Easygoing approach keeps people happy
EDGEWOOD — Braden Ebbesen didn’t immediately take to the auto business, but that didn’t stop him from persevering. “I think I only sold two cars my first month,” he said. “I really, really struggled. But I can’t not succeed Anything I do, I have to win. Not win, but, but if you take the top 10 percent in something, I want to finish in the top 10 percent of people.”
Still, it took Ebbesen some time before he really got the hang of things.
“A year into it, I started finding my groove,” he said. “I was raised by engineers and scientists where there was an answer to any question. In the car world, sometimes there isn’t. But the ability I learned from having an engineer as a father gives me a different view on how things work.”
And that’s where the perseverance came into play as he’s now the finance and sales director for Rich Ford Edgewood dealership.
“I learned the easiest thing to do is to give people an easygoing experience and you can make it so much better in this industry,” Ebbesen said. “The bar is set so low, it’s so easy to blow away that bar by 1,000 percent. People are extremely happy if they go in expecting a negative experience and ending up enjoying it.”
A Manzano High School graduate who attended the University of New Mexico before taking some time off, Ebbesen said he decided to heed the advice he was giving someone else about getting a degree.
“I quit school, I didn’t get my degree and how I can tell him do something I hadn’t done,” he said. “So I went back to school and got my accounting degree.”
And he actually was offered a job elsewhere as head accountant until Dennis Snyder of Albuquerque’s Rich Ford found out and offered him a promotion to keep him.
“I wanted to be an accountant, but this ended up working out,” Ebbesen said. “Being behind a desk just didn’t make sense. I have too much talking to do sometimes.”
And being Edgewood is a homey feeling he enjoys.
“I enjoy it, it’s awesome,” he said. “The funniest thing is, the first week I started, I go over the Smith’s and I’m walking down the first aisle and two people come up to me, ‘Oh you must be Braden, the new guy.’ I hadn’t even met anybody. … I spent a lot of my childhood in South Dakota, summers, Christmas break, all that stuff and I spent a lot of time in a community where that was normal. That’s what makes Edgewood unique. You don’t know everybody but there is a feeling of caring for your neighbor up here that is the closest thing to the community in South Dakota.”