Magazine for the professional tire industry
Issue link: https://mtd.epubxp.com/i/567620
MTD September 2015 Tire Dealer of the Year plus it's another way to show he's invested in the people in the room. Benton calls the training center "the best thing our company has ever done." He won't say how much he's invested in it, but he sees it as an essential part of business. "If you don't train and try to stay on top of it, you'll be lef behind. You've got to continue to get beter in the feld or you'll be out of business." While Black's Tire certainly uses the center to train its own people, when vendors come in to show how best to use a piece of equipment, the dealership invites other tire dealers or technicians from repair shops to atend. "Tey support me," Benton says. "Te more you support somebody, hopefully they support you." Te BTS family Benton takes that supporting role seriously, with his customers as well as his employees. "A business is no beter than the people you surround yourself with," he says. His wife Dianne is at his side — he likes to introduce her as "the boss" — and their three sons are leading diferent segments of the business. Oldest son Rick, 42, is the company's tire buyer and vice president of purchasing and marketing. Ryan, 39, is vice president of retail sales and operations, and Jeremy, 34, is vice president of commercial sales and manufacturing. (It took a family meeting, and a fnal ruling by Dianne, to decide on each of the boys' titles. No one at Black's Tire has a title printed on a business card. Meeting one employee afer another, the question that stumped nearly every employee was, "What's your title?") Te three oldest of the couple's eight grandchildren are in high school, and those boys are working in the tire business, too. During the summer they delivered tires one day and cleaned up a weedy lot the next. Dianne says her husband expects a lot from their kids, telling them, "'You've got something to prove.' Don't ask people to do something you're not willing to do yourself." But Benton's family is much larger than his ofcial family tree. All jokes about "Carolina cousins" aside — and the people at Consumers demand options, and Ricky Benton says there's a place for Tier 1 tires as well as Tier 4 tires. "You've got to have all facets of the business. You need all price points to be successful." 32