General manager survives rocky start
Della Andersen rebuffed several recruitment efforts from Rich Ford.
But she finally succumbed to the sales pitch from President Dennis Snyder. That was 18 years ago. Now Andersen is the general manager.
“She was working for Bernalillo County and she was a customer and she had a problem with an Expedition,” Snyder recalled. “After about 15 minutes of her telling me what needed to be done with her Expedition, I asked her if maybe we could sit down and start over because it was a hostile situation. You remember the old commercial where the customer threw the tire through the window? She wanted to drive the Expedition through the window.”
Well, that didn’t come to pass, but in future dealings, Snyder came to appreciate the spark Andersen possessed and offered her a job.
“I threw out a number I felt she could make and she laughed,” he said. “But then she came back and said, ‘I hate you but I can’t stop thinking about the dollars.’”
It wasn’t exactly a smooth transition and after three months, Andersen transferred to the Edgewood store for some hands-on training in a more relaxed setting.
“You have to learn the product and be engaged in talking with the customer and you really have to know what you’re doing because at the beginning I didn’t know anything. That’s why I had to move to the East Mountains: because I couldn’t handle it.”
After a couple of years there, she returned to the main store and her career really took off, even surviving a fall from a horse that broke her hip.
“I was out two weeks and Dennis really accommodated me at that point,” Andersen said. “That’s really what made me want to come work for Dennis Snyder and Rich Ford, because there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his employees. It’s just amazing. If people need something, it didn’t matter what you needed, he would go out of his way to help.”
In this case, Snyder came up with a good idea to help his hobbled salesperson.
“As a salesperson, there was no way I could sell cars walking because I was on crutches,” she said. “He told me, ‘What I’m going to do for you is rent a golf cart.’ So I used a golf cart for about three months. And I was selling just as many cars as anybody else was.”