Starting from a position of being so broke he “couldn't buy the steam off a hot lunch,” George Lee became a car salesman. Two weeks later, after selling a few cars, he says he bought a foosball table, a brand new stereo and a water bed.
“A month later, I was thinking about buying the Dallas Cowboys,” Lee said at the Dallas Smart Business Dealmakers Conference. “That didn't work out, so I kept working, and worked my way up until I earned my way into minority partnership in a Porsche dealership in San Antonio for 15 years, and that went along really great.”
He says he made so much money in that position that he wouldn't leave and go out on his own. Then he started riding motorcycles.
“Next thing you know, in five months, I had nine motorcycles in the garage,” he says. “And I would tell my wife, here's this Volvo dealer and Porsche dealer wearing khaki pants and a white shirt and a red tie every single day of your life. And you go home, and you put on your obligatory costume, morph yourself into this outer-body experience when you fire up this motorcycle in the garage, and it's like, ‘Ahhhh.’ So, I fell in love with it.”
That set him on a path toward buying a Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership. What he says he didn’t know at the time was there were only 750 Harley-Davidson dealers in the entire United States owned by about 500 people. But he kept after it and eventually got a dealership.
“I bought the two worst-performing dealerships in Texas — 43 dealerships, ranked 43 and 42,” he says. “And they had a horrible reputation, awful.”
When he decided to change the name of the dealers, he ran into issues.
“I said, Well, there's 254 counties in Texas. This one is named Bell County. Means nothing. So, I'm going to change it to Horny Toad Harley-Davidson dealership,” he says. “Harley said [sarcastically], ‘Sure, you are. Of course, you are.’ They said, ‘No.’ Turned it down (because of the) connotation of the term. So, I googled Parks and Wildlife and it said it's a Texas state reptile. I googled our university here, TCU, said they're the horned frogs. (Harley) said it's approved. Two years later, it was the No. 1 t-shirt seller in the world. Five years later, it was the No. 1 dealership in the United States.”
The dealership had a lot of success and he built it up to be worth a lot of money. But he didn't have a successor when he decided to sell. So, he called Harley-Davidson and got connected to a person who was head of mergers and acquisitions for AutoNation who had bought billions of dollars worth the car dealerships. She had retired and become a consultant for Harley and reached out to him to help sell his dealership. She connected with someone who wanted to buy the dealership through a public company, Sonic Automotive. Harley, however, had said that they would never sell to a public company. Lee protested, saying many car dealerships were selling to public companies. So, eventually, someone was going to write a contract with a public company, Harley will say no, they'll get taken to court and will lose because there's precedent. So, he says, rather than lose and have to live under a judge's terms, they should set the terms themselves. And Harley let up, allowing him to be the first person to sell a Harley dealership to a public company.
“I guess my point for that is, you never know where a deal is going to lead you,” Lee says. “The deal may start out one way. You think it's going to be like this, and it's totally not like that. It's completely morphs itself into something else. So, you have to be nimble. You have to be prepared. You got to have some grit and stay with it. It took me six months to do it, but they showed me the money.”
