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John Holtz
Position: President, Holtz House of Vehicles
Education: B.S., business administration,Rochester Institute of Technology, 1971
Age: 58
Family: Wife, Seana; daughters, Caitlin, 19, and Kyleigh, 17
Residence: Pittsford
Interests: '50s and '60s music, golf, family, charities
Quote: "I think we've got some great staff. It's all a matter of bringing people up through the ranks. It's a matter of training. And maybe it's a matter of finding somebody at another business, auto-related, and recruiting them."
John Holtz has walked over hot coals-literally. On three separate occasions. It is a metaphor for life, he says.
"If you can walk on fire, what can't you do?" explains the 58-year-old president of Holtz House of Vehicles, whose last trekin the early 1990s-was over a 50-foot bed of hot coals on the island of Hawaii.
Indeed, since opening his first car dealership with just eight employees in 1977, Holtz House of Vehicles has succeeded in accomplishing what just a handful of area dealers has: growing significantly despite recessions and a stagnant auto market.
Holtz employs some 260 staffers at its six area locations. and sells 5,800 to 6,400 new and used vehicles annually. Holtz did not participate in the Rochester Business Journal's most recent list of auto dealerships, but the dealer would have ranked third in terms of car sales in the area.
The dealership annually posts revenues of more than $165 million, Holtz says.
In the mid-1960s, Holtzs father owned a three-story Buick dealership in downtown Rochester. The younger Holtz worked weekends and summers learning to grind valves and working on brake drums.
"I worked underneath the ramp going to the third floor in this little area nowhere near as big as this," he says, referring to the office he keeps at the dealer's Mercedes-Benz store in Henrietta. "(It was) dark and dingy. Id come home filthy."
But in retrospect, he says, the job taught him a great deal.
"It teaches you a little humility. I think it kind of developed my personality," he explains. "And it taught me respect."
As a youth Holtz wanted to be a professional baseball player when he grew up. When he realized the chances of a boy from Rochester playing with the New York Yankees were slim, he considered...