Succession gauntlet

Steve Cox has been in the family auto sales business for 40 years, but it almost didn't work out that way.

Cox, instead, had a young entrepreneurial mind. Like the time in the sixth grade, in the early 1960s, when he tried to turn the Cox family Chevrolet dealership into his own money machine. Every day after school Steve Cox would ride his bike a few blocks from home to the dealership, which back then was in a three-story building in downtown Bradenton.

“My duty was to fill the soda pop machine and the cracker machines,” says Cox. “That became my own little business.”

Cox recalls that Rebecca Edwards, the first woman to work for the dealership when she took a bookkeeping job in 1950, created a ledger for the startup vending business. Edwards kept a separate box in the petty cash, where the young Cox counted out nickels and dimes. And profits.

Cox no longer counts coins. Now he's the fourth generation of what's become a five-generation Chevrolet dealership that goes back 100 years, including 80 years in Manatee County. The dealership, not counting a Mazda subsidiary it's owned since 2002, had $110 million in sales in 2012, up 8% from 2011, when it sold $101.5 million worth of Chevrolets.

On a cumulative basis, the Cox family has sold 86,000 Chevrolets since 1932. That's nearly $1.84 billion in sales. “The Chevrolet bowtie has always been a part of the Cox family,” says Cox. “It's just a way of life.”

That way of life is currently making its way to what Cox proudly calls G5. Those are the six Coxes, siblings and cousins, who are primed to run the company for at least the next 30 years. Three G5 members are Cox's children, while three others are the children of Cox's brother, Gary Cox. Each member of G5 has an individual leadership role in the company.

One of the elder statesmen of G5, Gary Cox's son Kris Cox, has fond memories of growing up in the family business. Kris Cox, 35, did everything there when he was a young boy. He washed cars, changed light bulbs and scrubbed nicotine stains from the walls. Kris Cox, who oversees corporate strategy for the company, adds that leading in tandem with two siblings and three cousins is surprisingly amiable.

“People think there would be a ton of fighting, but there's not,” says Kris Cox. “We absolutely have our disagreements, but we always hash it out.”

Earn it
Tammy Cox-Leavell, Steve Cox's daughter and the CFO of Cox Chevrolet, believes G5's ability to successfully work together stems from two factors. One, all the relatives genuinely like each other, she says, but even more important, everyone over-communicates with each other. Says Cox-Leavell: “We make sure we don't let the small stuff get in the way of running a business.”

Another key factor in the G5 succession plan is the anti-silver-spoon approach.

In fact, everyone in G5, just for the right to buy an ownership stake, had to earn an M.B.A; be certified by General Motor's stringent internal management program; attend Disney Institute leadership training sessions; and, finally, work in every dealership department for at least a year. On the latter, a senior manager supervised and mentored every G5 member — a supervisor who had full authority to fire any younger Cox if warranted.

“We were hoping to weed some of them out,” half-jokes Steve Cox.

More seriously, Cox says the process, aided by the Rawls Group, an Orlando-based firm that specializes in auto dealership family successions, was designed to set high standards.

“We expect them to be equal to or better than any other employee,” says Cox. “Just because they have the last name of Cox, that doesn't entitle them to any special privileges.”

Adds Cox: “We tell them family heritage is great. But this is still a business, and you have to operate it as a business.”

The G5 contingent, looking back, says the rigorous process was invaluable. It both prepared them for the challenges of the job and it sent a direct message to employees that succession is serious. “It's definitely not a birthright to be here, by any means,” says Kris Cox. “We all had to jump through hoops to get here and stay here.”

'Economic boom'
That's how James Pleas Cox, the first Cox to sell a car, treated it back in 1912. That Cox ran a furniture store and a Ford franchise in Ocilla, Ga., a rural town in the center of the state.

James Pleas Cox was both the family patriarch and a pioneer: He sold cars just four years after the famous Ford Model T was introduced. That was also a decade after the Olds Motor Vehicle Co., later Oldsmobile, launched one of the first mass automobile production lines in the country.

The Cox family grew the business quickly, both in Georgia, and, in the economic boom that gave way to the Roaring Twenties, in Avon Park in central Florida. The family settled in Bradenton in the late 1920s, mostly because it was close to then booming Tampa, Steve Cox says.

The Cox Motor Co. officially opened in Bradenton, on Third Avenue West, Dec. 17, 1932. (The dealership was a few blocks away from V (Five) Dollar Limit, a dry goods store run by a young entrepreneur named Robert Beall Sr. That store was a predecessor to Beall's, which is now a $1.4 billion Bradenton-based retail chain.) It cost $20 a month to rent the Cox dealership building.

James Pleas Cox ran the business with his son, James Olin Cox Sr., who took over the business from his father in 1938. James Olin Cox Sr. then worked with his son, James Olin Cox Jr., who was called J.O. Cox. He became the third generation of the family to run the business, soon after World War II.

Hand it down
The 1930s and 1940s were growth decades for the dealership. That time period was also one of some sales practices that would be rather unusual today. For instance, according to a family book, put together by Tammy Cox-Leavell in 2001, in the early 1940s the dealership would sometimes sit on a backlog of inventory that exceeded 100 cars.

“To reduce the backlog, prices would be painted on each car's windshield and reduced $5 per day until sold,” the book states. “Not only did it sell a lot of cars, it kept a painter busy most of the time.”

J.O. Cox's tenure at the company lasted about 30 years, until the early 1970s. When he was ready to retire, J.O. Cox set the Cox family succession standard.

He did that by having his sons, first Steve Cox, and later Gary Cox, buy company stock and pay him back through a loan and future earnings. J.O. Cox, says Steve Cox, treated the transaction like any other business deal: He got an appraiser and negotiated a price.

“Then, in the last minute he upped it,” Cox says, “because he hadn't factored in that the business owned the property.”

Cox ultimately bought into the business, though it took him 10 years to pay off the loan from his dad.

That tough-love approach worked for the fourth generation, which is why Steve Cox and Gary Cox utilized it for G5. The brothers still actively work in the business, however Steve Cox says a formal exit is in the near future, now that G5 has survived the succession gauntlet.

Kris Cox and his fellow cousins and siblings, meanwhile, are already thinking about G6, which so far consists of three young children. Indeed, Kris Cox and Tammy Cox-Leavell both say successful succession to the generation that follows them is a constant priority.

“I don't want to be the one not to pass the torch,” says Kris Cox. “If that happens, then I think I have failed.”