Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404180107
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By LEIGH ANNE LARANCE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Jay Lewis "Lew" Shelor doesn't know why, at 48, when most people look toward retirement, he looked toward a new adventure. On April 1, 1974, 17 years after he started with General Motors, Shelor left the company to buy his own dealership in Christiansburg.
"Looking back now, the struggle it has been, I think, 'How could anybody be so foolish to risk everything?'" he said.
But the risk paid off.
What started as a 5-acre operation with a staff of 20 has grown to a 16-acre megadealership along U.S. 460/U.S. 11 with about 150 employees. Shelor now sells Chevrolets, Geos, Toyotas, Chryslers, Plymouths, Dodges, Volkswagens and Subarus - and he may soon add Fords to the inventory.
Now 68, Shelor plans to buy Homer Cox's Ford franchise on Roanoke Street in Christiansburg. As of last week, he was still awaiting approval, saying the deal will be final "as soon as it goes through the red tape paperwork in Detroit."
Cox declined to comment except to say there might be an announcement down the road. But of Shelor, he said, "I've known him for 20 years, and he's a good businessman."
Ward Teel sold Shelor his dealership in 1974, at a time when Teel was trying to juggle his business interests and public service.
"I was in the legislature, and that was taking a great bit of time," said Teel, who then represented Montgomery, Floyd and Carroll counties and the city of Radford in the House of Delegates.
The two men still see each other regularly at Rotary meetings.
"In fact, recently I was talking about coming down and buying a new car from him," Teel said.
He also gives Shelor high marks as a businessman.
"He's done a fantastic job down there," Teel said. "I think the growth speaks for itself."
One thing that's notable about Shelor is that he stays in the background, Teel said. "Ninety percent of the people who go down there would not know who he was."
For Shelor, at 6 feet 3 inches and 220 pounds, staying in the background is no easy task.
But Teel's assessment is in line with Shelor's philosophy. At General Motors he sometimes felt suffocated by his supervisors.
"Sometimes it was hard to tell whether you were bag carriers or businessmen," he said.
At his dealership on the commercial stretch of U.S. 460 just off Interstate 81, he keeps the management side thin and gives the sales staff center stage. The top management includes Shelor, his son Larry Shelor and David Hagan, who has been with the operation since 1981.
Shelor's interest in the car business goes way back. He worked in his father's business, Shelor's Garage, when he was growing up in Floyd County.
He was away from the auto industry only briefly when, after high school, he served in World War II in Germany, France and Belgium. Home on a visit to the county clerk's office to have his discharge recorded, he met Isabel Gallimore, who six months later became his wife.
Shelor continued as a mechanic in his father's garage and worked for Floyd Motor Co., a Chevrolet dealer, while pursuing a degree in business at Virginia Tech. He never got the degree, but that didn't stop him from getting a job with Chevrolet Motor Division, where he learned every angle of the business and studied the successes and shortcomings of dealerships up and down the East Coast.
His family grew at the same time. Shelor's daughter, Jane Baker, works with her father and brother Larry at the dealership. The Shelors' other son, David, works in Austin for Texas Instruments.
During his first few years in Christiansburg, Shelor said the business nearly choked to death.
"We were constantly on the brink of failure - always in a crisis, always trying to cover the cost of opening the doors."
It was a different operation then, with a gravel lot and an inventory so small that at the end of each work day the cars and trucks were driven into a fenced area and locked up for the night.
At the time, he was selling about 100 cars a year.
"It's hard to eat real good on 100 a year," Shelor said.
The business has had its ups and downs, and everyone at the dealership still remembers the Dodge Aspens that gathered dust in an energy-conscious market.
"The Aspen got about 12 miles per gallon and was the worst car. [We] gave them away, sold them below profit, anything to get them off the lot," Shelor said.
The business has weathered recessions, energy crunches and gas crises and still it continues to grow.
Growth is measured more by sales than size, however.
In 1992 and 1993, Shelor Chevrolet sold the most trucks in the automaker's Washington zone, which includes about 150 dealerships from Delaware to North Carolina. It ranked in the top 50 nationally.
That's unusual, considering that dealerships based in metropolitan areas virtually monopolize the list of top sellers, according to Randall Edwards, a Chevrolet district manager.
"We'd have [other dealers] call up and say, 'Where in the hell is Christiansburg? ... How many people live in Christiansburg?'" Shelor said.
Shelor is "a good merchandizing dealership," Edwards said. "They know what their customers want."
According to Hagan, they'll come a long way to get it. He said the average customer comes from more than 30 miles away. "We took a map of Virginia, Maryland and Tennessee and we put pins everywhere [our buyers live]. We had pins everywhere. It wasn't like they were concentrated in one place."
The dealership has annual sales of 5,000 cars, trucks and vans, close to $100 million in gross sales, according to Larry Shelor.
Hagan said people will drive to Christiansburg because they want to be able to buy the car, truck or van they want at the price they want and take it home the same day.
"The chances are, we've got it," he said.
Getting the message out doesn't hurt, either.
"Our volume really comes from huge, huge advertising." Hagan said the dealership has an advertising budget of $800,000 per year and reaches markets from Lynchburg to Bluefield.
Locally, Shelor's main competition comes from Paul Duncan, whose family-owned dealerships dominate U.S. 460 between Blacksburg and Christiansburg in much the same way that Shelor's dominates the commercial strip near I-81. The Duncans own nine dealerships in all from the New River Valley to Rocky Mount and last year sold more than 7,500 cars.
With Shelor's acquisition of the Cox Ford dealership, they will now be competing head-to-head selling Ford products, such as the best-selling Taurus.
Duncan said he heard rumors of the sale but has not heard anything official. Duncan says he respects Shelor's business acumen and adds that they run their operations differently. "I focus more on the service end, and they focus more on volume."
Shelor's dealership also has received local recognition: the 1993 Commerce award, the Christiansburg-Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce's top honor. Executive Director Kathy Mantz said when Shelor bought the business in 1974, he immediately joined the chamber, and has been active in community and economic development since.
He is a member of many professional and civic organizations and is a big fan of Virginia Tech athletics, providing three cars for the athletic association's use.
When he's not cheering for the Hokies, watching stock car races or surveying his farmland from his perch on a John Deere, Shelor is at the dealership, checking on the operation of a venture that started on April Fool's Day two decades ago.
To what does he credit his success?
"What I've done is stuck to the car business. And I don't golf."
Keywords:
PROFILE
Memo: NOTE: Also ran in Neighbors May 12, 1994.