Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [41]
Spencer didn’t argue. It all felt familiar to him. When he took over the business more than three decades earlier, he had walked his father, Gif, to the door and sent him off into retirement. Spencer saw the sense in letting Gabby take the reins completely. He knew he could be ornery, difficult, and set in his ways. Gabby deserved to recast the operation as she saw fit. He was actually relieved when she asked him to step aside.
“Here are the keys,” he told her. “It’s all yours. Go for it. Thank you and I love you.”
Gabby took no salary. She was there on a mission. Her goal was to get the business back into the black, and to preserve the family assets.
The business community took note of her age—just twenty-six—and her moxie. Early on, she gave an interview to the local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, about her return to Tucson and the family business. “I have a fresh eye for things, and I question why we’re doing things a certain way,” she said. “You only gain that perspective by being away from something, and then facing it head on. I have tremendous ambition, I’m enthusiastic, and I have great ideas, but I lack experience.” She admitted that some key employees had left, and that she had jettisoned certain suppliers. “They worked for my father,” she explained, “but I didn’t get the sense they were going to work for me.”
Sometimes, Gabby talked tougher than she acted. One woman in the front office had a drug problem and was routinely hostile to Gabby. People knew she needed to be fired, but Gabby couldn’t let her go. It was partly because Gabby had a heart for working women, and partly because she would try, sometimes too hard, to see the good in people. The woman eventually quit.
One of Gabby’s best business decisions was hiring Raoul to revamp the company’s antiquated computer system. Back then, in the pre-Internet days, all the stores’ computers were connected by phone line. It took Raoul hundreds of hours to modernize the place—he literally moved in and slept on the floor at night—and over time his friendship with Gabby grew.
Raoul noticed that many employees took a liking to Gabby quickly, drawn in by her friendliness and openness. Others found her to be too perky, too positive, too young. They seemed disdainful of her. They didn’t know whether they should trust her, or whether her upbeat demeanor was just an act. Gabby didn’t obsess about trying to win them over. She just continued being herself, and if her sunny disposition rubbed people the wrong way, she was OK with that. She was too busy to dwell on it.
Early in Gabby’s tenure, she wrote a thick employee manual, the first in the company’s history, so everyone would know the rules, expectations, benefits, and company philosophy. She also had children’s play tables placed in the waiting areas of all twelve El Campo stores.
In any way she could, she tried to pay special attention to female customers. “The tire industry doesn’t treat women customers the way they treat men,” she observed. Salespeople would talk down to women or take advantage of them. At El Campo, most of Gabby’s employees were men between the ages twenty and forty. Some looked like the roughest characters from a biker movie, with lots of tattoos and facial hair. Others were traditional family men who viewed the world as a patriarchal society. Gabby worked hard to change the culture within the company, reminding her workforce to treat women and men with equal respect.
She did a lot of reaching out to women, too. She bought a booth at the annual Tucson Business Women’s Expo, set up a giant display of chrome tire rims, and stood there handing out El Campo refrigerator magnets and pamphlets with car-care tips. “We’re locally owned and we’re woman-owned,” she’d tell passersby, conversing easily in both English and Spanish. “I just want you to know that we’re a friendly tire company.”
Gabby enjoyed being the face of El Campo, appearing not only in the company’s television and radio commercials, but in print advertising, too. A part of her was still