If you find yourself in a car dealership in the Southeast, particularly in Florida, that seems locally owned but has no owner’s name on the building, keep your eyes open for a lean, 68-year-old man, 5-foot-11, dressed impeccably, perhaps carrying a briefcase so worn with age it looks to fall apart. It could be your best chance of catching sight of the ever elusive, rarely spotted Terry Taylor, the publicity-shy Palm Beach man who’s the nation’s largest private owner of automotive dealerships.

Taylor — no surprise — declined an interview for this article. One of his attorneys, in a court hearing last year, said, “he’s a very private man. There was just a recent article in Automotive News about his enigmatic nature.”

You won’t see Taylor’s name on his dealerships. He’s so private that he fights in court to keep secret the most fundamental piece of information about him: Just how many auto dealerships he owns.

What is known about Taylor is that selling cars is the family line. His late father, Warren Taylor, was an Ohio native who joined the Marines at 18 and lived large. He for a time held a long-distance water-skiing record and piloted planes until he was 80. His travels took him through West Virginia, where Terry was born in 1951, and to Daytona Beach in the 1960s, where he owned a Ford dealership. Terry Taylor worked with his father there and then in Southeast Florida with the late Roger Dean before returning to Daytona Beach and opening a used-car lot.

“He started small, and the rest is history,” says Daytona auto dealer and former Mayor Glenn Ritchey Sr., who met Terry Taylor 50 years ago. “He’s one of the most laser-focused individuals I’ve ever known.”

By 1990, Taylor had six dealerships around Daytona and much larger ambitions. Auto retailing appeared, then as now, ripe for consolidation. In the 1990s, as Fort Lauderdale tycoon H. Wayne Huizenga led a wave of dealership purchases and built AutoNation into the nation’s largest auto retailer and one of Florida’s largest companies, Taylor — in obscurity — acquired dealerships in dribs and drabs.

By 2001, Taylor had 18 dealerships in the Southeast U.S. By 2006, when he bought several dealerships from Florida auto dealer, later congressman, Vern Buchanan, he had “about 40” in seven states in the Southeast and Colorado, according to a standard transaction listing in Automotive News. By 2014, one of his executives was quoted as saying the number had reached 90. By 2016, Automotive News put the number of Taylor dealerships at around 100, with 43 in Florida. He has dealerships on the Gulf Coast from Naples northward and on the east from South Florida to Jacksonville.

Taylor hasn’t been any more forthcoming with the industry’s news bible than with others. He cooperates neither with Automotive News’s fact-gathering for its annual list of the largest dealers by sales, nor with Trend’s fact-gathering for its Top 350 Companies list, and so doesn’t appear on either. In a 2016 piece, Automotive News pegged his number of dealerships at 115. He is easily the largest private dealer in the nation and among the top five of any dealer type. If he has between 100 and 200 dealerships, the annual revenue of his holdings could be anywhere from $10 billion to nearly $20 billion. At $10 billion in annual revenue, his company would rank among the top 10 private firms in Florida.

The bigger Taylor has grown, the more reticent he has become. Automotive Management Services, the company he runs that manages services, including advertising, for his separately owned dealerships, employs 200 in West Palm Beach, but business group executives say they’ve never met him, nor is he active in their organizations.

One of his partners in dealerships in Charlotte, N.C. is race car team owner Felix Sabates, part-owner of the NBA Charlotte Hornets and a Cuban-immigrant entrepreneur. Sabates says that in the decades he’s known Taylor, “I have yet to see a person come over to him and say, ‘Are you Terry Taylor?’ He doesn’t want me to introduce him. He’s allergic to pictures.”

Taylor can’t escape notice entirely. In 1996, he married 1993’s Miss Florida USA, Daytona’s Cynthia Elise Redding. It was his third marriage, according to public records. Another publicity blip came when he took to buying and flipping super-yachts, which led to coverage in 2007 in the Wall Street Journal, even though he wouldn’t be interviewed about his five yacht purchases and sales. A database of super-yacht ownership says he currently owns the 198-foot Mia Elise II, a seven-cabin yacht worth $50 million that was built for a Russian businessman. The same database says he owns a $35-million Gulfstream jet.

In 2009, he and Cynthia, then living on South Ocean in Manalapan, the barrier island community of the super-rich south of better-known Palm Beach, sued the owner of a parcel adjoining their oceanfront estate over a “mountain of dirt” that accumulated there as part of construction. The Taylors, parents of two, relocated to Palm Beach itself to Addison Mizner’s Casa Nana, an oceanview estate with 16,269 square feet of air-conditioned space, Venetian loggias and a 16th-century fireplace the King of France commissioned for his mistress. They paid $22.2 million to Home Shopping Network founder Lowell “Bud” Paxson for Casa Nana.

In 2010, the couple won permission from the Town of Palm Beach to close its main oceanfront road for a few days so they could build a private pedestrian tunnel to the beach. The annual property tax bill for the estate alone is $454,000.

In Aspen, Colo., they bought a home valued at $13.7 million by the local government appraiser. In 2017, Taylor bought the $25-million penthouse at the Porsche Design Tower, a Sunny Isles Beach development where he acquired not only the five-bedroom unit with two outdoor kitchens but also a sky garage with private elevators that hoist vehicles to his unit.

The Taylors and his local dealerships are philanthropic. He and Cynthia were inducted into the Boys & Girls Club of Broward County’s Admirals Club for those who donate $50,000 a year, and to the Dream Makers Society for million-dollar donors. The few times Taylor has been photographed have come at club events such as its yacht-rendezvous fundraiser. The research laboratories at the University of Miami’s Schiff Center for Liver Diseases are named for Taylor and Cynthia, who died at their Aspen home late last year after an illness. She was 44.

Taylor’s M.O.

In some ways, Taylor’s approach to his dealerships is conventional. He believes in high-quality facilities and service and, as a Nissan executive told Automotive News, Taylor’s dealership employees are “top-notch.” When he buys a dealership, Taylor retains ownership of the real estate. If the dealership is well run, Taylor typically makes its general manager his minority partner in the business — with a 20% to 25% stake that he finances.

Taylor brings in revenue two ways: From his share of the dealership, and from the service charges and rent the dealerships pay him and his other companies in West Palm Beach. He wants the dealerships to feel locally owned but generally doesn’t let anyone’s name go over the door.

General managers get autonomy but must keep him informed. Taylor, who carries current financials in his briefcase, “knows what every store is doing every day,” Sabates says. “Terry might be one of the smartest people I ever met when it comes to numbers. He’s got a memory like a frickin’ elephant.” Sabates tells the story of discussing plans to renovate a dealership building with Taylor, with Taylor instantly recalling exactly how many doors the building had.

On two occasions, Taylor has wound up in court with his minority partners, cases that shed some light on his deal structure.

In one case, involving a Ford Lincoln dealership Taylor owned in Cookeville, Tenn., the dealership’s former general manager, Michael Petrello, says he turned the operation from a moneyloser to profitability and from 70 sales a month to 220. Taylor lent him $980,614 in 2014 to buy a 20% stake in the dealership, then later sacked him — Taylor says for performance, Petrello says after a fight about employee pay.

Petrello didn’t return the stock, according to court records, and alleged that Taylor funneled money from the dealership to his own company to profit himself and to lower the dealership’s value — and the value of Petrello’s shares.

For the years in question, Petrello said, the dealership paid inflated fees of $35,000 a month to Taylor’s Automotive Management in West Palm Beach, $15,000 to another Taylor company and $30,000 a month in inflated rent — $4.3 million over the years. In addition, the suit claimed, Petrello had to use Taylor’s finance and insurance company, West Palm Beach-based Total Warranty Services. Petrello claimed Taylor has a pattern of forcing out GMs at artificially deflated prices. The case settled last year, with terms undisclosed.

As that case unfolded in court, Taylor’s attorney, Hal Litchford of Baker Donelson, fought to keep secret exactly how many dealerships Taylor owns, saying Taylor viewed that information as “highly proprietary.”

With automotive experts predicting further consolidation in the industry, Taylor may acquire even more dealerships. According to Kerrigan Advisors, the nation had some 40,000 dealership owners in the 1930s; in the 2010s, the number of third-generation owners was down to 8,000. Publicly held companies own just 8% of the nation’s dealerships, and the rest of the 150 largest dealers own only another 14%. The remainder of dealerships are owned by small groups and families.

Owning a dealership has become increasingly expensive, which will force some dealers to assess whether they want to persevere or cash out, says Cliff Banks, publisher of industry newsletter the Banks Report. The industry is cyclical, and “the margin on new cars has become razor thin, if not below that,” Banks says.

The ranks of consolidators include public giants like AutoNation, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, George Soros, private equity firms, high-networth individuals and family offices of the likes of Michael Dell.

Taylor without doubt is closer to the end of his career than the beginning — though his father lived to 91 — and he’s not talking about his plans. Sabates says a private equity firm with deep pockets asked him to set up a meeting with Taylor to discuss a sale. “He wouldn’t even listen to a number,” Sabates says. His prediction: If Taylor ever sells, it will be to his partners.

Another prediction: “If you meet him, he would be a charmer.”

 

Read more in Florida Trend's July issue.

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