Driving Ahead

When Jeff Wyler opened his first Chevrolet dealership on Nov. 1, 1973, business wasn’t exactly booming.

 For four days, not a single customer walked through the door. Then someone finally did.

“I wasn't going to let that person out,” Wyler recalls with a laugh. “We sold him a car.”

 By the end of that first month, the fledgling dealership had sold 22 vehicles.

More than five decades later, that one-showroom operation has grown into the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family, with 30 franchises, 60 dealerships in more than 35 locations and multiple collision centers.

That journey from a small Chevrolet store to one of the region's most recognizable family businesses is being celebrated in 2026 as the Jeff Wyler Family is inducted into the Goering Center Family Business Hall of Fame.

 But the numbers tell only part of the story.

The more enduring lesson may be how an entrepreneur learned to build a company that could grow beyond its founder and how a family learned to have the difficult conversations necessary to prepare that company for another generation.

 Starting With $10,000 and an Entrepreneurial Bet

Wyler didn't grow up surrounded by entrepreneurs. In fact, he says he was in college before he even knew what the word meant.

“I was a freshman or a sophomore in college before I heard the word entrepreneur,” Wyler recalls. “I had never heard it before.”

His father and stepfather worked for large corporations. Owning a business wasn't part of the world he knew growing up.

But entrepreneurship would ultimately define much of his life. Wyler grew up in subsidized housing in Greenhills. In 1973, he scraped together $10,000 to open that first Chevrolet dealership.

In the beginning, being the owner meant doing virtually everything.

“You’re the daily operator and you’re there opening the door, closing the door, working in the service department, working in the sales department,” Wyler says.

 Eventually, however, an entrepreneur who wants to grow faces a different challenge. He has to stop doing everything himself.

 “As you grow, then you have to be able to entrust people to do their jobs,” Wyler says.

That transition helped turn a dealership into an enterprise.

Growing Up in the Family Business

For Jeff’s son, David Wyler, the dealership was part of childhood. His earliest memories include spending Saturdays there with his father, helping prepare for sales meetings and simply being around the employees.

 Then, as a high school senior in 1991, David sold his first car, a Chevrolet Lumina. He was hooked.

But Jeff Wyler says an important distinction helped shape the family's approach to the next generation: his children weren't expected to join the company. They wanted to.

That included David and Jeff’s son-in-law, Scott, who joined the business more than three decades ago and brought legal and finance experience to the organization. Today, David and Scott have assumed significant leadership responsibilities as the company moves into its next chapter.

For Jeff, that transition required perhaps one of the most difficult skills for any successful founder: letting go.

The Conversation Every Family Business Needs to Have

About a decade ago, the Wyler family began seriously addressing succession.

They had seen what could happen to family businesses when those conversations didn't take place early enough. So they started talking.

Not all of those discussions were comfortable.

“Some of these conversations that we had years ago, they probably weren't easy,” David says. “They probably weren't comfortable for everyone.”

But avoiding the subject would have been worse.

David credits his father with being willing to take the first step and clearly communicate with his children about what would happen in the future.

“You know, that's the one thing, being able to communicate as a family and everybody knowing their role moving forward to Gen Two or Gen Three,” he says.

It's a lesson with implications far beyond the automotive industry. Founders spend decades thinking about how to start, operate and grow businesses. Preparing those businesses to thrive without them requires a different kind of leadership. It means creating a succession plan before it's needed. It means giving the next generation genuine responsibility.

And it means having conversations about ownership, leadership and expectations while everyone is still able to participate in them.

Building More Than a Business

The Jeff Wyler story also demonstrates another way family businesses can create impact: by creating entrepreneurs themselves.

Over the years, employees who learned the business inside the Wyler organization have gone on to start companies and become automobile dealers themselves. For a man who once didn't know anyone who owned a business, that ripple effect carries special meaning.

Wyler says entrepreneurship turned out to be “a wonderful way to live your life,” and helping other people pursue that path became part of his own experience. After more than 50 years, his perspective on what he built also sounds less like a balance sheet and more like a life story.

“The fact that I’ve been able to start here 50 years ago and all the wonderful people I've met, got to do a lot of things that everybody would really want to do and been able to do it with a smile and have the support of my family.”

That’s an appropriate legacy for the Goering Center Family Business Hall of Fame.

The Jeff Wyler Automotive Family began with $10,000, one Chevrolet dealership and an owner who waited four days for his first customer. The bigger accomplishment may be that, more than half a century later, the company is preparing not for its ending, but for its next generation.

That is the difference between building a successful business and building a family business designed to last.