This is the first installment in a two-part series

The Baby in the Picture (Hint: It's not me.)

My father, Jim Pedler, spent the better part of five decades in the automotive aftermarket, first as a distributor, then as the owner of a small chain of independent parts stores in Salt Lake City, then as a manufacturer's rep working the Mountain states until he was ready to retire. He never set out to become a lifer in the industry. It started, like a lot of things do, with a moment of clarity that arrived disguised as something else entirely.

He was sitting at the desk of his boss at F.G. Ferre & Son, which was a well-known family-owned auto parts, racing equipment, and accessories chain based in Salt Lake. Fred Ferre Jr. pulled out a photo of his newborn, Fred Ferre III. Jim thought: If I'm still here in twenty-five years, this baby will be my boss.

"That was my epiphany," he told me, sitting across from me a few weeks ago while I channeled my inner Oprah Winfrey interview style. "When I saw that baby and realized it was F.G. Ferre and Son, and he was third or fourth in the line of succession and I'd be working for him, I realized I didn't want to work for anybody but myself." (No word on whether it was a cute baby.)

Jim was in his twenties. The year was around 1970. And the industry he was about to spend his life in looked almost nothing like the one we work in today.

"Seamy, Dark Places"

If you weren't around the business in the early 1970s, it's worth a moment to picture it. The stores were small, inventories manageable, and catalogs were made of paper. "They were these smaller stores with a sales counter ten feet behind the front door when you walked in," my dad remembered. "No retail space. They were kind of seamy, dark places. Not very appealing to go in and shop."

As a child, I would occasionally accompany my dad on business trips and can confirm that this description is accurate. I have three other memories of these 1970s jobber stores: (1) Seeing the catalog racks on the counters and thinking that counterpeople must be the smartest people on the planet if they're reading all those books; (2) If they get to read books all day, why are they so cranky?; and (3) One of these stores was next to a set of active train tracks on which I placed pennies and watched them get flattened, which is high entertainment at any age.

Around this time, Checker Auto Parts moved in and changed the aftermarket forever by opening up the front of the store and putting accessories, chemicals, and wiper blades where customers could actually touch them. Mass merchants like Skaggs Drug Centers and Grand Central were installing automotive departments the size of small warehouses. The channel was fragmenting even as it was expanding.

My dad's early career transitioned from distributor's outside salesman to the general manager of the entire automotive division for American Strevell. Strevell was a Utah-based wholesale giant that, at its peak in today's dollars, was doing over half a billion dollars a year. Unfortunately, American Strevell had borrowed heavily to acquire grocery wholesalers, then interest rates went to 14%, and Strevell filed Chapter 11. But while the grocery division tanked, the automotive division was the one that kept making money.

On the Value of Mentorship

Jim said that he learned more about business in that one Chapter 11 year than any before or since, sitting across from a pair of Harvard-educated crisis managers who knew exactly where every dollar was going. It was, he told me, the best education he never paid for. Because it was profitable, the automotive division was saved, and Jim Pedler went to work for the new owners.

When I asked him what makes a good mentor, he described his own mentor at Strevell, Dale Nelson. "He had patience," he said, "because a mentor has to teach you everything you don't know, which can be significant on a new job." Respect was the second quality: "He gave me enough leeway to make decisions and then live with the outcomes, and he didn't hover or micromanage."

I wasn't the only one shaped by watching a father navigate this industry. Darren Dellavechia, Catalog Manager for WHI Solutions, grew up with a front-row seat of his own. "Watching dad handle situations that at times appeared to be hopeless turned out to be invaluable," he told me. "Customer relationships were always salvaged whenever possible, and how to do that taught me that despite price and service being paramount, it's still pretty much all about relationships."

Going All In

My father's exit from the corporate world was, characteristically, a clever transaction he engineered himself. When the new owners of the old Strevell hard lines division turned out to include a man he found genuinely—difficult, he spent his last year there quietly preparing his exit while telling no one. (Shout-out to horrible bosses who become catalysts for life-changing career transitions.)

The mechanism for this was elegant. He was in Pocatello, Idaho, closing an underperforming store. After a week of twelve-hour days, the store had been picked clean of inventory but was full of shelving, custom graphics, catalog racks, and nut-and-bolt displays. It was a complete auto parts store with no auto parts. Weeks before, he'd spotted a For-Lease sign on a building in Salt Lake not two miles from our house. So when it came time to load everything into a semi and haul it back, he called his boss. "I've got a guy up here who's offered us five thousand dollars for the whole thing," he said. (The guy was him. He didn't mention that part.)

His boss took the deal. My dad went straight to a bank, got a blind cashier's check with no issuer's name on it, handed it over to his boss, and had the semi driven down to park behind his newly leased store location.

With $35,000 in savings and a $100,000 inventory order from a local WD, the first Parts Pedlers opened its doors sometime around 1982. "Were you nervous?" I asked him. "Very," he said. "Very, very nervous. Very sleepless."

My mother, wise in her own right, was on board with the plan after she made him promise to never borrow against the house. I was 11 or 12 years old at this time. I knew he didn't like his boss, but I was primarily concerned with our selection of breakfast cereal. Was there enough Sugar Smacks for tomorrow morning, or would I have to fight my sister for it?

He then worked the store open to close, seven days a week, for longer than he should have. My mother was a full-time hair stylist and did most of the parenting and household chores. It's one of the decisions he'd take back. "Working that much damaged my relationships with mom and with you kids," he said simply. "It was a bad idea." He had, in the way that small business owners tend to do—in a way that I understand and appreciate—a deep commitment to taking care of his family. (In his defense, we weathered that storm intact and are very close.)

Paul Arena knows something about growing up inside this industry too. "The industry was always part of my environment growing up—my dad worked at Interstate Battery, Cardone, Dorman, and now Terrepower—so I had early exposure and a real appreciation for the aftermarket. At the same time, I was intentional about building my own path and gaining experience on my own terms." (Paul and I differ in our views on nepotism in that I did drop my dad's name if I thought it would offer me a wider path to a sale or a professional relationship. I REGRET NOTHING.)

Paul continued: "After graduating in 2014 and moving to Denver, I applied to Gates for a marketing role and ultimately started in customer service on the Industrial side. Over time, I moved into the automotive side, into a Catalog Analyst role, and now support our Automotive Replacement as a Global Product Line Manager. Looking back, I'm proud that I found my own way into the industry while still benefiting from that early perspective."

The First Transition: Doing Battle With the Chains

Six years after the first Parts Pedlers opened, there were three stores and a machine shop. That machine shop turned out to be a game changer.

The machine shop came from a single question he asked himself when Checker Auto Parts, AutoZone, and Pep Boys moved into town. They weren't killing him yet, but he could feel the effects. He had to raise wages to compete and shave margins to keep customers. "I sat down and said, what can I do that they can't?"

The answer was machining. AutoZone had a machine shop, but their customers complained about long turnaround times. My dad looked at that and saw a lane wide open.

"Not only did we penetrate all those outfits that were having trouble finding machine shops to do the work," he said, "but we were getting their parts orders too. If they're going to resurface a head, we're going to sell them the belts, the radiator hoses, the hose clamps, the gasket set, everything." He paused. "And if they didn't give us the related sales, we upcharged the resurface 25%."

It was, by his own account, one of his best decisions. But the machine shop story also illustrates something larger about what the independent operator had that the chains didn't: the ability to look at a problem specific to the local market, make a decision in an afternoon, and execute it.

We know now that the chains eventually won anyway (today there is an O'Reilly store in the same spot as the machine shop). But my father was not too disappointed by this prospect. There had been a series of armed robberies of auto parts stores in the Salt Lake valley. Parts stores stayed open late, had cash on hand, and thus became targets. One evening one of my father's stores was robbed at gunpoint. When the store manager was walking to the back of the store as instructed, one of the perpetrators fired a shot just over his head. (I remember coming in to work and seeing where the bullet had hit the shelving.) That store manager quit not long after, and there were issues with the managers of the other two stores. My father swam laps for exercise most evenings and he remembers having a full-blown panic attack in the pool. When he got out, he thought, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to sell." Shortly after, Jim sold his stores to another Utah-based chain.

The number of independent jobber stores in the county has declined significantly, swallowed up by the large retailers. Those retailers were getting a lot of things right, and a few things wrong. But they were well-positioned to handle the transitions that the next few years would bring to the aftermarket.