Focus on the tasks at hand
Well-known throughout the industry and the Philadelphia business community, news of Tony Martino’s death spread faster than
the Maaco public relations staff could communicate. By the time
the staff at Maaco had a chance to disseminate an official press
release and call franchisees, many already knew what had happened.
“In an effort to put some formality to it, our Maaco public
relations department put out press releases to the various
communities my father was affiliated with — most specifically, a letter to all of our franchisees,” Martino says. “We also
made sure every one of our franchisees was called personally
by our in-house staff, so that they had something more than
just an informal letter.”
With news of his father’s death spreading so rapidly, the focus
soon shifted from merely informing the community and franchisees to plotting a course for the immediate future.
Martino — who had served as vice chairman immediately prior to his father’s death — gathered Maaco’s senior management team together. In addition to giving them some personal
background on his father’s death, he wanted to set the ground
rules for moving ahead with the company.
“I wanted to assure them that the vision for Maaco and the
family’s interest in Maaco would continue,” he says. “I had
been a part of Maaco in various capacities since its inception
in 1972. I had worked with him in business for almost 40 years
total by this point. But even though there was still some comfort in the business still being run by the family, those in the
business were still pretty much in shock. They had to go
through those first few weeks knowing that we had work to do
to fulfill his vision and keep on moving forward.”
While still giving people closest to his father time and space
to grieve and recover from the initial shock of his loss, Martino
tried to focus as many people as possible on his dad’s legacy,
not his loss.
“Our focus quickly turned back to where he had been directing the company over the last few years and look for ways to
continue that or even accelerate that,” Martino says. “He put
this company on a very good course.”
Tony Martino had made a career out of starting businesses,
then leaving their long-term growth in the hands of others.
Maaco was the one business he spent decades growing.
Martino says that by the time of his father’s death, few other
executives had his ability to guide a business through the ever-changing environment of the auto care industry.
“Over the last 10 or 15 years, there have been so many significant changes in the way cars are built, in the quality of materials, quality of metals, quality of paints,” he says. “So we had
to develop an idea both from a marketing and a production
standpoint to extend our brand and what our brand meant to
consumers. At one time, it meant simply a paint job. My father
worked over the past five or six years, and we’ve been extending that brand to mean a collision repair shop specializing in
light collision damage.”
Martino says it was one of the greatest business lessons his
father had to teach: Don’t shy away from a risk and don’t be
afraid to change. With that lesson firmly embedded in
Maaco’s culture, it made the transition to new leadership easier.
“Obviously, when you have a clean break from an icon to
another individual, there are some concerns, but people understand that we are going to evolve and change as my father did,”
Martino says. “There is always going to be an evolution in
change.”
