A Crash Course In Success

Damian Mills’ strategic leadership, talented team, and knack for turning crises into Lucrative Opportunities turned his mega-dealership into an unstoppable force

- Selena Hill

Throughout the automotive industry, it was known as the “Crash of 2009”— a year in which hundreds of franchises were wrecked by the colliding forces of the Great Recession, the financial sector meltdown, and two of the world’s leading car manufacturers’ forced bankruptcies. For Damian Mills, a young auto dealer who acquired his first franchise five years earlier, that series of events represented the turning point for his nascent enterprise.

In 2004, Mills had purchased Classic Ford of Smithfield, North Carolina, in a deal that required him to put up his life savings to fuel his entrepreneurial ambitions. By 2006, he added a Chrysler dealership in Fort Mills, South Carolina, to his budding megadealership. But his plans seemed to have taken a detour when Chrysler became one of the automakers that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and threatened to terminate agreements with dealerships. Mills was concerned about not only losing his investment but focused on the livelihood of dozens of employees.

The dire situation represented his moment of truth. “Conventional wisdom tells you to sit on the sidelines. But in business, that’s the time you have to get in and take action,” Mills says as he recounted the experience to an audience of entrepreneurs at FWD, be’s recent business conference. “I used the recession not for contraction but as an opportunity because every business was put on sale. People were not going to go from driving cars to riding horses.”

Using his strong banking relationships, Mills decided to “aggressively pursue opportunities at a discount the way Warren Buffet would.”