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Larry Ferguson bought his first car--a '69 El Camino in Le Mans blue--as a sixteen-year-old living in Hood River, Oregon; he sold it soon after at a slight profit and bought another. Skip some forty-odd years ahead and the song remains the same.
Of course, he has picked up a few things in the decades between being a scraggly teenager picking strawberries in the Rasmussen orchard and starting his own company, among them two degrees--one in automotive technology, the other in automotive machinery--and too many nicknames to list. The most influential things gained, however, were an insider's perspective of the uglier sides of the industry and the experience necessary to provide an alternative.
Born in Redmond sometime between the Carter administration and the late Triassic, Larry has plied his trade in Madras, Prineville, Portland, Salem, Woodburn, Beaverton, and just about every point in between. An on-the-job apprenticeship at Campbell Auto Truck and Boat netted him two degrees, which he spun into a position at Delon Mazda-Isuzu as a Service and Parts Director; after twenty years' work across three dealerships managing various service departments he transitioned to managing sales teams--an easy switch given his teenaged sales and the fact that he'd been pulling the same cars he was now selling apart and putting them back together for several decades.
As rewarding as that all was, however, a problem had been brewing ever since he switched from the service department to the front end--the combative culture endemic to auto sales. Larry felt that there was no real reason for the "us vs. them" mindset drilled into salespeople by dealership executives; he'd amassed years of repeat clients by treating them as friends and neighbors instead of dollar signs to be wrangled into commission via submission.
Things came to a head in early 2015 when he heard two salesmen bragging--loudly--about making ten thousand in profit off of an older woman buying a car with her husband's life insurance payout. He chewed both salesmen out, quit on the spot, and within months was running his own business as a certified auto broker--no more bosses, no more guilt, and a newfound freedom to treat clients as people instead of payouts.