Perhaps it would have been easier for Rick Case to write a check and just buy the more than 100,000 bicycles that his company has worked hard to collect for needy children throughout the past 26 years.
But Case, president and CEO of the Rick Case Automotive Group, says it just wouldn’t have sent the right message.
“It’s easy for a lot of businesses to give money, but it’s hard to give time,” Case says. “When people see you doing that, that’s when you gain their respect. We do it because we believe in it, and we have a passion for helping people. … It makes us feel good, and I think it makes the people feel good, and it makes the whole community feel good about what we do.”
Case and his wife, Rita, the company’s vice president, are first and foremost in business to sell cars. But they believe the best way to draw people to their business and generate new sales is to show potential customers that they have a heart.
When people see that you value helping others, they are more likely to want to help you and feel better about being in business with you as an employee or doing business with you as a customer.
“A lot of it is one client at a time, one customer at a time, one employee at a time,” Case says. “It’s just what you do. People can talk it, but they don’t walk it. It’s what you actually do.
“It’s probably more important in the car business because a lot of people still today don’t like going to a car dealership because they don’t like the way they might get treated. Over the years I’ve been doing this, which is 45 years and we’ve been in South Florida for 23 years, we try to eliminate that through the different things that we do and the services we provide in the community.”
One of his dealerships has a clerk of court’s office to enable local citizens to pay a speeding ticket or obtain a marriage license. Some people even use Rick Case as their local voting precinct.
Case’s ongoing effort to help people has struck the right chord with both his employees and his customers. The company has 900 employees and reached $550 million in revenue for 2007.
“It’s all about showing people that you care,” Case says. “That’s something you can’t be phony about.”
