Listen to the interview here!
Eric Savage
Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece. Welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living Magazine. Today I have Eric Savage with me. Hey, Eric, welcome to the Project!
Eric Savage: Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.
Toni: Great. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Eric.
Eric: I’m your friendly neighborhood car dealer up in Hamburg, Pennsylvania with Freedom Auto Group. I’m married 20 years this year, and I’ve got two amazing kids, and I’ve lived in Berks County my entire life. I’m involved in a number of community projects with the Olivet Boys and Girls Club and the Mental Health Alliance of Reading and Berks County. I’ve been involved with the John Paul II Center for special learning, and a variety of other causes.
Toni: Thank you for showing up for the Project today. Let’s go into the first question. What does inspiration mean to you?
Eric: This is just kind of a funny thing, but I think back to when I was in college. What most people don’t know about me is that I was a biology major in college, which obviously has a very close correlation with my career choice. I remember I was a biology major, and I went into biology class. There’s a technical term for breathing in biology. Breathing is ‘respiration’ of course. The first half of respiration is when you inhale, and that’s actually called ‘inspiring’ or ‘inspiration.’ It’s actually the technical term. The biological term for breathing is inspiration. I remember the professor standing in front of the room, and this is a Biology 101 class somewhere midway through the first semester. He said, “The most basic of all human acts is inspiration.” You think about it, from a biological sense he’s absolutely correct. It’s autonomic and it’s just something that happens, and it’s what you do. He meant nothing by it other than what it sounds like. Breathing in is the most basic of all functions. I was also a theater minor. Now you can see why I’m a car dealer, because I was a theater minor.
Toni: Absolutely.
Eric: I remember it was the same semester, and I was in an improv class, which was fantastic. I had this really ethereal, artsy kind of teacher in the class. You can imagine what I’m talking about. He was like a beatnik. Anyway, he said the first day of class, I kid you not, “Inspiration is the most basic human function.” I thought it was so ironic that two people from opposite ends of the spectrum were saying the same thing – meaning different things by them, but they said the exact same thing. Truly, inspiration and inspiring people and becoming inspired is the most basic of all human acts as much as breathing is. I think that’s a necessity for us as humans is that we need to be inspired and we need to inspire others. It’s the most basic act that we have. I think that many people live a life where they avoid being inspired, because they’re afraid of what they’re going to do with that inspirational energy. They don’t know what the output could look like or what the reaction to that could look like, and so they might turn themselves off from it. Other people have the desire to inspire others, but they’re afraid to try for fear of failure. In the end, I think it is our basic calling as sentient beings, that we breath, and therefore, we inspire.
Toni: It almost sounds to me like it’s a responsibility. It’s a responsibility that we have.
Eric: Yes; it’s a responsibility, Toni, absolutely – but more than that, it’s innate. It’s built in us. It is part of who we are by design, and that’s just the way our brains function is to look for the opportunity to inspire and be inspired. It’s a two-sided coin. There’s nobody who’s inspirational who isn’t someone who gets inspired by others, right? I think that every inspirational leader are themselves people who are inspired by others, and so this is all symbiotic.
Toni: So what does it feel like? What does inspiration feel like to you?
Eric: If I were to talk just in terms of tactile feelings and emotions, it’s that low tingling in my gut that tells me, “I’m on to something here,” or, “I can do something with this,” or, “I feel capable of something that I didn’t feel capable of yesterday,” and that, “Oh, I’d forgotten to look in this dark corner of myself and look what I found – this unbelievable gem, and now I have to do something with it.” It’s that energy, that butterfly that says, “There’s something good I can do here, something meaningful and valuable.” That’s the most tactile representation I can give.
Toni: It’s like a discovery.
Eric: Completely, yes.
Toni: So how do you put that magic, that discovery when you feel it, into practice here in Berks County?
Eric: The locale question is interesting to me in the sense that at least for me, I don’t think it would matter if I were here or in Asia, Africa, or on the moon – I would put it into practice because that’s part of who I am. I think the answer to how I put it into practice is really trying to understand fundamentally what my role is in the world. Of course, this is a question that I think that most people ask at some point in their lives, and I try to ask myself daily – “What am I here for? What am I supposed to be doing with my time and my effort and my resources, my energy? What am I supposed to be doing?” The answer always comes back to me in just this simple form. People first. That’s always the answer. When it comes to getting inspirational energy, what do I do with this energy? How do I transfer it to allow me to make people first and to change the lives of others? I’ll just move over to the business side real quick. We’ve got four car dealerships in two locations – Hamburg and in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We have 220 employees. We sell a lot of cars and do a lot of service work. People often ask me, “What is your mission? What is your goal? What’s your business really about?” Business for the sake of business seems to be a pretty hollow existence. Business for the sake of profitability seems a very hollow existence. Business with purpose is really what I’m interested in. We believe that we are in the life improvement business. Our primary function is to improve people’s lives. Certainly we can do that by selling cars in a great way and helping people get their vehicles serviced and helping them with the parts they need and all that. It’s the easiest manifestation of life improvement business for us is just by doing our jobs well – but it’s more than that. Life improvement business means that we improve the lives of our associates, not just by giving them a paycheck, but by giving them a real great place to work, and a place where it’s meaningful to work where there’s value in the efforts they bring. Finally and probably most significantly is that life improvement business means that we extend that effort to the community with zero expectation of return. Businesses always talk about return on investment – we invest in the community zero expectation of return on that investment. I’m not just talking about sponsoring things or putting your name on the little league shirt and things of that nature – that’s all there, but it’s more than that. It’s more about how our dollars, how our energy, how our thoughts and input and feedback, how the leverage we can create for agencies can actually improve the lives of others. That’s what we see happening. For example, our employees embark in a program every year. It’s their own project where they endeavor to help families who are really down on their luck and having a hard time around the holidays. They put together a gigantic, mammoth basket of stuff; a big box actually. They are huge cardboard boxes filled with about a week’s worth of food, presents for the kids, everything you can imagine. Literally staples for the kitchen to Christmas trees for people. You name it. They extend this out to the community to the most needy families that we can find. We partner with social agencies to help find the families, and they go about and do this. They’re like a bunch of busy little elves. You should see them. It’s amazing. They love doing this. They love helping these families. I’m going to tell you that in the Hamburg area alone, in that dealership environment alone since 2006 when we began doing this when we became Freedom, we have touched over 2,500 people with this program. It’s all funded by them and me. I buy a certain amount of food, they buy the rest, and they buy clothing for people, Christmas trees, presents, and you name it. This is what life improvement business is all about. We take the energy we have in our business. We take our energy, our beliefs, our thoughts, our abilities, and we apply them to find people whose lives could use some improvement.
Toni: You’re putting the inspiration into practice by the employees inspire you, you are inspired to move forward into the community and help the community, and the community is probably inspired by what you’re doing. There’s a whole ripple effect of paying it forward that I would imagine is happening just on the life improvement side of your business, correct?
Eric: Completely. The sense in our dealership, I would like to believe, is that if you walked into a Freedom dealership today and said, “What business are you in?” that our associates who understand us and know us well would say, “We’re in the life improvement business.” They would not say, “We’re in the car business. We’re in the service business.” They would say, “We’re in the life improvement business.” That’s what we believe. We exemplify that in the ways I mentioned.You talk about the inspiration piece, and this is where it just gets so interesting in how it toggles back and forth between inspirer and inspiree, and the roles keep shifting. I came with the idea for what we call our Holiday Helpers program to my associates back in 2006. The first year we did six families in the Hamburg store, and we were so impressed with ourselves, and they were very excited about having helped six families. It was pretty cool. We set a goal for the next year to go up to 15. It’s a bigger task than it sounds. Just moving to 15 families was going to be a big task. We ended up doing 44. The year after that, we set the goal at 50 – we ended up doing 88. Now routinely out of the Hamburg store alone, we’re doing 120 families a year. That’s a big task.
Toni: Yes, it is.
Eric: My vision was never, ever for 120 families out of Hamburg. I couldn’t see that. That’s what’s so cool, is that I may have brought the original vision, but my associates came back to me and said, “We think it could be even bigger and better than that.” They just took it further. I’m inspired by them. I guess I inspired them to do it, and then they inspired me to see that it could be bigger. It’s just amazing how that can work.
Toni: They took an idea that you discovered and they blew it up. There was a discovery of inspiration that has absolutely blown up all over Hamburg, right?
Eric: Pretty much. Absolutely.
Toni: Who in Berks County inspires you?
Eric: Wow – lots of people. There’s the standard I think set of people that’s probably about 100 people deep that we could mention. Tammy White from United Way or Chris Carreras or Albert Boscov of course. People like that are just extraordinary. Sue Perrotty. Lots of community leaders like that. But my greatest inspirations always come from more humble backgrounds; they are the ones that really get me going. Here’s an example. A number of years back at the Olivet Boys and Girls Club there was a Youth of the Year winner, Liz Torres, a great young lady who lived in the middle of Reading and had some challenging life circumstances, and really wanted to better herself. She got into college and was going to Clarion. She was struggling because she had a specific need for transportation. I got connected with her through Meggan Kerber, who was at the time at the Olivet Boys and Girls Club, and she sat me down with Liz. Liz told me her story, and we sat and we had such a good time talking to each other that I developed a custom automotive scholarship program for her. Basically, I gave her a car as long as she maintained good grades. She was so inspiring to me. This young lady was so inspiring to me in saying, “I want to be better than what my circumstances want to limit me to. I want to be an example to the community, and I want to be an example to the family and to my nieces, my nephews about what someone can become when they put themselves to it.” I don’t know about you, but you see a 20-year-old young woman telling me that and it’s, “I’ll give you the world to help you.” We put together a deal. I said, “Let’s pick out a car.” I gave her the car and I said, “I will pay your payment for you every month provided you keep a 3.0 in college.” She did. What’s really cool is she’s now in graduate school. I said I’d keep the deal as long as she maintains her grades. The car is almost paid for. She’s going to have the car literally for free. She’s doing a great job, and it’s been very inspiring. Another example might be we do an internship program with the John Paul II Center for Special Learning where we take special needs kids, we bring them into the dealership environment and have them help out. This is pretty cool. We brought these kids in, and we brought them in with the spirit of sacrifice, that it was going to take some effort to figure out how to integrate them into our daily work routines, and finding the appropriate work for them to do and how they could do meaningful work, and yet not really take anyone’s job away, what have you. We thought it was going to be complicated and challenging. It was the spirit of giving. We were all into it, but recognizing it was going to be a task. Boy, were we wrong. This thing has paid back 20:1. It’s just been amazing how much beauty, love, and strength has been brought to our dealership because of it. One young man particularly, Austin Adam, graduated from John Paul II in June and we hired him as an actual employee this year. He works for us now on a part-time basis. We love Austin. This is where inspiration really comes from. I have an employee who’s an older gentleman. I was asking him about how the interns from John Paul II were working out, and how he was relating to Austin specifically who was our intern last year before he graduated. He said, “Well you know, I’m really uncomfortable with it. I don’t know how to relate to kids with special needs. It feels very awkward and stunted to me, and I don’t know how to manage this.” Okay, I can understand how that can happen, and especially generationally I think it’s different. We talked about that a little bit and I just said, “If Austin was not special needs, if he was just a new hire and he was walking down the hallway, what would you do?” He said, “Well, I’d say hi.” I said, “That’s a great place to start.” The best part is, within two weeks, these guys were fist bumping each other down the hallway and eating lunch together. Austin now makes his rounds – he has a little cart that he delivers boxes and mailings that we get in the building. He delivers them around the different departments. He goes in and he sits down with this same man who was awkward about managing time with him, and will chat with him and talk with him, and they have great conversations. It’s amazing what can happen. To me, that’s an explosion of inspiration right there.
Toni: And types of people that inspire you. So Eric, what would you like your legacy to be?
Eric: Other than being extraordinarily handsome, the second choice would be that “people first” would be the response. Toni, you’ve been to my office. I have walls that I can write on.
Toni: Which I love!
Eric: I keep above my door to my office the words, “People First” because it’s very easy for me to get consumed by an activity that is on my desk or in my computer. People often will saunter by my door to see if I’m going to notice them, and those words up there are a reminder to me to say that the thing on the desk can wait, the thing on the computer can wait, the phone can wait, but people can't. When I see a person, it’s people first. People first above everything else. That’s what I really would want to be remembered for is that I chose people first.
Toni: Thank you very much for working your legacy and your living legacy, and that’s what’s it all about. Thank you so much again for showing up for the Get Inspired! Project. We’ll talk to you soon.
Eric: Thanks, Toni.
