Kerry Cardwell
General Manager Boardwalk Volkswagen Richardson

For Kerry Cardwell, achieving success with customers in the automobile marketplace means casting aside conventional car dealer wisdom. With a background in investments, he views car retailing as a process not of transactions but of long-term service relationships. Maybe that's why he has amassed nearly three decades of dealership success.

"Because I never had some of the preconceived notions of car sales, I never thought of the process as ‘selling a car,'" he says. "I always looked at it as assisting people with the second biggest purchase of their lives." 

Entering college on a football scholarship, Kerry Cardwell earned a degree in economics and finance from Texas Tech University. He parlayed his university performance into a successful career with Merrill Lynch & Co. He decided to build on that success by attending graduate school at the University of Texas at Dallas. It was while working over summer break that he discovered he had a knack for selling cars. "I made more money that one summer than my father did while raising me," he says. He never went back to grad school.

Since then he has worked in virtually every facet of the dealership business for some of the most successful and respected dealers in Dallas. "Today this business is pretty transparent because of the Internet," he says. "Everyone has access to dealer costs. What separates a dealership from the one down the street is the manner in which that dealer treats people. At Boardwalk, we instill a luxury car feel throughout the entire sales and service process--from your first pre-owned purchase at 16, to the supercar you promised yourself when you ‘made it.'"