Michigan dealer survived by selling vehicles that GM wouldn't supply

DETROIT — Karl Zimmermann stood reading the terse one-page letter again and again.He was stunned. He kept waiting for the words to rearrange themselves and for the message to change.The letter, which arrived via FedEx on June 2, 2009, at the vast George Matick Chevrolet dealership, was the breakup from General Motors he didn't see coming.Zimmermann would have 18 months to close the suburban Detroit dealership he had tried several times over several years to buy from his father-in-law, George Matick Jr. Zimmermann had finally succeeded in doing so just four months earlier.The same dealership into which he had invested everything.The same dealership that Ed Peper, then head of Chevrolet, toured for nearly two hours and lauded in a 90-second video broadcast to Chevy dealers nationally in November 2008 — just days after the Detroit 3 CEOs had appeared in front of Congress, asking for the same sort of relief that had been given to banks.Zimmermann, owner-operator, recalls looking at the letter for close to two hours before his brother, Paul Zimmermann, the dealership's general sales manager, came into the office. Zimmermann handed him the letter."It could have been 30 seconds, it might have been 30 minutes. But within a pretty short time, he and I both decided, 'Well, balderdash' — not quite the word we used — 'we're not going anywhere,' " Zimmermann recalled. "We're going to fight this thing."Hours later, out to dinner and unable to eat, the two thought about their strategy. They had 10 days to appeal.Karl ZimmermannTitle then: Owner-operatorDealership: George Matick ChevroletWhere: Redford Township, Mich.Survival strategy: When GM gave him 18 months to close, he bought hundreds of new vehicles from other dealers and continued to pay his sales staff typical commissions."We realized that GM had made thousands and thousands of decisions under incredible duress and that they could not possibly make the best decisions or the right decision in all cases and this was obviously a mistake," Karl Zimmermann said. "We had a beautiful location, a huge facility. We had great customer satisfaction scores. We had a great leadership team. I had just been approved not only to buy the Chevrolet store, but we had just been approved to buy a Cadillac store."Looking back, there may have been some warning signs about Matick Chevy's position in the eyes of GM, which had to cut even deeper in light of its precarious financial position and its restructuring plans.Zimmermann had worked throughout 2008 and into 2009 to buy a Cadillac store in Detroit owned by Sonic Automotive Inc. In April, the regional head of Cadillac approved plans to co-locate the Cadillac dealership at the George Matick Chevrolet site. But a month later, Zimmermann received a call from Cadillac that the deal was off.And on June 1, 2009, the day GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Paul Zimmermann called his brother just before he was about to tee off at an annual golf outing for the Michigan Automobile Dealers Association in Lansing. Paul had gotten a call from a friend tipping him off that their dealership file had moved to the bad pile from the good pile over the weekend.While Zimmermann still doubted George Matick Chevy was on the closure list, if it was, he wondered, what would he do? Fight, he surmised."We would need to make sure we could stay in operation. And in order to stay in operation, I would need to make sure that nobody left," he recalled. "In order to keep everybody, I would need to make sure they could make money. In order to make money, I would need to make sure that we had cars to sell."Paul said he would handle selling cars and motivating the team. He told Karl to figure out how to keep the franchise.For 10 days, Zimmermann hardly slept. He said he lost 40 pounds within weeks. And while George Matick Chevy lost its appeal, a GM rep encouraged him to continue to make his case. Staff meeting

Michigan dealer survived by selling vehicles that GM wouldn't supply

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