Stan Masamitsu is named Hawaii’s Dealer of the Year

This year, HADA nominates Stan Masamitsu for the 2007 Time Magazine Quality Dealer of the Year award; the nomination makes Stan our state’s Dealer of the Year.

A successful auto mall requires two things for success: 1) accessibility and 2) visibility, says Stan Masamitsu, HADA’s 2007 nominee for the Time Magazine Quality Dealer of the Year. The Central Oahu property offered us both, he adds.

A drive up Oahu’s H-2 freeway gives you a good view of the big autoplex.

Greeted in the spacious parking lot, you’re directed to a readily available spacious parking stall and you take the elevator up to the second floor to get to the Tony Group administrative offices. After a short walk through work desks filled with an enthusiastic admin staff, who all greet you with a warm smile and a hello, you soon arrive at the president’s office.

Like the other desks, Stan Masamitsu’s desk has a few stacks of paperwork, several framed family pictures, personal memorabilia, and in sports fan Stan’s case, a wall shelf containing a full-sized USC football helmet head-to-head against a UH Warriors helmet—reminiscent of the USC-UH football game played in Aloha Stadium. Stan’s a USC business school graduate, and a fan of both the Trojans and the Warriors.

It’s a small, bright, colorful, well-used office connected to his father’s office by a double door-sized opening.

“You’re sitting in my Dad’s office, he’s just turning 80 this year,” said Stan. “He comes in a couple times a week.”

The Tony Group’s four car dealerships, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen and Hyundai, occupy what amounts to 16 football fields filled with cars and buildings on Ka Uka Boulevard in Central Oahu, between Mililani and Waipio Gentry.

The move, in year 2001, has seemed to be a good one. The company grew from 250 employees in 2000...to nearly 500 employees today. New and used car inventory is 1500 vehicles...with 750 available for viewing at anytime at the auto mall’s vast display lot.

Today, the youngish-looking Stan, 37, remembers being thrust into the company president’s chair, when, pictures show that he looked even younger. “I think of myself as young today, but in those days I was really young, Stan said, with an emphasis on “really.” “It was sure helpful to have Dad’s office close by.”

At the time, Stan had only recently returned to Hawaii—after spending five years in college, including a year in the middle spent studying at Waseda University in Tokyo.

After graduation he spent two years at the company’s California dealerships at South Coast Acura in Costa Mesa and Los Gatos Honda in San Jose and a helpful stint going through the NADA Dealer Academy and two more years filling various manager positions at the Hawaii Tony Group dealerships before becoming president of Tony Group at the age of 27.

Indeed, Stan’s learning curve had to be fast-tracked, but being born into the car business certainly helped, he says. “It’s all about expanding on the legacy built by my Dad,” Stan says. And building on that legacy.

Stan’s father Tony, a Japanese-American who was born in Stockton, California, was a teenager when he and the family were packed up and sent to the Manzanar internment camp in Central Californiashortly after Pearl Harbor. “It was a time when the family lost everything,” said Stan.

Tony was later allowed to go to Los Angeles and finish high school, and after graduating, served in the U.S. Army as an interpreter late in the war and became part of the occupying force. He stayed to work in Japan afterwards. It was there that hemet his wife Norie and began selling cars as a Honda dealer in Japan, in 1967. “At the time, Honda was little more than a motorcycle company,” Stan says. Dealers didn’t inventory the vehicles; servicing was provided by the factory. The original Honda cars were very small. A Honda dealership in Japan was primarily a salesonly operation.

Stan was born in Fujisawa near Tokyo in 1969. With his father being an American citizen and his Japanese-born mother, a naturalized American citizen in Japan, Stan and his two sisters, Lilian and Janet all had American citizenship.

“I had a bad case of asthma as a kid,” says Stan, “and in a way that contributed to the family’s decision to move to Hawaii.” Japan was very smoggy in the twenty years after the war as new industries were built. The Masamitsu family had visited Hawaii several times and had loved the clean air and beauty of the islands. So, after 25 years in Japan, Tony and Norie moved their young family to Hawaii—opening Tony Honda in Waipahu in 1977. Stan was 7 years old at the time.

He recalls what he describes as the long drive out to the Waipahu dealership from the family home in Aina Haina. “Fort Weaver road then didn’t even have street lights at night, but I remember the brightly lit Skyslide being right next to the dealership,” he says with a smile. The Tony Honda dealership was on Farrington Highway, on the site of the current Aloha Kia Waipahu dealership, now owned by Bill van den Hurk.

In those days...Waipahu was considered out there and pretty far from downtown Honolulu, Stan said. It was a risk to put a dealership in. “People were, however, talking about the Second City at the
time.”

By 1991, the company had grown to six dealerships including Tony Honda and Pacific Olds/GMC/Volkswagen in Aiea, Pacific Nissan and Pacific Mazda/Subaru in Waipahu and the two dealerships in California.

“Around that time, the economy went sour, and we had all these franchises and all these stores,” said Stan. “Later we began downsizing. Those were difficult times”, he recalls. “In 1998 we closed Mazda and Subaru. The nineties were difficult times for all Hawaii dealerships”.

In 2000, we sold one of the California dealerships, and in the same year, sold the Olds/GMC franchises. Also, in the same year, the auto mall idea was born with the consolidation of three dealerships (Volkswagen, Honda, and Nissan) on a 3- acre Aiea property.

“We were always interested in the concept of auto malls.” Auto malls were popular in the mainland, where municipalities offered enticing tax breaks to lure them to their cities, but in Hawaii there were no such tax advantages.

The idea to move up to the Central Oahu plain was born in the company at the time.

“We only had three franchises, and we thought that such was the minimum to have a critical mass, so we bought 6 acres in a largely undeveloped area.” “At the time, I remember it was pretty much just Zippys that was up there. Costco was not in and there were no traffic lights.” “It took some imagination.”

Stan remembers the night of June 6, 2001 as a Field of Dreams experience. “It was the night we sold our last car on the Aiea lot and moved hundreds of cars up to the new location in Central Oahu. “You wouldn’t believe the long line of headlights coming up the road...it was just like in the movie.”

“We filled up most of the lot on Monday night and opened all three new dealerships (Tony Honda, Tony Volkswagen and Tony Nissan) on Friday, and the Tony Group Autoplex was born. Tony Hyundai was
added in November of 2004. The company sold 8,202 units in 2005.

Currently, the Tony Volkswagen, Honda, and Hyundai dealerships are #1 in sales in the state for their respective automaker categories and Tony Nissan regularly holds the #1 or #2 sales position. A car wash doing 200-300 vehicles a day was added in July of last year.

Today, the boy who grew up in Japan looking at new car brochures printed in Japanese, still speaks fluent Japanese as does wife Masumi, who was also born in Japan and who had come to California with her parents as an infant. The two met at USC. “We try to speak Japanese to the kids, (Alisa, 5, and Micah 3), said Stan.”

In June 2006, Stan was recognized by Pacific Business News with the PBN “Forty Under 40 Young Business Leader of the Year Award.”

In February of 2007, Stan will represent Hawaii in Las Vegas, where other nominees for the Time Magazine Quality Dealer Award and the rest of the nation will learn at the NADA convention who has won the national Dealer of the Year award.

Asked in the nomination form what has been one of the most rewarding parts of his career, Stan wrote, “being well positioned with a modern facility on a fee simple commercial property in a thriving area.”

“We all wish Stan luck in February,” said HADA past president Eric Fukunaga, who, among others, had nominated Stan for the award. “He’s helped build some excellent dealerships here in Hawaii, and has done a great deal for the community in the process,” said Eric.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Stan asked his nearly 500 employees to join him in raising money to help those affected by the storm. Tony Group’s Hurricane Katrina fund raiser ran from Friday September 9 to Monday September 19th. Stan offered to match $1 for every $1 contributed by the employees...and he threw in a twist. If the company achieved 100% employee participation, the Tony Group Foundation would double the contribution to $2 for every dollar contributed by the employees. At the end of 10 days, Tony group employees achieved 100% participation. Every single staff member, from hourly wage earners to senior management made individual contributions. The donations were received via payroll deductions in amounts from $1 to $500. In the end, Tony Group made donations to the American Red Cross Hawaii State Chapter totaling $45,628.

Since Stan became president of Tony Group in 1996, the Tony Group Foundation has played an active role in contribution to the education of Hawaii’s youth. As of June 24, 2006 the Foundation has awarded $37,000 in scholarships to recent public high school graduates in the central and leeward areas of Oahu.

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