Have You Met?

Lisa Schomp is a rebel with a cause. She runs a successful car dealership, takes great pride in her role as wife and mother and gives generously to the support of kids and education.

Lisa began her career in the automotive business when there weren’t any women in the business outside of office personnel. “Women were sex objects and were considered non-persons. There are still very few women in the industry and it’s still a very hard industry for women to break into.”

She took over the dealership in 1988, and has been running it for over twenty years. “It’s my career. I’ve had a wonderful time with it. I’ve had a lot of success and I’ve done a lot of things differently than most other people.” Being a female gave her a lot more freedom than men in the business. “I’ve never been “one of the guys” which makes it very lonely in business, but not being “one of the guys” gave me the freedom to be different.” Schomp Automotive was the first one to offer “One Price” and that caused a lot of controversy in the business. “The other dealers never felt it would work and thought people really liked to negotiate. It was scary for the first eighteen months but in the next year and a half our business increased eighty percent.”

Lisa has a bag full of stories about being a woman in a predominately male business environment. “I was the number one dealer for GM Oldsmobile and I walked into a regional meeting where they were doing a roundtable discussion. The head GM guy took one look at me and said, “Is there something I can do for you, honey? Are you looking for your boss? Which agency are you with?” He asked me what I was doing there. I told him I was invited to be at the meeting because of what I do. He said, “Just what is it that you do?” I told him I owned Ralph Schomp Oldsmobile. It was hysterical. You could have heard ice cracking. His only response, “Oh.” They can’t ignore me anymore. I’ve been here too long.”

Another of Lisa’s stories took place in Flint, Michigan. “I was the second girl to graduate from General Motors Institute (GMI) Dealer’s Son School. and spent six weeks in Flint. I made a bundle carrying Coors beer in my suitcase and selling it to all the guys.”

The youngest middle child in a family of six children, Lisa says she was in trouble all of the time. “My sister, the other middle child, was “little miss perfect” and got straight A’s, while I was in trouble all the time, grounded twenty-four hours a day, I couldn’t do anything right. My grades were terrible.”

Lisa tells a delightful story about the way she began her career. “When I left high school I went immediately to work, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” She went down to the City and County of Denver and took the Civil Service test and got a job as a clerk for Denver Health and Hospitals where she went to work at Denver General Hospital. She did that for a year and found that civil service was not her forte so she went to work in the restaurant industry. “I realized that I didn’t want to take orders from anybody, I wanted to work for myself and I also wanted to make a lot of money. My next question was how to accomplish my goal.” She knew her brothers and sisters had never shown any interest in the automobile business and her father had this great business and was doing quite well. Her grandfather had always talked about business to her so she put what her father did together with the stories that her grandfather had told her and said, “Well, why can’t I do that?” Her father was always concerned about her and was continually asked her what she was going to do with her life. Lisa called him one day and said, “Why don’t I come to work for you.” She laughs as she remembers, “ You never saw such a look of pain on his face. After he thought about it, he said, “Yeah, I guess you could come to work in the office.” I replied, ‘No, I don’t want to work in your office and marry your sales manager. I want to work for you and become a car dealer.’ He said he would have to think about it. I reminded him that he had told me that I could do and become whatever I wanted to, if I wanted to work hard to get there. What could he say? He told me we could try it; that I would have to start at the bottom. I started me out as a coffee greeter girl, what GM called a “mini wait server.” I walked up and down Broadway. It was my job to get donuts and coffee for the customers that were waiting in their car for service. I worked through the different departments and became a salesperson and learned what it was like to be in “no man’s land.” When you were the boss’s daughter, no one talked to you and on top of that I was a girl.”

Lisa’s twenty-one year old son, Aaron, has wanted to be a car dealer since he was four years old. He recently graduated from Northwood University in Automotive Management and will soon be the fourth generation running the Schomp dealerships.