Ten years later, more stories of survival

Doug Wilson remembers the scene well.

It was May 2009 when the CEO of Wilson Auto Group was blindsided by a letter from Chrysler alerting him that his profitable Dodge franchise in Flowood, Miss., was being terminated — one of the thousands of dealerships wrung out by the Great Recession and the government-led restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler Group.

These dealers and their stories of struggle and survival were the subject of an Automotive News retrospective series in September.

Here's another one to add to the collection.

When he got the letter, Wilson gathered his managers to share the news. Then he laid out a survival plan, unsure whether it would work.

The plan called for a massive sale that would liquidate six months' worth of Dodge inventory within three weeks, and then going all-in on the Hyundai and Kia brands, recent additions to his group that he considered franchises of the future.

Before he knew it, the sale was under way.

After the meeting, Wilson headed downstairs to his showroom where he was greeted by local media outlets that had gotten word that his store was on the chopping block. With the cameras and recorders trained on him, Wilson went from being bearer of bad news to enterprising salesman.

He stood next to a Ram 1500 and declared that starting the next morning, Wilson Dodge would have the biggest going-out-of-business sale that you've ever seen. He then used the pickup as Exhibit A, saying customers could get up to $10,000 off on it if they had a trade-in.

A reporter who was interviewing Wilson at the time then closed out the segment by repeating the trade-in deal. Other outlets would run similar stories.

Then the floodgates opened.

"I have never seen so many people. People were getting mad like, 'You need to have more salespeople,' " Wilson recalled. "We really didn't intend on having this sale."

Wilson and his crew managed to clear the Dodge lot in a whirlwind stretch on the back of the early media coverage and an aggressive ad push on TV and radio touting the clearance sale.

Doug Wilson went from two decades as “the Dodge dealer” to all in on Hyundai and Kia.

'Cash in the bank'

To restock, Wilson called Hyundai and Kia in early June to see what kind of inventory he could get. They had plenty of small cars such as the Accent, Elantra, Forte and Rio. While fuel prices had fallen off their peaks by this point, the small Korean cars were still prized for their value and long warranties at a time when unemployment was nearing 10 percent and Americans were spending less.

Wilson said he'd take them.

A month later, he knew he had made a smart call. That's when the Obama administration and Congress stepped in with "cash for clunkers," the economic stimulus program that used cash to entice car owners to trade in their gas-guzzlers for more efficient vehicles.

"The government was doling out money to banks, insurance companies and manufacturing companies left and right," Wilson recalled. "I said, 'Hey, if I go broke, I'd rather be holding cash-for-clunkers IOUs from the government.' It would be cash in the bank.

"We didn't understand how we were going to get reimbursed, and they didn't have all the rules," he added, "but we just dove in there and started doing every one of those deals that we possibly could."

Through the program, Wilson would convert a slew of his Dodge customers into Hyundai and Kia buyers. He'd have to convert his image, too. He had long billed himself as "Doug Wilson, the Dodge dealer," having sold the brand for two decades. But in 2009, he said, he had to "get back on TV" and rebrand himself as a Hyundai-Kia dealer.

Meanwhile, he kept the registers ringing by relying on his service operation, which continued to repair Dodge models. Wilson still had $400,000 worth of Dodge parts when the store closed, so he put them to use.

The store also flipped the acres of quality used cars obtained during the Dodge sale and moved the Hyundai-Kia teams to a salary-based pay plan to attract better workers.

Awkward holiday

Then came an awkward turn of events: A few months after terminating Wilson's Dodge franchise, the new Chrysler awarded one to his brother right next door — which Wilson said "made for some interesting Thanksgiving dinners."

But there was little time for bitterness. In 2012, Wilson would open another Hyundai point, this one in nearby Ridgeland. Then he got back into the Dodge business in 2013, opening a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram operation in Collierville, Tenn.

"A lot of dealers failed in '08-'09. We survived," Wilson said. "We did that by being the best Hyundai-Kia dealer we could."