6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589)

by Rosenbaum, Michael

  Halle describes himself in somewhat less glowing terms, always as a work in progress and as flawed as any other human being. His self-image is anchored—possibly marooned—in a small, underfunded and understocked store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Or perhaps he is still walking along the railroad tracks, carrying his dad’s lunch pail to the firehouse from the house his family shares with his grandparents.

  “I think of myself as an ordinary guy who goes to work every day and has been lucky enough to live as long as I have, and I have been blessed to have beautiful people around me,” Halle reflects. “People sometimes say, ‘Gee, how did you do what you do? How did you build the company?’ Well, I worked at it for fifty years. You go back and what do you do? You do the things that anybody did when they started a business. You sweep the floors. You wash the windows. You clean the bathrooms. You talk to all the customers. You create some little advertising programs. You pay the rent and try and make it work, and little by little, all the pieces kind of come together.”

  Diane Halle says it would be a mistake to think that Bruce is ambivalent about the success he’s achieved. “He doesn’t want to brag about it, but he’s happy inside. He’s happy where he is today, he was happy where he was ten years ago, and he’ll be happy where he could be ten years from now,” she declares. “He does love climbing that ladder, but it’s the challenge of climbing, to get to that next place, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in business or if it’s in real estate buying or in learning about art or traveling or better clothes or new airplanes. Anything. He likes to learn all about it.”

  Acquiring and learning have elevated Halle’s lifestyle, but not his attitude. Over the years, Halle has developed both an appreciation for and some expertise in oenology, but the lover of fine wine has avoided the temptation, if he had any, to become a wine snob. Ask him for his opinion about wine and he will offer a simple deflection: “The best wine,” says Bruce, “is the one I’m drinking now.”

  Despite all the pieces that have come together for Halle, he doesn’t see himself on the same level as other successful businesspeople or professionals.

  “Anybody can open tire stores. Lots of people. And what’s so wonderful about that?” Halle asks. “I look at people like Warren Buffet, and then I look at some of the big money people and how they do things. It’s a whole different world. It’s a finance world that I live in, somewhat, because of our size. But my real finance guys are [CFO] Christian [Roe] and [Assistant Treasurer] Andrew [Haus] and those guys. I don’t live in the finance world like major developers or mergers and acquisition people do. That’s not my dance. And I’m not a doctor. I’m not a dentist. I’m not a college professor—I open tire stores.”

  Halle continues to place himself in a sphere below the “polished” people who have always seemed to be a bit beyond his reach. “I immediately respected them,” he says of countless elegant folks he’s met. “They were charming, polished. They had vocabularies. They spoke well. They presented themselves well, and I just kind of admired them. In my opinion, that was something I did not have and I respected it, I admired it.”

  Entering the world of polished people has always required a passport for Halle, and he has seen the women in his life as the holders of that passport. Both Gerry and, later, Diane have played the role of guide to society. Ask about the most embarrassing moment in Halle’s life and his answer will not involve business or personal dealings, but a fashion faux pas.

  “We had moved to Arizona and Gerry was at the beauty shop, and she met another lady whose husband was a doctor in town. He was a plastic surgeon, and he belonged to a food and wine organization, Bacchus,” Halle recalls. “They met once or twice a year to have a black-tie dinner and taste great wines—just men. So he invites me to go to this. I don’t have a tuxedo at that time, so I go to one of the stores in town to get one. It’s summertime in Arizona and some gentleman is telling me I should have a white jacket, so I do it. Then I go there and there’s twenty-five or thirty guys, and I’m the only one with a white jacket. That was embarrassing.”

  While Halle is still awed by the elegant people of the world, he reserves his respect for those who work hard to accomplish something in life, the “squared away” people who are “honest and straightforward.” He admires Karl Eller less for his financial success than for his determination to pull himself back up after hitting bottom with Circle K. He respects his brother, Bob, for building a successful career as an educator and, along with his wife, Nancy, raising a good family. He is proud of his sister, Mary Ellen, for her success building homes with her husband, Roger. He cites Gerry and former Goodyear executive Bill Sweatt as models to be followed in speaking positively about others.

  Halle’s list of respected individuals is populated by people who work hard, do the right thing and help others. Delving into his disrespected list takes substantial prodding, as he’d rather not talk about the disappointments in life.

  “Something that most people say at one time or another—and some more frequently, especially if they go to church regularly—is the Lord’s Prayer. And, part of the Lord’s Prayer is ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ People forget that second part. They say it and they don’t think about it. It’s just words.”

  But Halle thinks about the second part of that prayer frequently, and he views the forgiveness of others, in large part, as a prerequisite to being forgiven himself.

  “I think I’m a positive thinker. I do. I don’t dwell on negative things. Some things happen that I don’t like once in a while, but it doesn’t matter that much,” Halle suggests. “I imagine I could think of a couple of shitheads if I spent some more time on it, but it’s just not that important. And you don’t hear our guys talking negatively about people. Why do that? That’s not their M.O. That’s not how they live. We look at the positive things and what we can do to make things better and make the company grow, help our people. These are all the things that are important. I’ll have to spend some time and think about this. If I come up with the names of a couple of shitheads, I’ll tell you.”

  Of course, no list of shitheads follows the interview, and Halle stresses the need for everyone, including himself, to hold to the basics of honesty and fair dealing.

  “Whenever you do something that you shouldn’t do, or fail to do something that you should do, you’re always the first to know, but don’t be surprised when the rest of the world finds out about it,” he explains to anyone who will listen to this mantra. Halle’s focus on Golden Rule basics is deceptively simple. Everyone knows it, anyone can follow it, but making it a consistent discipline is hard work.

  “You cannot tell someone you’re a good guy,” Halle says simply. “You just have to be one.”

  Father Ray Bucher says Halle does an unusually good job of walking the walk. “I don’t know if he saw it in his folks or he developed it himself,” Bucher observes. “But there is an underlying integrity that gets him through storms and high points and low points. I think his faith is a part of it. He knows humans are imperfect and he accepts that.”

  In fact, Bruce Thomas Halle is probably more polished than he realizes, or will allow himself to accept, in his ninth decade of life. His discipline of humility helps him bridge the gap with his workers and make them feel appreciated. In fact, it is hard to know if it is a discipline at this point, or whether he has somehow hardwired it into his nervous system.

  In turn, Halle’s employees respond to him with an unusual mixture of familiarity and awe. Most call him Mr. Halle, as a sign of respect, but they also see him as a peer or, sometimes, a father figure. In turn, Halle’s uncertainty around the “polished gentlemen” he’s met in society is nonexistent when he’s hanging with the men in the stores.

  Halle seldom talks about business, preferring to talk to individuals about their lives, families and interests. More comfortable in a one-on-one discussion than he is on a stage, Halle sees his success as tied to the success of each individual within
the organization.

  “The first thing I was told as an employee, and the first thing I ask my guys, is, ‘What would Bruce do?’” says Ron Archer, vice president for the Indiana region. “Once, I saw him in Houston, and he was heading back to Arizona, so he gave me a ride on the corporate jet. For two and a half hours on the ride back, we never talked about business at all. He said he just wanted to get to know his people better, know about their families, so we didn’t talk about market share or any business at all. It felt like a couple of guys sitting on a bar stool, shooting the breeze.”

  In a very meaningful way, there has been essentially no change in Halle’s worldview or value system since he was a twelve-year-old boy climbing on board the train that would take him from Berlin to Detroit. The lessons are deceptively simple; obvious but difficult to implement.

  1. Be honest.

  2. Work hard.

  3. Have fun.

  4. Be grateful.

  5. Pay forward.

  It was only half as many lessons as the Decalogue, but Halle found a way to establish both a business empire and thousands of loyal followers by adhering to a handful of the precepts that everyone knows to be true.

  I’M CHECKING HIS PROGRESS

  In the nearly six years between Gerry’s death and the wedding of Bruce and Diane, Discount Tire continued its aggressive growth. By the time the nation’s largest tire entrepreneur remarried, he and his lost boys had added more than seventy stores and four regions to the Discount Tire empire.

  While Diane focused on uniting the families and consolidating households, Bruce presented his own to-do list for his new bride. Gerry had been the Discount Tire Mom since the beginning in Ann Arbor. Now it was Diane’s turn to fill that role. The mantle of “founder’s wife” turned out to be more than a full-time job in a company whose founder was personally acquainted with thousands of employees and spouses.

  As she became more deeply involved in the Bruce Halle family, including the extended network of Discount Tire employees, Diane reduced or eliminated her ties to many of the civic endeavors that had defined her role as the wife of Herb Cummings. Art and philanthropy continued to be passions, however, and she focused on these areas to create a shared journey for Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Thomas Halle.

  Both had developed a keen appreciation for Catholic teachings about charity, although the two had taken very different paths in their application of those lessons. Diane focused on philanthropy, which seeks to address broad issues or common needs, working from the top down to create a better world. Bruce had more of a retail approach, opening his wallet to individuals with a sad story or an immediate hardship.

  As a result, Halle’s personal files are filled with letters from employees, family, friends and quite a few strangers who came up short and called on him for help. Attached to those letters, quite often, are copies of the checks he has sent in response. Across the company, just about every manager can cite a case of an employee or family member whose crisis was resolved by Bruce Halle. The prototypical statement, repeated across the company and across the decades, follows a simple pattern: “My relative/friend/employee had a disaster/illness and Bruce Halle provided a check/referral/flight/time off.” Or all of the above.

  A retailer to the core, Halle considered donations on a person-by-person basis, much the same way he thought about selling tires—one at a time. Halle looked after his parents and sent gifts to relatives; supported Father Francis Curran, his parish priest from St. Kieran’s in Berlin; and adopted the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose leader had stopped by a store many years earlier with a battered vehicle and dangerously worn tires. Examples offered by employees—seldom mentioned by Halle himself—number in the thousands.

  Each of these acts of charity was specific and tangible to Halle, while larger-scale, philanthropic donations were less fulfilling, even if the importance of the cause was clear.

  Halle also was concerned about the publicity that surrounded large donations and highlighted his wealth. While employees know Halle has achieved great wealth, he sees no reason to stand in a spotlight and give money that could go toward the employees’ families to other causes.

  “We had a luncheon a few years ago with the president of a university, and he was looking for a big funding program in line with a $40 million to $50 million gift the university had received earlier,” Halle remembers. “So he took Diane and me to lunch, and we knew he was going to ask for something. So he finally gets through the nice luncheon and all the nice talking and he finally gets to a number. He says he wants $35 million from me. He’s saying the publicity is good for us and so on, but that’s the last thing I want. If I’m going to give $35 million to anybody, I’m going to give it to my employees and their families.

  “It would be terrible for me to give big money, like millions of dollars, to someplace and get all that publicity out of it. And here I’ve got employees out there who are ordinary working people, making a good living, but nothing like that. And all of a sudden I’m giving millions and millions of dollars away. It’s stupid. It would be a morale disaster for all of my employees,” Halle concludes.

  Halle will talk at length about the college scholarships available to children of full-time employees with at least three years on the job, about the “Baby Brain Boxes” the company sends to employees with a new baby and the support employees give to each other through their own fundraising activities. He is less focused on giving outside the universe of his extended family at Discount Tire.

  Halle had made a few exceptions, most notably when he agreed to fund the Halle Heart Center in Tempe, Arizona, in memory of Gerry, and a new library at his alma mater, Eastern Michigan University. After Bruce married Diane, the number of these named gifts increased, largely focused on education and health—including cancer—in Arizona.

  Diane was anxious to apply the lessons she had learned at the Nate Cummings Foundation to add impact and efficiency to her new husband’s generosity. In 2002, the couple established the Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation, with Diane as president, creating a vehicle to expand giving to both public institutions and employee families.

  Across the Discount Tire network, employees are following the founder’s lead by raising money for all types of causes. Each region has its own employee assistance fund to help employees with unusual medical or other expenses, while Halle makes an additional donation to each of the twenty-three regional offices for gifts to Cub Scouts, Little League teams and other local groups. From the Administrative Angels at corporate headquarters to the wives who put together bake sales for individual stores, the sun never sets on Discount Tire fundraisers.

  While local engagement in fundraising builds esprit de corps, funneling donations through regional offices has its limitations. Diane discovered that the vice presidents and assistant vice presidents in the regions were too busy running their operations to give away the money available to them, so she organized their wives to handle the job.

  “It really is a big deal, and the wives love it,” Diane Halle says. “You hear the stories of site visits that they make—they’ve taped some of this—and you cry a little. You almost cry listening to it. It’s beautiful. The husbands are happy that the wives are doing it, and the husbands, by the way, if they want to sponsor a Little League team, they can still do that. Or they can give a set of tires to a charity. But the women are out there giving money to actual charities.”

  Diane says the involvement of the wives has made a substantial difference both for the charities and for the wives themselves. Under the umbrella of Driven To Care, the regional wives meet regularly with each other and, at least annually, with Diane Halle to plan activities. The same methods are applied to build spouse involvement at the corporate level, where Diane works with executive wives through Bridges To Hope.

  The foundation also manages Discount Tire’s scholarship program and other corporate giving, while a multimillion-dollar grant from the Halles supports philanthropy for public causes related primaril
y to education, health and issues of children and families. Mirroring the corporate-community approach entrenched at Discount Tire, the foundation makes its website available as a resource to both other nonprofits and grant applicants.

  Diane sees the family foundation as a means of passing on a commitment to charity to the next generations of the Halle family. By engaging children and grandchildren with the foundation, she hopes to create both momentum and continuity for philanthropic engagement.

  Sir Tom Farmer, a longtime friend of Bruce Halle and founder of Quik-Fit Holdings, says it’s important for wealthy families to organize their giving in the most productive way.

  “Being a Catholic and proper Christian, you aim to have socialist leanings in the pure apolitical way. You should try to do things for those less fortunate,” Farmer says. “If we’re supporting something, we should be clear how much and how long, and we must be able to evaluate it. I think that’s what Diane brought to Bruce’s giving, a more professional and more controlled focus, and more thinking about what and who is going to benefit. In other words, more of the head being involved and not just the heart.”

  Diane also drew Bruce out of the office more, increasing his travels to weeks rather than days out of Scottsdale. Bruce had agreed to spend three days on their honeymoon—noting it was one day more than he had with Gerry—but he was, in fact, enjoying the style of touring that Diane presented. It was on one such tour that the Halles began their most meaningful act of philanthropy.

  “It was our first Christmas alone, and we decided to go to Rome for Christmas,” Diane says. “We were just going to take ten days and roam Rome. During that time, John McCaffrey, a friend of Sir Tom, was going to be over there. John organized a private tour of the Vatican for us.