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Carter Myers Automotive has been around for 98 years, meaning they lived through the Spanish Flu of 1918.

Liza Borches hasn’t seen all of that, but as the 3rd generation President and CEO of CMA, she knows the stories of the company. She knows the joys and the pains. And she has led the organization through growth and culture shift, overcoming her own ideas about retail auto and even some misogyny from those in her organization. Michael Cirillo, Paul J Daly, and Kyle Mountsier ask her about an opportunity at General Mills, Honda’s 3 Joys, and why groups are asking CMA to acquire them.

What we talk about in this episode:
0:00 Intro with Michael Cirillo, Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier.

7:59 Coming out of college, Liza didn’t want to work for the family business. She took a job with American Honda because it sounded like fun to live in Southern California. But that job showed her a whole new side of retail automotive.

“I started really seeing the difference that those leaders and dealership associates were making in their communities, I saw a different side of the business than I had grown up with. I grew up just seeing my dad working 24/7 some challenging times with our business almost going under a lot of stress and to be honest, he just wasn't around. So I just needed to see a different perspective on the business. And then I got to come home and see it through the lens that my dad was able to share with me more as an adult than versus when I was a kid.”

14:04 For Carter Myers Automotive, company culture is about influencing the whole person, not just that person at work.

“Tom Doll shared at the Subaru meeting a couple of weeks ago, and he said, ''We don't just want to be good business people. We want to be good people in business.” And I think at CMA, that's something that we've always focused on. We don't want to just create and pour into and invest in our team to be good business people. We also want to help them be good people in business. And I think that reflects back to encouraging our team to bring their whole self to work, not just their work self, and how do we help them grow both personally and professionally, that it has to be investing in them as a human being and not just an as an a team member of CMA.”

19:43 Liza’s grandfather gave the company its fiscal responsibility, her father gave it an aggressive growth desire, and Liza herself brought the company its soul. She learned how to build a great culture at a single store and then began scaling it to the other stores in the group with the help of some amazing general managers.

27:15 Michael Cirillo makes an observation that in some ways, the automotive industry is really one big family business. Liza adds to that by talking about the fear of failing in a family business, but how, if you aren’t afraid to be yourself and bring your own ideas to the table, you can add a whole new

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