Hi, I’m Eddie Hall, Chief Operating Officer of the Hall Automotive Group. Welcome to the Virtual Intern Experience.

When I went to college, my initial gut was I wanted to go into family business, and then you sort of get in an environment with all business-minded students, and you know, there’s the lure of Wall Street or working in finance that seemed very intriguing. I also was in college in 2008, 2009, which we kind of know was like the automotive industry took a really bad downturn at that point. And so when I told people I was thinking about going into automotive, they thought I was crazy and really tried to talk me out of it.

I was hesitant, and that’s why I did my internships and explored public accounting, which I actually loved, but I wanted to have a backup plan. So I said, let me get my CPA license. I know that I can always have that to fall back on. But in my gut, I felt like, you know, my dad’s spent 40 years building this business. He built it to support a family, and I thought I had to give it a shot. I just thought that I had to sort of try to build upon what he had built and really wanted to work with him and grow the business even more.

I thought, I’ll give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, I had a backup plan.

It’s tough. I mean, you know, working in a family business is really challenging because as my dad started this business, things were very, very different. He talks about how, you know, he did this before there were computers, before there were batch machines. So he’s very antiquated. To give you an example, he still uses an old school flip phone. He doesn’t have an email address, none of that. So it has been challenging.

I think the way I try to honor his ideals is that he really wanted to have a business that felt like a family business. He wants our employees and our team to feel like they’re part of the team, they’re part of the family, open door policy. Our team knows us. They feel comfortable with us, and we want to do fun things and outings with them. We just want to make it, we don’t want to be too corporate. We want to make it a fun, family-friendly environment and really make our team members feel like they’re part of our family.

I try to honor that while still modernizing our practices. Customer expectations have changed tremendously. People call it the Amazon effect. They’re used to getting things pretty quickly and easily, without a lot of red tape. That’s been a big part of my job: modernizing all of our processes and making the experience more customer-friendly, more customer-centric.

It’s tough. I transitioned into leadership roles at a young age, and that was one of the things that was challenging for me—I was oftentimes the youngest leader in the company. My team has transitioned out to younger people, but when I joined in 2010, I was probably the youngest person on staff and started in a leadership role.

I’ve always been really big on credentials. That’s why I felt proud and excited to have my CPA license. I’m a big believer in not just telling people what to do, but being able to show and do it myself as well. There’s not a job outside of fixing a car mechanically at the store that I could ask somebody to do that I couldn’t do myself. I don’t have a problem jumping in and showing them that I’m not asking them to do anything that I wouldn’t do either.

People like to say, leave business at work. That doesn’t happen, right? When you’re working in a family business, there’s just no way because it’s such an important part of who you are as a family. It spills over into family life and your personal life too. But I think being clear about roles and expectations is important. The more you can have them written down is key.

I joke about when I started. I was asked about something, and I had to really work with my dad on a lot too because he’s old school. He’s a handshake kind of guy, you know, we’ll figure it out later kind of guy. Literally, when I started, I had no idea what my compensation was gonna be, what my hours were gonna be. It was just coming to, you know, you start on Tuesday, show up, turning down a job offer with a big four accounting firm, not knowing what I was walking into was difficult.

It’s worked out, but I’ve just tried to practice that—let’s have things written down, let’s have clear expectations, clear definitions, because it makes things easier for everybody.

What was very eye-opening to me about how cars have changed and how the skill set of an automotive technician has changed was during Covid and coming out of Covid. If you remember, there were major car shortages. Dealerships didn’t have cars, and most of that was because of shortages of chips. They couldn’t get microchips to produce cars. While we know how high tech the cars are, they’re essentially 2000-pound computers.

There are hundreds of microchips in every car that control everything from how the wipers work to how the blinkers work to the navigation system. Every part of the car has a different microchip that controls it. It was eye-opening to really understand how cars ran.

What was also interesting was part of the shortage happened because during Covid, consumer electronics sales skyrocketed. The same chips that we were putting in cars could be repurposed and sent to consumer electronics. A lot of the big chip producers reallocated their stock and shipments to other areas. That’s why the automotive initially lost out.

We realize that these cars are extremely high-tech, and that most of the time what the technician is fixing is more computer-based than oil-and-wrench based. The skill set is changing; it’s kind of crazy. One of the big things they’re proud of with EVs is that a lot of the things in your car can now be fixed with an over-the-air update. A technician doesn’t have to physically touch your car; they can literally send new software to the car to fix a lot of the issues.

I’m hoping that as an industry we can do a good job of letting people understand that the mechanics of the past, the world’s gonna be very different.

and it’s gonna be a much more computer technical, um, path versus oil and ranch.

Yeah, I mean, I think that internships are so important because a lot of times, I mean, you hear buzzwords or you hear even buzz majors, finance, accounting, marketing, but what does that really mean? What do you really do in those roles, right? And so I went to business school knowing I always wanted to go to business school; I didn’t know exactly what that meant or what I wanted to do within business.

I went through my first year of intro level courses and I just really happened to like my first intro to accounting course and I was good at it. And so I said, well, let’s explore this. I was able to do a couple of internships in public accounting to figure out what does an accountant do? What does this actually mean? Because there’s what’s in the textbook, but that’s not necessarily what gets done in terms of a career path and in terms of a job.

I think without having that sort of experience, it’s really tough to know what a role is, what a field is, if I think that’s why an internship is so important.

I think the first thing I look for is passion for the field or the role that they’re doing, a lot of skills and, the technical side of things, as long as you have a willingness to learn, a lot of that stuff can be taught. So I think I wanna see that somebody has an interest or a passion for what they’re gonna be doing is number one.

And then I think being a good communicator. My business is customer-facing. Most of my employees interact with customers. So just making sure they have a good set of communication skills that they can act in a professional manner and that they can communicate and work well within a team environment are the two big things. A lot of the technical stuff can be taught as long as you have a willingness and an aptitude to learn it.

I think my best advice for trying to decide what you want to do is make sure it’s something that you’re interested in. Passion is a big or a tough word, but just think about the fact that you’re gonna spend more time typically at work than you do at home, more time with coworkers than with family.

It’s important that you find something that you enjoy doing, that you’re interested in that’s gonna keep you motivated because life’s short. You gotta do something that you like. Explore, take an internship, figure out what it is that you like and that you can really have some fun with because you’re gonna spend a lot more time at work than at home, especially starting out.

So one of my roles outside of working in the dealership every day is I support our OEMs on things like boards and councils. I sit on the board, national Dealer Council, working directly with them in all their strategic planning that has anything to do with the dealer body. I kind of get a peek behind the curtains as to what they’re doing.

One of the things that’s really been surprising to me lately is they’re hiring a ton of people and recruiting a ton of people. They’re recruiting people away from Google, from all the big tech firms because they’ve gone to a more of a hybrid work environment. Not everyone has to live in Detroit anymore or in Dearborn, but they’re hiring people from all over the world.

Ford now is hiring more software engineers, more people specializing in AI and technology. I think people have the conception that working on a model means either you’re in sales or you’re a mechanic, and they kind of fit into those two boxes, but they’re really transforming these companies into tech companies.

The vast skillset of people that they’re hiring is impressive; they’ve hired the number two and three people away from Apple to transform their integrated services business. They’re hiring people to help them with autonomy in the future. There are so many more career paths within automotive than just fixing a car or being in sales or in marketing, and sometimes people aren’t aware of the scope and type of people that automotive companies are hiring.

If I could offer a piece of advice for accepting a job in a family-owned and operated business, first and foremost would be to pay attention to culture. I think that’s gonna be what helps you to succeed. Culture is probably more important and looked at more closely in a family business than in something that’s more corporate.

Culture is everything; it’s about the look, the feel, the dynamic of how we work together. It’s really important that people get along and like each other and work well together. So I think making sure that you fit into whatever culture is there is gonna be important.

Family businesses are typically slower to change in culture. Big corporations can change direction quickly, but that’s typically a lot slower in a family business. So making sure that you fit in or agree with or like the culture that’s there is something that you should really look at before cutting a role within a family business.

In terms of longevity and career path, ask those questions. If you want to know how you can succeed within a family business and what your career path is going to look like, ask. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to ask upfront. While I hope the business will always maintain family leadership at the head of the company, I’m looking to expand.

I have partners in some of the businesses that we own, and there are opportunities for people within the company to become general managers, to become partners. There’s definitely room for career growth. We talk about that when I’m hiring someone, especially at a senior level. I tell them that my plan is to continue to expand and I’m always gonna be looking for partners in that expansion. There is that opportunity.

Thank you for watching. To learn more, check out virtualinternexperience.com.