Employee Profile: McLarty Daniel Ford General Manager Jason Hooe | McLarty Daniel Ford

Every day, in everything he does, the mind of McLarty Daniel Ford of Bentonville General Manager Jason Hooe is on the Four-Oh-Nine. That’s what he calls the philosophy he came up with during his 14 years at the dealership, and his two decades in the car business. Since he became General Manager at McLarty Daniel Ford, he’s made the 409 the heart of the culture.

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“The 409 is this,” Hooe said, “I’ve got 97 employees who work here under this roof. If you take those 97 employees and multiply that by the national household size, that means this business is responsible for 409 people: wives, husbands, children.”

Those 409 people, Hooe said, have things going on in their lives: births, deaths, weddings, illnesses. But every one of them depends a little or a lot on the continued success of McLarty Daniel Ford. And for that reason, every person who works there is committed to keeping the dealership strong by making sure customers stay satisfied enough to become customers for life.

That’s not only a commitment from one employee to another, Hooe said. It’s a commitment to understanding that the customer has the right and ability to hire and fire McLarty Daniel Ford every time they walk through the door or open their phone to write a review of the dealership. “We’re very vested in making sure that our reputation is not a reputation of five stars because we paid for them,” he said. “We want a reputation of five stars because we earned them.”

Hooe has worked in several different departments at the dealership since starting there 14 years ago. He started out in the car business as a detailer, moved into sales, and worked his way up to General Manager at McLarty Daniel Ford through a little luck and a determination to get it right. The luck comes into play in that he happened to be exactly the right age to get in on the ground floor of the monumental changes the Internet had in store for the way cars are sold.

“Fortunately I am of the right age to have been old enough and young enough to have been at the very cutting edge of the Internet age of the car business,” he said. “The guys that were older than me couldn’t figure it out or were having a hard time translating it… They were saying: ‘What’s this internet deal? I can barely figure out my email much less figure out the internet.’ But I did understand it was valuable because it was how I communicated with my friends, and it was how I started shopping [online].” Soon, Hooe was promoted to a position as the dealership’s first Internet Manager.

Hooe said the Internet has taken car sales from an inefficient, dealer-focused experience and turned it into an efficient, customer-focused experience. “The consumer has the capacity within ten seconds to tell me what the most efficient price is,” he said. “It has put the power in their hands. It has allowed us to turn a lot more volume, but there’s a lot lower revenue. I’m good with that. I’d rather be a dealership that’s a high-volume, high velocity store, and sell to everybody at the most aggressive price point that we can. That’s what the internet has done.”

Hooe said he counts himself fortunate to have been in the business long enough to see the last of the “old breed” car salespeople, and to know it was not for him. “I was a very young man, but I got to touch that culture, and I got to reject it,” he said. “My generation are the ones that got to put the power back in the customer’s hands, and that allowed for a lot more transparency in the transaction, allowing the consumer to have a better understanding and more peace about their decision to do business with us.”

On a shelf in his office, Hooe keeps two things that he said are very important to him. One is a die-cast replica of the 1979 Ford F-150 truck that Walmart founder Sam Walton drove for over a decade until his death. A little digging by Hooe confirmed that Walton’s real F-150, an icon which is currently on display at the Walmart Museum in downtown Bentonville, was personally purchased by Walton from the same lot that’s now McLarty Daniel Ford.

“That was kind of a local legend, so I called the old owner [of the dealership], Ron Blackwell,” Hooe said. “He’s a local guy who is still tied into the community. I reached out to him and asked him to confirm that, and sure enough, the famous truck was bought here. I’m so proud of that little truck. I know it’s not ours, it’s Sam’s. But look, I work on Walton Boulevard. Maybe that truck’s not famous anywhere else. But to me, that truck means the world. He bought that truck from here. He serviced that truck here. That truck still speaks to this community today. So I’m very proud of that little Ford F-150.”

Another thing Hooe keeps in his office features another famous Sam: a copy of the famous Dr. Seuss book, “Green Eggs and Ham.” In it, a character named Sam I Am asks another character over 100 different ways if he would like to try green eggs and ham. Spoiler Alert: in the end, the character tries the dish and loves it. Though the book is for children, Hooe believes it can teach sales people something important about the job. “Dr. Seuss taught me in ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ that you’ve got to ask 129 times to get to yes,” Hooe said. “Just keep being persistent until you find a solution that works for your customer. Whatever it is, if the customer has a concern, continue to ask to get that customer the right solution, just like the salesperson Sam I Am.”

Hooe said meeting the customer’s needs is a key to success in the fast paced world of modern car sales. That, and the ability to own up to and quickly correct the inevitable mistakes we all make.

“Every single day, we make a mistake here at the dealership. But so does everybody else,” he said. “We’re going to make mistakes, but the important thing is how you recover and how you fix it. At that point, the consumer has the ability to make an additional buying decision from you. Most of the time, you’ll find that if a mistake is made and a solid recovery is given, that’s a customer for life. A consumer who walks in and has a great experience and buys a car and we send them off, you almost never see them again. But that consumer where something small happens, we recover and the team rallies and the team puts the customer first? We end up with that customer for life.”

Like a lot of the people who make McLarty Daniel Ford what it is today, Hooe seems to have found the place he belongs in the world. Behind the current location, work continues on a new showroom and service center which, when completed this fall, will be the first new home for the dealership since the days when Sam Walton bought his Ford F-150 there. Hooe, who helped in the design of the new space, said it’s being built for a purpose that’s more important than more room and a bigger office.

“I’m not building it to sell cars,” he said. “I’m building it to service cars better. I’m building it so I can have a car wash. I’m building it so that when somebody comes in for an oil change, they get their car washed too. I’m doing it so that when people come in for service, we have absolutely the latest technology to lift their car in the air, service their car and get it back to them as quickly as possible. I’m building that building for service, and because the customers deserve it. We designed the whole building around customer satisfaction, not car sales.”

While Hooe believes anyone can sell a car if they follow a few basic tenets of the business, it takes a special set of talents to make those who buy from McLarty Daniel Ford customers for life. Among them: the ability to truly understand a consumer’s needs, put those needs ahead of your own, and empathise with customers without having to force or fake it.

“The real secret is: consider the consumer’s needs first,” Hooe said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean price. That’s where people miss it sometimes. It just means that you understand that they came to you and trusted you and they must know that you care, genuinely, about their position. If you do that, they’ll buy from you. Really, price is always a secondary thing. That’s why Amazon.com is so successful. They’re not the best price. The consumer just feels good about the process. That’s how I see it here. It’s about that true heart of a customer…. Now it’s all about how you get treated. You can buy a Ford anywhere. You can buy a car anywhere. But they choose to buy them from me.”

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