Boucher Auto Group of Greenfield, Wisconsin, has been an automotive success story in Southeastern Wisconsin since 1977. Company leaders point to the staff as a critical reason for that success, and the credo of employee empowerment is key to that course.
Gordon F. Boucher, a native of Milwaukee, founded the company 21 years after he began his automotive career in 1956 as a salesperson for a local dealership in his hometown. In 1977, Boucher opened his first Lincoln-Mercury dealership in West Allis, and today he owns and operates 18 dealerships with 15 different brands in Southeastern Wisconsin.
The dealerships are run by Boucher’s sons, Frank Boucher and Gordie Boucher Jr., and daughter Julie Boucher Sellars.
Boucher Auto Group currently employs approximately 1,200 staff members – about 1,000 full-time and 200 part-time employees – and ranks among the top 75 dealer groups in the nation, according to Automotive News. Boucher Auto Group has earned a position on Deloitte’s “Wisconsin 75” ranking, which celebrates the largest privately held companies within Wisconsin, and since 2010, satisfied employees have voted the Boucher Automotive Group among the Top 5 Workplaces in Southeastern Wisconsin, based on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Workplace Dynamics Survey.
The reason is simple, according to Boucher Automotive Group Vice President Pat Myers.
“(Boucher Automotive Group President) Frank Boucher always stresses that listening to employees is key to dealerships' success,” Myers told Mega Dealer News. “Our management credo with our employees is ‘We ride with you every mile.’ That means we always support them and we always have their backs.”
Myers said that Boucher Automotive gives its staff autonomy with customers.
“We empower our sales staff and service advisors with the authority to make decisions on the spot to help make the customer experience a positive and fruitful one,” he said. “Customers can be taken care of immediately and to their betterment. It is a win-win for the customers, who can feel that they are being listened to and their needs taken care of, creating a positive experience. It is also a positive experience for our employees who can feel trusted, backed and responsible for making that customer experience a good one.”
Taking care of its people took another form for the company during the pandemic.
“Frank Boucher made certain that we were open during the pandemic,” Myers said. “We never closed during normal office hours; we never laid anyone off; we paid all of our people and our achieved goal was to keep our employees safe and secure, keep their jobs safe and keep their income as expected. We also gave our employees additional vacation days. Doing this, we were also able to keep our customers safe and cars ready for them when they needed them.”
Regarding one pandemic issue in particular, Myers said that Boucher Automotive was able to turn potential catastrophe into a positive.
“We experienced a chip shortage, and new car inventory was low for all the nation’s dealerships, so we made certain to maintain and increase our used-car inventory, parts and service capability,” Myers said. “We invested in our infrastructure by remodeling buildings and purchasing new equipment. We invested in employee training, as well as in sales and service-advisor procedures. In this way, we invested in customer-experience procedures to make it simpler for customers and employees to conduct business."
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