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American Woman Motorscene
Dealing With A Full Deck
Kitty Van Bortel ignored the skeptics
(including her father) and built one of the
top Subaru dealerships in the country.
by Steve Scott
She is decidedly not your stereotypical car dealer.
But then you know that already, because this article started with
the word she. Meet Mary Catherine "Kitty" Van Bortel-of
Van Bortel Subaru in Victor, New York.
Kitty started her own dealership 10 years ago with
one used car, which she parked in front of her rented house on
Route 96 in upstate New York. She sold that car for more than
six times what she'd paid for it. Says Kitty, the dealer she bought
it from "didn't know what he had." Obviously, she did.
Now, Kitty's three-year-old Subaru franchise, which
she has built on the site of that same rented house, is on a pace
that should eclipse the $11 million sales figure it posted last
year. In April, she received a Chairman's Roundtable Award from
Subaru of America for sales and customer service excellence in
1993. It was the second straight year she received that award.
In May, she received a "Customer Satisfaction: Best in Class-1993"
award from Subaru. Of the more than 700 Subaru dealerships nationwide,
Kitty Van Bortel's is one of 14 to be so honored. Her dealership
sold nearly 500 vehicles in 1993-most of them to women.
How has she shot to the top of this extremely competitive
industry so quickly? Consider a few of her business practices:
- Kitty uses a "one-price" selling service,
meaning the price on the car is the price you pay. Customers are
offered a list of options and prices, and they circle what they
want. That way, there are no hidden costs. She doesn't think it's
fair that different people pay different prices for the same car.
"The whole horse-trading way of doing business is a thing
of the past," she says. "There are a lot of men
out there who seem to get all geared up to go out and do the horse-trading
thing [when they buy a car], but I don't know a woman alive who
likes or wants to do business that way."
- She sells new cars on a 2-percent margin from Subaru,
which is pretty much rock bottom, and her salespeople are paid
a flat fee, not a commission based on the size of the profit.
- She offers used-car buyers a 102-percent, no-strings,
money-back guarantee. If a used-car customer is unhappy for any
reason and returns the car within 20 days of purchase, Kitty will
cut him or her a check for the purchase price, including sales
tax, plus 2 percent of the total. She says this alleviates the
fear of buying a car.
- She likes to hire inexperienced salespeople, especially
women, because she feels people who have not been trained to be
"car salespeople" make customers feel more comfortable-and,
in the emotionally charged process of selling a car, she feels
women are more empathetic. Currently, 80 percent of her salespeople
are women.
- There are no offices or dividers in the showroom.
It's completely open, so customers don't feel like prisoners.
This practice also encourages customer-to-customer conversation.
She used to operate her dealership right out of the front of her
house, complete with a fire in the fireplace, light music, coffee
and cookies.
- She encourages buyers to read Consumer Reports and
other informational literature before buying, and she will pay
for a mechanical inspection of a used car at the buyer's choice
of shop.
"What differentiates me from other [new] car
dealers is that we work from strengths rather than weaknesses.
We give people all the information they need and the best price
we possibly can," she says. "We feel that if
we are straightforward and honest, people will respect that. And
even if they go to another dealer who undercuts our price, they'll
often come back and buy from us because they respect our integrity
and service."
Her maverick methods definitely appeal to women buyers,
if not the competition. "We have women come in here who
are extremely well-educated with high-powered jobs, but when it
comes to buying a car, they're lost," she says. "Women
are conditioned to believe that since they don't know much about
a car mechanically, they don't know how to buy one. But you don't
need to know anything about the mechanics of a car to be a smart
buyer. I don't know anything about the mechanics of car, nor do
I want to."
Not knowing what makes a car tick hasn't hampered
Kitty on the job, though. "Kitty can appraise much better
than most dealers," said Harry Ridley, a retired Ford
dealer who gave Van Bortel her first job selling cars.
That was a job her father, Howard Van Bortel, formerly
of Palmyra (New York) Motors, would not give her. Like Kitty,
Howard likes to do things his way. Palmyra locals will know Mr.
Van Bortel as the guy who sold Rolls Royces at a discount and
other cars at $49 over factory invoice; the guy who sported a
huge roll of cash and traveled with a chauffeur and five bodyguards;
the maverick who took on General Motors Corporation in an antitrust
lawsuit that accused GM of trying to put him out of business.
Howard discouraged Kitty's initial efforts at selling
cars, offering her only office work at his dealership when she
was a teenager. But Kitty, whose practices can be said to be more
conservative than her father's, went ahead and landed a summer
job as a saleswoman at Ridley Motors anyway. It was between her
junior and senior years at Wells College in Aurora, New York,
and owner Harry Ridley had some doubts about how his seasoned
salesmen would react to working with a college kid, especially
a female college kid, so he had her make her pitch to each of
his staff individually and then he took a vote. They voted her
in and she started on Monday.
"She was never lower than No. 2 in volume,"
said Ridley.
When Kitty graduated from Wells, Ridley offered her
a job, and she worked there until he shut down the dealership
two years later. Apparently impressed by his daughter's performance,
Howard Van Bortel then invited her to join his sales staff. She worked at
that dealership for several years, rising to head of used-car
sales before she left.
The next chapter is one Kitty points to as the most
significant stepping stone in her career-when she hit rock bottom.
It was in 1985 when, at the tender age of 30, she was fired from
her $100,000 per year job as a sales manager selling Mercedes-Benzes
and BMWs for Holtz Automotive Group.
"It used to be that the laws were such that
you could depreciate a car in three years, no matter how old it
was. High-powered executives were buying these cars, depreciating
them, writing them off and getting new ones. They were selling
like hotcakes. Well, in 1984, the law changed and business went
straight to hell," she recalls. In short, the company's
management thought they could do better with someone else, and
Kitty was fired.
"I was devastated," she says. "After
I sold the house, paid my bills and rented the house in Victor
I was broke. I asked my father, 'What am I going to do?' and he
said, 'You're going to start in the gutter and work your way back
up.'
"After that, my motivation was that I was
going to prove I was going to make it-pure survival. I learned
a lot working for my father," she says.
Kitty's father was a pioneer in low-price, no-bargaining
car sales. "He had one-price selling down to a science,
and he sold thousands of cars," she said. "When
I worked for other people, I adapted, but one-price is really
natural for me. I always knew when I got my own dealership that's
how it would be."
And today, that's how it is at Van Bortel Subaru
Peter Cedolin, executive director of Subaru Distributors
Corporation, says that he knows of no other woman who started
a car dealership from scratch. "I wish we had a dozen
more like her," he says. And if you've ever bought a
car the traditional way, you probably do too.
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