Brendan Harrington Joins Automotive Masterclass: Think Bigger

Brendan Harrington asked his future bosses one question before he took the job. He wanted to know if they wanted a good group in the short term or a great group over the long term. They said they didn’t need the money. They wanted to be great.

Today he’s President of Autobahn Auto Group in Fort Worth, Texas, home of Porsche, Land Rover, MINI, Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, and two Cadillac stores. His full Automotive Masterclass, Think Bigger, was released live onstage at VINCUE: UNLEASHED26 and is now free and live on RockED. It teaches how to put the right people in the right seats and challenge them to think bigger.

Brendan says his career has had one cadence: launching, fixing, repairing, and building. He was a product manager at Mercedes and at Nissan on the Xterra, then spent roughly 20 years with the Penske family. He launched an Audi store and took it to the top ten in the country in seven months. He turned around a Mercedes store. Then he went to Longo, which he says was still the number one store in the world but had lost market share for ten straight years.

He says he’s “not a great daily manager.” He’s much better at fixing, repairing, and building.

Autobahn gave him the chance to build a new campus about five miles away, along with the team to run it. His goal is to move the group out of the crisis mindset so many dealerships live in and into a planning state. He says his replacement, his next CFO, and his next HR director are already lined up, and the training is built to get every layer ready to move up.

His definition of thinking bigger: “Thinking bigger is truly about achieving your greatest potential.” What he can’t stand is seeing someone who doesn’t believe in themselves or doesn’t see an opportunity. “You treat an A student different than a D student,” he says.

Brendan’s rule: if you have to hire for a position, go do that job first.

His proof point is the Penske body shop. It was the biggest in the country, and it was going off the rails. Penske sent him in as an undercover detailer for six months. When he later took over the shop and had to hire all of its managers, he already knew what the jobs needed.

He applies the same rule when he has to replace a general manager. He runs the store himself for the first 90 days. Before any hire, he asks two questions: what do you want this person to be good at, and what is their next job? If you can’t picture the next job, he says, don’t hire them.

On sales, his stores stopped hiring retreads from other stores unless they sell 15 to 20 cars a month. They hire positive people and train them for 90 days. “Hope is, as we all know, not a strategy.”

Brendan’s new-hire orientation ends with a luncheon where the general managers and department heads introduce themselves. Then he asks every new hire four questions: What’s your name? Where do you work? Where do you want to be in five years? Is there anything we can fix?

About 20 people in one room produced a pile of fixes, including keys getting lost at the Porsche store. Two said they didn’t expect to be there in five years. One wants to be a diesel mechanic. One wants to be a dental hygienist. Brendan’s takeaway is that the group had built a place open enough for people to say so. His philosophy is that everyone has a hundred points, and your job is to help them align those points with what they’re good at.

His proof point is the BDC. About 45 people were taking calls there, and he kept asking them to move down to the service drive as quick-lube writers. They already had the skills, but they were afraid to try it. One finally did, and she became the top quick-lube writer fast. Brendan says her income went up 50%, the other women saw it, and they followed. “We believe in you,” he told them. “Why don’t you believe in you?”

Brendan says a leader’s job is to get the team comfortable giving real feedback. “The sum of the people is always smarter than the individual.”

Crisis mode kills it. In crisis mode, a warm body goes into every open seat, and the answer to every question is to bark an order. That works for 30 days, he says. It never builds a team.

His method for getting ideas moving looks like this. Tell your sales managers you want to sell a hundred cars and why, then leave it there. If they don’t engage, come back with some ideas. If they still don’t, come back with the exact plan. If they never engage, bring in someone who will. For Brendan, it’s a way to get people thinking bigger when they aren’t comfortable doing it yet.

Daniel came to Brendan’s Land Rover store as a first-time GM, after a career as a general sales manager. The store was second worst in the country. Brendan started with fundamentals: profitability, CSI, and sales efficiency. The CFO taught Daniel to read the financial statement, and Brendan sent him to GM school.

Then came the challenge: win the factory award, join a charity board, and join an OEM board. That year, Daniel’s store finished number one in its segment and number eight overall for Land Rover, and he joined both boards. The next year, Brendan challenged him to be number one overall. After that, he challenged Daniel and Jason Kopp, his BMW GM, to launch software across the group.

Both did well in some areas and struggled in the other stores, mostly on follow-up and thoroughness. Brendan says that’s the point. Launching across a group means you can’t bark orders. You have to get buy-in.

His goal for every manager: “Our job as managers is to work ourselves out of a job.”

Brendan’s last lesson comes from racing. Either you see the wall, or you see the gap between the cars. He says most people in this business only see walls. When his Cadillac stores said they didn’t have enough inventory to sell more, he told them there were another 150 cars out there they could sell.

“Your job as a manager is to help your team not see the wall, but to see the gap.” And if you don’t believe, he says, your team won’t either. “You either lead them at success or you lead them to mediocrity.”

Interested in watching the full masterclass? Learn more on how to access the Automotive Masterclass series on RockED here. Brendan covers hiring, developing, debating, and pushing your people, plus reflections from his GMs. Want more from the series? Browse for more in VINCUE Resources.