OUTLET: Inside Business
By Lydia Wheeler
lydia.wheeler@insidebiz.com
Walter Wilkins II knows a thing or two about cars.
The owner of Bay Automotive in Norfolk raced single-seat open wheel cars semi-professionally until a bad crash at Daytona in 1975 forced him to retire.
“The crash ended my family’s support for me racing,” he said. “I had to do my own work on the car. I wasn’t the mechanic of caliber I had hired before, but it did help me understand cars a lot better.”
His grandfather, who opened Norfolk Motor Co. in downtown Norfolk in 1938, was the collision and repair expert in the family, and now Wilkins is bringing his business back to those roots. On Feb. 12, Bay Automotive sold its Kia franchise at 6970 N. Military Hwy. in Norfolk to First Team Auto and plans to instead focus on collision repair, vehicle repair and maintenance services.
“We’re going back to a simpler time when people could walk into a shop and talk to the person working on their car,” Wilkins said. “The dealer repair system has gotten too complicated.”
His goal is to open 10 new repair and service centers in the next five years. The company already has a shop, known as Bay Old Dominion, at 42nd and Colley Avenue. In addition to repairs, Wilkins plans to keep and expand his used car business, Bay Direct, on leased property next to Kia at 6950 N. Military Hwy.
In 12 to 18 months, Wilkins said he’ll exit his lease and move his pre-owned sales and repair services back into the space now occupied by Kia. First Team is moving the franchise to the former Green Gifford Chrysler Jeep Dodge property, now vacant, at 2747 N. Military Hwy.
Calls made to First Team were not returned.
Wilkins, who has 35 employees, said he will have to retrofit the former franchise and add space for a paint booth. The shift in business is his attempt to stay on top of an ever-changing industry. New vehicle sales, he said, dropped from 16.2 million in 2007 to 10.4 million in 2009. Though the market is recovering, people are keeping cars longer.
“The average age of a car on the road today is 11 years,” Wilkins said. “And 12,000 to 15,000 miles is what the average person drives a year, so that’s 132,000 miles on a car minimum. When I first started in the car business, 60,000 to 70,000 miles was it. Now, if you change your oil regularly, cars will last 150,000 to 170,000 miles.”
Changing a car’s oil every 3,000 miles is key. Wilkins said he’s seen Saabs with 200,000 miles.
In addition to growing Bay Automotive’s repair services, Wilkins plans to expand his pre-owned sales. He’s already made changes to his business model. He’s nixed commissions, opting to pay sales associates set salaries with a bonus for number of cars sold instead, and he’s focused on Internet sales.
“The way people are buying cars is changing,” he said. “We’re just staying with that trend and trying to get ahead of it. People used to come to a dealership and look around. Now they find their car online and go wherever the car is.”
Wilkins is used to change.
In 1981 he bought Wilkins Chevrolet from his father with the help of Motors Holding, a General Motors organization that provides investment capital for dealers to buy franchises, and renamed it Bay Chevrolet.
He then acquired Kia around 2000, followed by Saab in 2003. But when General Motors filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and closed dealerships around the country, Bay Chevrolet was one.
“We sold the franchise back to GM after working through Congress to get a law passed to at least allow an arbitration,” Wilkins said. “We settled with them after the law passed.”
Saab was next to fall, filing for bankruptcy in 2011. The company liquidated all of its assets and pulled its inventory from dealers. Wilkins was among the masses then, too.
“Ironically, Saab parts was a separate division of Saab that never went out of business,” he said. “It set up a U.S. distributor and named us a certified Saab repair facility,” a title the company still maintains.
Today, Eddy Harris is Wilkins’ top sales associate. On average she receives 200 to 250 online inquiries each month. It’s Bay Automotive’s goal to give a live response to those inquiries within 10 minutes during business hours.
The company claims to match or beat any other offers and all customers are given a three-day money-back guarantee. Change your mind and you can return or exchange the car you just bought.
It’s all for peace of mind, Wilkins said. He knows how nervous people get about the condition of the car when used.
How many pre-owned dealerships he’ll have has yet to be determined. He’s already in talks with two property owners about buying land for additional locations. He wouldn’t say where, but he thinks he might have something to announce soon.
“Sometimes these opportunities don’t wait.”
