At first blush, car dealer Clay E. Cooley may seem like something of a throwback—an old-fashioned TV pitchman more akin to Oklahoma-born Cal Worthington than to a modern-day entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Like Worthington, a mega-auto dealer who became a cultural icon for his ubiquitous TV commercials, Cooley on camera is affable and folksy, recognizable for his toothy grin, custom cowboy boots, and catch phrase (“Shop me first, shop me last, either way, come see Clay!”).
The self-made, Dallas-born businessman, 54, has amassed 10 dealerships, including stores in Austin and St. Louis. His Irving-based Clay Cooley Automotive Group, which employs nearly 1,000, specializes in selling “volume cars”—those costing $20,000 or less—to a customer base that’s 40 percent Hispanic. Last year the dealerships moved 25,737 vehicles, up from 20,655 in 2014. And total sales in 2015 were $740 million.
Cooley’s success story starts and ends (so far, at least) in Dallas. When he was growing up, his cotton broker father moved the family from Big D to Lubbock. There, at age 14, Cooley began working part-time for the Skaggs Alpha Beta supermarket chain. After high school, he returned to North Texas to work for a new Alpha Beta store in Plano. But soon, “I figured out that I was in a big city—there had to be more to it,” Cooley says. “So I started selling cars.”
Beginning in the mid-1980s he toiled for local dealerships, from the legendary R.O. Evans’ store to Bankston Nissan, where he focused on used-car sales. After marrying his wife, Lisa, Cooley hooked up with a Dallas dealership owned by Gary McKinney and Glenn Polk. They “really taught me how to do business—how to do the back-end, besides just selling cars,” Cooley says. “They taught me how to make a living for my family.”
After nine years at Toyota Dallas—first as used car manager, then as general sales manager—Cooley says he took his wife’s advice: “She said, if you’re ever going to go on your own, you’d better go now.” And so he did, opening up his own “dirt lot” in 1998 at Trinity Mills Road and Interstate 35E, selling used cars that had been repossessed. His success there led to the purchase of his first new-car franchise (Isuzu, in 2001) and then to others: Daewoo, Hyundai, Buick-GMC. Since the Great Recession, when monthly sales plunged from 1,800 cars to less than 1,000, Cooley has shed some dealerships and acquired more, finally building the business back up. His nameplates, which now include Nissan, Toyota, Chevrolet, Mitsubishi, Kia, and Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/Ram, put Cooley squarely in his “volume car” sweet spot. “If I can’t do volume,” he says, “it doesn’t fit my business model.”
Although the Cooleys’ daughter, Ciara, 19, and sons Chance, 18, and Chase, 28, work at least occasionally at the dealerships—Chase, a lawyer, is full time—the veteran car salesman won’t retreat from the company he built anytime soon. “I’m not looking to spend my life on the golf course,” Cooley says. “I figured out that I like the journey better than the destination. The journey is the fun part.”
