Don Hall has spent nearly five decades in and around the car business, the last several as president of the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association. He joined Paul Daly, Kyle Mountsier, and Michael Cirillo on Auto Collabs for a conversation that started with association work and ended up somewhere much more personal.
❝It's about people. It ain't about cars. Give a damn about your people, and they'll give a damn about you.❝
That line came near the end of a story Don told about a dealership mistake gone badly wrong. A customer bought a truck, drove it home, and got a call saying the dealership had pulled the wrong invoice. When he refused to bring it back, the general manager reported it stolen. The customer spent a night in jail over a deal the dealership itself had botched.
Don didn't tell that story to make anyone comfortable.
What Associations Actually Do (and Why Younger Leaders Question It)
Don was blunt about where he started. As a young general manager, he questioned why he had to pay association dues at all. It felt like something for the old guys, not for him.
📊 Don has attended every major state association gathering since the late 1980s. His dealership example in the conversation referenced 84 staff members, all sent through OEM certification programs, as a snapshot of the capital and training investment dealers carry before a single vehicle sells.
What changed his mind wasn't a single conversation. It was moving from retail into association leadership and seeing the industry from an angle he couldn't get any other way. That shift shapes how he talks about what associations are for today.
Associations don't belong to the people running them. They're owned by the dealers in the state, and their job is to protect everyone, not just ownership.
The protection extends past the owner. Don was direct: he fights just as hard for a technician or a detail person as he does for a dealer principal, because federal law bars dealers from forming unions, and trade associations exist to fill that protective role instead.
Engagement isn't optional if you're staying long term. His advice to anyone dismissing association work: read what gets sent out, pay attention to the details, and if your association genuinely isn't doing its job, get someone in there who will.
Legislators usually don't understand dealership economics at all. Don pointed out that most lawmakers assume manufacturers own the inventory on a lot. In reality, dealers pay for vehicles before they arrive, own the facilities outright, and carry the staffing and certification costs themselves.
From "Hold Gross" to "Be Tender"
Don didn't dress up his own retail past. He ran deals bell to bell, seven days a week, and built his identity around control, the front end, the back end, all of it. He called it out directly: don't be tough with customers, be tender.
That reframe came from the same shift that changed his mind about associations. Once he started hearing directly from legislators and regulators, the pattern was consistent. Nobody calls to say a car buying experience went great. The complaints are the ones that stick, and Don's argument is that the industry keeps handing critics fresh material by tolerating a mentality it should have retired a long time ago.
Want the full conversation?
Don also opens up about joining the Marine Corps as a troubled 17-year-old with no parent to sign his enlistment papers, and how it changed the direction of his life. Paul pushes him on why the industry struggles to invest in telling its own good stories, even when everyone agrees something needs to change. Watch the full episode of Auto Collabs.
Where does "tough" still show up in your own sales process when it should be "tender"?
Don's line about flipping a customer for an extra point of gross wasn't a hypothetical. It was the exact playbook he ran for years before he saw the cost of it up close. Every store has some version of that instinct still baked into training or incentive structure, whether anyone calls it that or not. The dealerships getting the benefit of the doubt from their communities and their legislators aren't the ones with the best PR. They're the ones where that instinct actually got retired.
