West Valley car dealer perseveres
Buzz Sands, 72, is a finalist for national award
Through General Motors’ bankruptcy in the Great Recession, the economic downturn in the early 1980s, the oil crisis in the 1970s and World War II, rows of cars and trucks have flashed their chrome grills to drivers on Grand Avenue in Glendale.
And through much of that time, Buzz Sands has come to work at his family business, Sands Chevrolet — most assuredly wearing a loud tie — to send those vehicles to new homes.
“When things were the darkest, and everybody was wringing their hands, not sure where to turn, Buzz was there, eating that slice of pizza, walking around the dealership and assuring the managers that things will get better, the sun will come up tomorrow,” said Jerry Moore, Sands Chevrolet vice president.
Moore recalled March 2009, a month when the Glendale dealership sold only 79 cars and trucks, an abysmal figure compared with the typical 350 vehicles a month six months earlier. The workforce had dwindled from 350 to 170 employees.
That same month, Sands hosted the grand opening of a Chevy dealership along the sparsely developed Loop 303 in Surprise, after having dropped about $50 million between building the new facility and revamping the old one, said Tom Patrick, a project manager for the company.
Sands remained the lone dealership along the 303 for about two years.
“It was awful,” Sands said, with a laugh. “We pretty much had to continue and cross our fingers. Those were trying times for anyone in the car business, especially a dealership out in the middle of a cornfield. We survived. Barely.”
He opened a Sands Kia dealership there in 2011.
Now, the Glendale dealership sells about 400 vehicles a month, and Sands’ two Surprise dealerships sell about 200.
Sands’ friends and colleagues say the 72-year-old doesn’t care much for the limelight, but this January he won’t have a choice. The Arizona Automobile Dealers Association nominated Sands for the 2014 Time Dealer of the Year award. He and 56 other dealers will head to New Orleans next month, where a panel from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan will choose four finalists based on region and one national Dealer of the Year.
Sands is closing in on four decades overseeing the Glendale dealership his father opened.
When he’s not traversing the globe on his days off, Sands visits the dealership floor every day, typically sharing pizza with employees on Saturdays.
“When things are tough, he’s very supportive,” Moore said. “But don’t get me wrong, when things are good, he’ll get mad about a piece of trash in the middle of the (dealer) lot.”
Lifelong friend Nelson Butler attributed Sands’ hands-on attitude to his roots, which run deep in Glendale’s history.
Sands’ grandfather, who worked in the timber industry, moved from Michigan to Flagstaff in 1899. He and his wife then moved to Glendale and bought property he would call Manistee Ranch, after their home in Michigan. They had three children, one of whom landed an opportunity to open a gas station: Buzz’s father, Louis.
His father eventually opened a small dealership at the gas station in 1935 and employed about 10 mechanics. The business mostly sold pickup trucks — “the backbone of the agricultur- al industry” — because cotton, alfalfa, corn and other crops sprawled as far as the eye could see, Sands said.
Sands was born six years later to the chagrin of his 5-yearold sister, who called him “Buzzard” instead of his given name of Louis Sands IV.
“She said, ‘ Buzzard is the worst bird in the book,’” Sands recalled. “She had a book about birds.”
At the time, GM stopped manufacturing domestic vehicles and started producing tanks and other products for World War II, so his father switched to selling flatbed trailers and bicycles until the war ended.
Buzz went to Glendale High School and drove a sluggish pickup truck, he said, because he had accrued too many speeding tickets driving a high-powered Chevrolet Impala.
“I was an aggressive driver,” Sands said. “I’d have to go in and throw myself to mercy at the old judge here in Glendale in high school and beg forgiveness.”
Sands later attended the University of Arizona for “business and partying,” joined the Army Reserves and moved back home to work at his father’s dealership in the early 1960s. He took over the business in 1975 when his dad died.
Now, he sits at a hulking desk on the second floor of the autoparts department, surrounded by enormous paintings of cowboys and Indians riding horses or farming, models of antique ships and statues of buzzards.
Moore said Sands has maintained a steady process to keep the business healthy through the years. That included making a leap during the General Motors bankruptcy. As his father did when he switched to bicycles and flatbed trailers during WWII, Sands took on a Kia franchise when Americanmade automobiles had a murky future. That was no easy step for an all-American car dealer, whose only other foray into foreign-car sales was the Yugo, a Yugoslavian vehicle that made
magazine’s list of the 50 worst vehicles of all time.
Despite the changing atmosphere, Sands maintains that selling a car today is no different from selling a car when his dad ran the company. Except, he said, for September.
Sands grins when recalling late summer, when the car companies would release their new models, and his family would hide the cars at their farm. They’d roll them all out on the same day. It was a neighborhood spectacle, he said.
“All the kids would come out and they’d all want to see what the new hot rods were,” Sands said.
But while reflecting on his past, Sands said that while he really doesn’t like the car business because of the long hours that spill over into the weekends, “he’s pretty good at it”
“I make a good living and don’t know how to do anything else,” he said with a laugh.
Sands shares much of that income with a variety of organizations and individuals.
Every year, he gives a vehicle to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Phoenix for its silent auction, along with auctioning off a week at his beach house and boat on Newport Beach, Moore said. Sands also gives out scholarships for students at Glendale High School, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University’s West campus.
He helped fund ASU West’s campus, endowed UA with $10 million for a sports facility and paid for Glendale High School’s new scoreboard.
Glendale Councilman Ian Hugh, who has known Sands for years, said he met with Sands about Glendale High’s decrepit scoreboard when Hugh was on the school board.
“I showed him the design and he goes, ‘How much is that?’ Then, he yelled out to the secretary, ‘Hey, write Ian a check,’ ” Hugh said. “That’s just Buzz Sands.”
Sands said that giving out scholarships and other assistance isn’t rooted in any deep desire to help.
“I just get talked into it. I’m an easy mark,” he said. “It keeps me impoverished. That’s why I’ve got to keep working.”