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Shawn Vaughan
-- AGE: 37
-- POSITION: COO, VBM Auto Group, Boerne, Texas
-- ACHIEVEMENT: Increased net profit 75 percent in three years at Toyota store and took Nissan store from a $250,000 loss to a net profit of $1.4 million in his second year of running it
Shawn Vaughan picked quite the time to enter the auto industry: August 2008. The U.S. auto industry was already in a steep dive. Weeks later, the collapse of Lehman Brothers would send the global economy into free fall.
Vaughan had just left a comfortable job as the creative director of a Louisiana advertising agency to return to his family's dealership as a sales manager at Toyota of Boerne (Texas).
"I didn't know any of the language," Vaughan recalled....