine. And with the dealership group’s emphasis on retention, she likewise aims to be a resource to other employees. Welch encourages BDC reps to move to positions throughout the company, and she helps cross-train sales consultants. All new sales hires spend a week in the BDC, learning to cultivate business, plus a week with LaFontaine’s corporate trainer.

A BDC rep transferring to the sales floor last month wrote an emotional Facebook post about moving on that touched Welch. That doesn’t happen at most dealerships, she said, where an employee’s job progress is “not a huge thing like you’re graduating.”

In the post, the employee credited Welch for helping her develop the skills to succeed in her new role: “There will never be enough words for me to truly explain how Nicole Welch changed my life in such a profoundly positive way!”

That powerful endorsement shows how mentoring at LaFontaine cascades from the top down to entry-level.

For her own career, Welch wants to continue moving up at LaFontaine.

“I love this career field. I love this organization,” she said. “The LaFontaines ... really do treat us like family, which is so incredibly rare.”