Six months into 2026, we asked Brian Benstock how the year had gone so far. His answer captures the whole conversation that followed.
"It's been busy, it's been lousy, it's been all the above," Benstock said. "The economy is going in this direction, we got a war over here, a war over there, gas prices all over the place. I'd say it's pretty much as expected."
That's not resignation. It's the baseline he's operating from, and everything else he told us was about what he's actually doing regardless of that baseline, not waiting for it to improve.
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Culture Comes First. Strategy Fits Inside It.
Benstock now runs Paragon Honda in Queens alongside a second store in White Plains, about an hour away depending on traffic. He credits his late mentor, Paul Singer, with a lesson that took years to actually understand.
"He said it'll be more difficult for you to go from one to two stores than it will be to go from two to ten stores," Benstock said. "I didn't understand that, but I do now. It's really learning how to replicate yourself in another location."
The instinct most operators have when scaling is to try to export everything, including culture. Benstock does the opposite.
❝ The strategy is the same, and I think strategy comes after culture. That culture has to be there. ❝
His White Plains store, run by a manager named Jason, has its own distinct culture, one Benstock describes as more dynamic than Paragon's own. He doesn't try to import his culture into that location. He lets Jason's culture run the store, while the proven strategies get replicated underneath it.
The proof isn't abstract. White Plains finished first in its district for certified pre-owned business, ahead of a much larger, publicly traded competitor.
"We beat Paramus, man," Benstock said. "That's a public corporation. They got their ass kicked... and we're excited about that."
The underlying principle he named for this is worth sitting with on its own: a culture of trust.
❝ If you have a culture of trust, you can accomplish anything. ❝
New employees figure out almost immediately whether that trust exists, he said, often within their first day. Once it's broken by past leadership, it's genuinely difficult to rebuild.
