The day he was promoted to assistant manager at his store, Roberson bought himself a red Corvette. In 2002, he was promoted to vice president of the New Mexico/West Texas region and now heads up the Georgia region.
The prototypical backstory of a Discount Tire executive includes a lack of specific goals, average or lower-than-average grades and minimal expectations of the job or the company. Most applicants are looking for nothing more than a steady paycheck and, maybe, a place to bide their time while they figure out what to do with their lives.
In many respects, they look just like Bruce Halle.
Halle was the original “lost boy” at the time he prepared to open his first store. He didn’t have much of a plan other than putting food on the table. He was willing to work hard, but had no particular skills. He had completed college, but didn’t exactly burn up the track on his way to the top of his class.
If Discount Tire had existed at the end of 1959, it would have been the ideal place for Bruce Halle to find a job. Instead, he had to build his opportunity from zero.
Discount Tire is built around Who, as in “Who will make us successful?” Customers can buy tires anywhere, and most customers cannot tell the difference between one tire and another. For a company to excel in a commodity market, product differentiation is a non-starter. Improve the customer experience, however, and brand value explodes.
Halle would change the experience early by offering free mounting of snow tires. Later, he offered free flat repairs and introduced one of the first tire warranty certificates that covered risks not included in the manufacturers’ warranties. Every full-time employee has the authority to give away a tire, or a set of tires, when a down-and-out customer needs some extra help or a specific situation suggests that the customer should get a break.
When Halle started in 1960, giving customers a break on a warranty or changing snow tires at no charge were substitutes for advertising and marketing, which he couldn’t afford. He had time on his hands, at first, so providing free labor had no extra cost. Over time, free services brought in paying customers, convincing Halle that free can be very profitable.
Still, it takes more than offering something for nothing to make customers happy. Even free services have no impact when the person delivering the service does it grudgingly or shames the customer, according to Al Hatfield, vice president in Orange County, California. If the customer thinks the employee is working to make things right, it’s a victory. If the employee decides to win a debate, the company loses.
The search for people with the right attitude led directly to the lost boys. The cadre of young men—and they are almost always men—joining the company often shared a certain lack of focus in life. What separated the keepers from the rest of the pack was a willingness to work hard and to find that focus as part of a team. The team is critical, because the team is bigger than the individual, and a person who believes in the team will often be committed to serving others—including both the company and its customers.
Hatfield says the people who succeed at Discount Tire are the ones who understand how to make the customer happy. It’s not enough to honor a warranty or fix a flat at no charge; the employee must show that he really wants to do it.
“They have no issues giving away a tire. There’s no cost to it. But sometimes they think they need to get their point across first, which is backwards. Get the point across later and take care of the problem first,” Hatfield says.
Because the individual employee is the “secret sauce” in Discount Tire’s success, the company is built around the worker more than it is designed around the customer. Hire the wrong people and you’ll find that you can’t beat them hard enough to make them treat customers well. Hire the right people and no beatings are necessary.
“Happy employees make happy customers, but happy customers don’t always make for happy employees,” explains Tim Ehinger, vice president in the Detroit region. “So we need to find a way for employees to believe in what they do. It’s in our mission statement to be the best and to care for and cultivate our people. When we show our people how much we care, that’s where the magic happens and they become passionate about what they’re doing. Nothing happens until you sell something, so you have to make sure you have happy people who are motivated or you won’t sell a thing.”
Kevin Easter links the right attitude to the most basic of value systems. “The Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments are what this company is, but it’s not put out that way,” he notes. “Mr. Halle is the most spiritual man I’ve ever met, but he’s never said a word to me about religion. It’s all in how he lives. We’re in business to make money, but the way you let Mr. Halle down isn’t by not selling tires, but by not taking care of the people.”
Most important, Easter says, the company lives up to its commitment to reward people who focus on customer satisfaction. “You’re told to take care of customers, that customers are important. That happens at every company,” Easter notes. “But this is the first company I’ve seen that doesn’t punish you for taking care of the customer. In fact, you get in trouble if you don’t.”
Across the company, the people who’ve succeeded focus on the same issues and the same values in describing what makes the company work. The lost boys who can see their success as dependent on serving others tend to rise at Discount Tire.
“The fact is that we are empowered from day one to take care of any customer for whatever reason, to keep them safe and to gain a customer for life,” says Bill Wendell, vice president of the Minnesota region. “It’s nurtured over time: manners, politeness, doing what’s right, just kindness and honesty. So much in our business is the perception that we’re automotive, so maybe we can’t be trusted or our locations are dirty, but once you get them in the front door, and they see our clean buildings and our people, it’s not so much that we’re selling tires but a matter of making friends over time. You want repeat customers, people who refer us to family, friends, coworkers … we want to make them customers for life.”
The right person can be trained to channel his energies toward customer satisfaction, but a person who isn’t a team player is very unlikely to make the connection. The turnover rate is more than 80 percent for part-timers, reflecting the rigors of tire changing, but turnover drops to a minuscule 2 percent for store managers.
“It’s very much like the military in the sense that you feel like you are a part of something bigger than yourself,” says Ed Kaminski, regional vice president in San Antonio. “I was blessed with the opportunity to serve in the military and got the chance to experience the love, bonding and trust that come with that. Discount Tire is very much the same way.”
A sense of belonging is one of the employee benefits at Discount Tire, one with strong appeal to the type of people the company wants to attract. Delivering on that promise requires a commitment by the company as well as its employees.
“We’re a promote-from-within company,” says Ron Archer. “Everybody knows that in this company you start at ground level. Look at all our vice presidents, our senior vice presidents, all the way to Tom Englert, our CEO. They all started out in the same place. We’ve been around fifty years and we’ve never had a layoff.”
Discount Tire’s promote-from-within policy offers a brass ring to everyone who starts as a part-time tire tech. While it is possible to get a job in finance, law and other specialty areas without busting tires, the path upward in operations is open only to tire jockeys. Promotions are competitive, but the competition is always among peers.
“If I were to bring someone in at a high level without having worked in the stores, I may as well get in my car, drive around to the stores and slap every one of the guys in the face—because that’s literally what I’d have done to them. And I would never do that,” Halle says.
The promote-from-within policy has enormous power among Discount Tire employees, not merely due to its perceived fairness but also for the parallels it creates with Bruce Halle’s path. Much as H
alle played the role of surrogate dad when his own father was gone from home, his executive team will often cite a mandate to “be the dad” for their own employees.
The mandate is often literal. Several Discount Tire executives have sons and daughters in the business, and Dave Fairbanks, Halle’s college friend and manager of store number four, has both a son, who was named Bruce in honor of his good friend, and grandsons working at Discount Tire. For many, the company’s ability to attract and inspire lost boys is also a personal benefit.
“As a manager, I’ve had parents tell me how much Discount Tire has helped their child, and I dismissed this. We didn’t do anything special, it’s just what we do,” says Kevin Easter. “When my own sixteen-year-old son went to work at Discount Tire, I found out what other parents had thanked me for. My son was not a strong student and I worried about what life had in store for him. Over the years, the various managers he worked for treated my son as their own. I watched my son change before my very eyes into a very responsible adult. As a parent, I went to these managers and thanked them for helping my son grow.”
Easter notes that his son followed the same path that he himself had followed on the way to finding a niche at Discount Tire. “I’m a three-time college dropout,” he says. “I tried three times and hated it each time.”
Discount Tire has succeeded, in part, by exceeding the generally low expectations that both customers and employees might have about the tire business. Customers don’t expect quick turnaround, clean bathrooms or free repairs. New employees don’t expect a lucrative career, team membership and a company that worries about their families.
“That’s what makes Discount Tire great,” Ray Winiecke, San Diego vice president, says. “We didn’t bring in all those college guys to show us how to do it, but we’ve learned and grown together and shared the experience of building the company together.”
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
As the bet-it-all plan for rapid expansion paid off and Bruce Halle gained increasing renown in his industry and adopted state, he and Gerry increased their travels, and Halle’s gifts to his high-school sweetheart became increasingly lavish.
“Bruce would do anything for Gerry,” says Gary Van Brunt. “She never really asked for anything, but Bruce was always there doing things for Gerry—‘Let’s go buy some clothes,’ so they’re off to New York to buy some dresses. He just wanted to do things for Gerry.”
Bruce shared the wealth with his parents as well, buying them a house for their retirement in Florida and providing them with the comforts that Fred Halle had never been able to provide through his own labors.
“Bruce said that if he ever made any money in his life, he would take care of his mother and his dad,” recalls Charlotte Fournier, Molly’s niece and mother of Discount Tire COO Steve Fournier. Halle lived up to that promise, taking care of his mom until she died in 1985 in Florida. After Molly died, Bruce moved Fred Halle out to Arizona and bought a place for him to live nearer to Bruce’s family.
Frederick J. Halle began his new life in Sun City, Arizona, still the fun-loving, bigger-than-life idol that Bruce had looked up to as a boy in Berlin, New Hampshire. Taking care of his father, like taking care of his mother, was never a question to Bruce, even though it was sometimes a challenge to keep pace with his dad’s new adventures.
“Well, Dad didn’t get an Arizona license. He had an expired Florida one, and he let the insurance lapse on his car,” Halle remembers. “He’s going down the road in Sun City and the police pull him over and now we have to go out to a justice of the peace in Wickenburg. So [General Counsel] Jim Silhasek and I and Dad go out there, all in suits, and it’s the justice of the peace in Wickenburg and this is his little kingdom. He looks down at the front row and there’s three guys in suits. And he says, ‘Oh, we’ve got an attorney here?’ Dad and I said we weren’t attorneys, but Jim says he is, and Jim gets up and addresses this judge like it’s the Supreme Court. He really lays it on. It was really cool.”
In the end, the judge fined Fred Halle $600, which Bruce considered a bargain in light of the kinds of fines the judge was throwing out that day. Next, he took his dad to get a new license, but Fred couldn’t read any of the letters on the eye test.
“I said, ‘Dad, are these your glasses?’ and he said, ‘No, I got these at Walgreens but they’re okay.’ So we take him to the eye doctor for a new set of glasses and we come back and he passes that. So now he has to take the driving test and he goes around and comes back and he can’t pass that test, so we went to take the test in Sun City, where they deal with older people. But first, I had someone follow the drivers around on the route so we could have my dad rehearse where they go, where they turn left, where they turn right, where they park and all this. And then he takes the test and passes. And by the way, that took about four months.”
Halle laughs at the craziness of the experience, but it’s the least he could do for the larger-than-life guy who taught him how to box.
Caring for his parents represented a repayment for Bruce, but it also tied into his commitment to take care of his wife in a way that his dad had not been able to achieve for Molly. Geraldine Konfara Halle, a smart and elegant woman, would not have to wait until she was in her sixties to enjoy her life fully. Halle took pride in buying gifts for Gerry, doting on her and giving her a life he had been unable to give to his mother.
Halle’s father was his primary role model as a husband and father, but Bruce’s personality had much of Molly grafted into it. Bruce loved to play pranks and have fun, and he enjoyed the physicality of life that Fred Halle personified. Like Molly, however, he was a bit more shy, more reserved, less likely to seek the limelight. Halle enjoyed being one of the guys but didn’t feel the need, or sometimes, the worthiness, to be THE guy. Gerry had proved to be as nearly perfect a match for Bruce as friends and family could imagine. He saw her as smart and polished, capable of fitting in with the lost boys who made up his team at Discount Tire and the corporate chieftains who became their neighbors and friends in Arizona. She managed the household while Bruce worked sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, first in college and later at the stores. She served as sounding board and pep squad as Bruce brought home cash, stories and problems from the store. And she continued to serve as the Discount Tire Mom, making both the men from the stores and their wives feel welcome, as if they had a second family.
“Gerry wasn’t impressed with herself and she wasn’t impressed by others, either,” says longtime friend Cynthia Tubbs. Cynthia’s husband, Jim, had sold Bruce a number of store locations in Arizona, and the couples became fast friends. When Halle bought his first plane, they flew with Cynthia and Jim to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the night. “Money enabled her to do lots of things she might not have been able to do otherwise, but it didn’t change her,” Tubbs remembers.
In 1987, Halle set up Gerry and his daughters in their own business, a children’s clothing store called Spoiled Rotten in La Jolla, California. Both Susan and Lisa were living in California by then and Gerry thought the store would be a great way to spend more time with her daughters and source cute clothes for Bruce Jr.’s daughters, Audrey and Ashley. In the same year, Bruce outbid several of his peers to buy an espresso machine once used to make a cup of coffee for Pope John Paul II during his visit to Arizona. He had no interest in paying $14,000 for a $900 espresso machine, but Gerry said she wanted it. Done deal.
Gerry and Bruce had broadened their vistas, both literally and figuratively, with a strong business arc to carry them forward. Both were fully committed not only to each other and to Catholicism, but also to their health. Although Bruce did not possess the most beneficial dietary habits—he has a semi-addiction to Costco hot dogs—the two played tennis, skied, pursued an active lifestyle and underwent annual health checkups. Although Gerry had complained for some time about severe pain in her lower back, it was more than a year before doctors determined that she had stage-four ovarian cancer. By that time, the cancer had spread to her stomach a
nd uterus. Gerry began chemotherapy while Bruce searched for a specialist who could reverse the irreversible.
In the battle that mattered more to him than any other, he would not succeed. Geraldine Konfara Halle died April 8, 1989. She was fifty-nine years old.
“They had quite a love affair, and my dad is such a caretaker,” daughter Lisa says. “He loves fixing things and he just wasn’t able to fix this and … he’s such a Marine. He’s going to power through this and he’s going to make everything better. But this time it wasn’t going to happen that way.”
Father Ray Bucher, a family friend and religious adviser, recalls that Gerry was more concerned about her family than herself as she accepted the reality of her condition. Bucher says she proved to be both a positive example of how to live and, also, how to face the inevitable.
“What you take into dying is a reflection of how you lived, and she simply lived her life with great courage and hope,” he recalls.
Halle set up his office at the hospital and would spend as much time as he could by Gerry’s side. When she died at Scripps Memorial in San Diego, Bruce Halle returned home, alone, a broken man.
“It was just her attitude, her love, her support, her confidence in me, her encouragement,” Halle relates. “We were married thirty-eight years and it was beautiful, just wonderful. She was just a great partner and never any big challenges, never any big problems, just a wonderful person. She had a perpetual smile on her face. She made you feel good just being in the room with her.”
When Halle returned to his empty home, daughter Lisa stayed with him for a week, and his friends sought to console him, but he was not responsive. He threw himself more deeply into the work of the company, filling his emptiness with the details of selling tires. At night, though, he was likely to be home, alone, eating canned food for dinner, not interested in the outside world.
6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589) Page 12