Trophy Auto Broadcast

Paul Corvino sits down with Market President Chris Paz from Trophy Automotive Group.  Trophy Auto Group has proudly served the Los Angeles community for over a decade, operating five premier auto dealerships throughout LA.
 
2 Mercedes locations – Mercedes of Encino and Mercedes of Valencia
Universal City Nissan
2 Kia locations – Kia of Carson and Kia of Downtown LA. 
 
Kia of Downtown LA is currently building (probably) the largest, most glamorous indoor Kia service and showroom in the world!  It’s 4 stories tall and 40,000 square feet per floor. 160,000 square feet!

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
This is CEOs you should know.And now from iHeartMedia, here's Paul Corbino.
Today I have the pleasure of talkingwith Chris Paz, the market president
of the Trophy Auto Group, oneof the biggest and most successful auto groups
in the state of California. Welcome, good to be here. Say hey,
before we get going, what I'dlike to do is I start off

(00:24):
with a quick rapid fire questions,just to get our brains working, our
mouth moving, and get the wordsflowing. Are you ready yep? Summer
or winter? Summer, Beacher,ski, vacation beach, Michael Jordan or
Tom Brady Jordan, Star Wars orGodfather, Godfather. I like the way

(00:45):
you said that. Okay, SeanConnery and Daniel Craig Connery. See whoever
says Godfather always says Connery. Oldcelebrity people say you remind them of Eric
Roberts. I can see that.Popa Grandis village, hopefully not the current
Areaerence. So tell me a littlebit about your journey now. Now,

(01:07):
first of all, I understand yougrew up here in southern California. You're
a professional golfer, So what wasthe path from that life to running one
of the biggest and most successful autogroups in the country. And by the
way, you've got just so theaudience knows, you've got the two locations

(01:27):
Mercedes locations, one in Encino,one in Valencia. Right here you have
Universal, you have the Universal CityNissan, and then you got those two
locations for Kia and the one downtown. I think it's like four stories,
probably two hundred thousand square feet.It's huge, beautiful new building. We'll
have that open in about three months. We're currently under construction, and of

(01:49):
course dealing with the city, wehope to be opened three months ago,
but it'll be three or four monthsdown the road, and when that's completed,
it'll actually be the largest Kia facilityin the United States. Well,
it's impressive. That's impressive. Sohow does this boy growing up in southern
California dreams of being a professional golferactually starts a career as a professional golfer

(02:09):
and then winds up as the presidentof such an incredible battle group that spent
my whole life thinking I was goingto be playing golf for a living and
kind of had to start from scratchand ended up back in those days,
not to date, myself too much. But the way we had to look
for a job was in the classifiedsof the papers, and always saw that
there was a lot of entry levels. So it got a job selling cars

(02:31):
at Torrents Nissan, and very quicklycame home and said, you know,
a bunch of these sales managers aredriving really nice cars that I dreamed to
have, and they're not that mucholder than me. And it's you know,
the great thing about the industry isit doesn't require an MBA. You
don't have to do if you're willingto put in the effort and the hard

(02:52):
work and you got a little hustlein you, everybody's on equal grounds.
You were at Nissan back in theday, you wanted that two eighty zs
oh yeah, oh yeah, thatwas the car. I remember you didn't
say two fortysy. I'm not thatold. Yeah that was for me,
but now that's to me and itstill is one of the last places in

(03:13):
this country that really is the Americandream where anybody can walk in, whether
immigrant, educated, non educated.It's all about merit. And at that
point I was desperate and willing toput in the work and God willing it
all worked out tell us about yourdealerships. You've got a tremendous group,
large in size and scale. Whatsets your dealerships apart from the competition?

(03:35):
You know, one thing we're reallyfocused on is and obviously things are changing
rapidly these days with AI and technology, and we try to be very progressive
in that. And when you talkabout large, yeah, one of the
things we look at, and we'velooked at dealer groups in other states and
acquisitions coming down the road, andmost of the stuff we look at.

(03:58):
And it's interesting because we're a fivedealer group right now, and we were
just in negotiations with a group onthe East Coast that had just north of
twenty dealerships, and the funny thingwe laughed about was the revenue of those
twenty dealerships were less than we dowith five in California. So we really
try to focus on making sure wehave the right stores and the right neighborhoods

(04:21):
and the right brands. And atthis point, we like to our footprint
is very localized. I understand yourcompany is very involved in the community and
a lot of different charitable events andactivities and initiatives that you take on.
Can you tell us a little bitabout some of them. Yeah, it's
something that is very important to usfrom the top down. Our principal owner

(04:46):
has a family foundation and their focusis orphanages around the world, mainly in
very war torn, very very impoverishedareas, and all about education. And
then what we've done is we've takenthat at a local level with a lot
of involvement with the Boys and GirlsClub, Carousel Ranch, which is equestrian

(05:08):
therapy for autistic and disabled children bridgea home. We try to keep our
focus seventy percent of it around children, right, and then the other thirty
percent. Obviously, we're putting alot of focus towards the homelessness issue,
which I think is affecting everybody atthis point, certainly is a big issue,

(05:29):
especially here in state of California rightnow. Yeah, almost every month
we take about twenty five percent ofour budget, and then we've just recently
rolled out twenty of your budget ofour ad budgets. Yeah, and then
recently we rolled out an initiative overthe last couple of years at our Valencia
store that we're going to be rollingout everywhere else where every customer comes into

(05:50):
service, we donate a dollar andwe asked them to match that, and
in turn, we pick one separatecharity every month, and like the Boys
and Girls Club owns two months inValenci, every year, Carousel has one
and we try to spread it aroundthat way and get everybody involved. That's
really terrific. Let me ask you, if you could speak to your twenty

(06:11):
one year old self, what advicewould you give that young man to help
him get to the level of whereyou're at today. You know what.
To me, it would be,don't worry about the mediate results. And
a lot of that I got,even though there was a more of a
lack of patience than there should bein a professional golfer at the time.
The one thing I think I didlearn from golf was if you put in

(06:35):
the legwork, the results will come, probably not tomorrow, probably not a
week from now. But it's amazingwhat happens if you just do one percent
every day for a year and youwake up where you are a year from
now. And I think I wouldhave just told myself to be a little
less patient, stop looking for thegoal to happen in a week, just

(06:55):
you know, go about the processand the result will happen. That's great
advice. Thank you so much forbeing on. Chris. Once again,
we're here with Chris Paz, themarket president for the Trophy Automotive Group.
Chris, tell people if someone's outthere looking for Mercedes, a Nissan,
a Kia, how to get incontact with you when I'm easy, email

(07:15):
me Dura. I'm listed on everywebsite I'm there, just reach out direct.
I love to hear. It's myfavorite part of the business talking to
people, and to me with oneof the other things about the car business.
I remember when my dad said,why are you getting in the car
business. I said, because oneof the happiest moments of my life is
getting a new car. I'd loveto spend my career watching people do that
every day. So it's Christmas everyday for you, every day every day,

(07:38):
Chris, Thank you so much forcoming on. Once again, we're
here with Chris Paz, the marketpresident of the Trophy Auto Group. This
is Paul Corvino from iHeartMedia saying thankyou for listening to another episode of CEOs
you Should Know. Listen to CEOsyou Should Know on the iHeartRadio APPA