A Cadillac dealership in central Ireland has grown into a major brand, employing tens of thousands of people and generating millions of dollars in annual sales.
Its owners are now planning a $50m expansion, which will be completed by 2025.
Its owner, Carl T. Coleman, said the dealership has been a “huge success” for him.
“The company has become a success, we’ve been able to grow the business.
It’s been a great success,” Mr Coleman said.”
I’d like to be able to buy another Cadillac at some point, but I’m happy to be here.”
We’ve got a lot of money in our pockets.
The money we’ve got has helped the company.
We’re going to get on with it.
“Mr Coleman and his partner, James McNamara, have owned the Cadillac dealership for the last 17 years.
Mr McNamara said the business had been “a little bit lucky” to be doing what it was doing.”
It’s not as if we didn’t have the money.
We were able to take advantage of some of the favourable weather conditions and make money,” Mr McNamara told the Irish Independent.”
There’s a lot going on, but we have a very happy relationship with our business partner.
“Mr McNamar said he was confident that he could manage the expansion well, but would not go into details.”
If we were going to go to the market and we were selling cars, we wouldn’t be doing anything that we couldn’t do ourselves.
“When you have a big company like Cadillac, there’s no question that you can’t do everything yourself, so we’ve just been able, through the process of building the business, to take our time to do things well and manage it,” he said.
The dealership opened in April last year and it now employs more than 40 people.
Its main sales centre is located in Co Galway in Co Cork.
Its current owner, Paul Kavanagh, said his family had been a regular visitor to the dealership.
“My father was in the dealership for many years, and he was very proud of the place,” he told the newspaper.
“He was also very pleased to see the sales people, they did an outstanding job.”
All of our salespeople have been very loyal to us.
“Mr Kavanagha said the owners had invested heavily in the development of the business and had worked hard to keep it going.”
Everything has been done very well.
We’ve put in the time, we’re in a good place financially,” he added.”
In terms of building, we have the building in place and the facilities in place, we are very well-placed.
“Cadillacs have been around for a long time.
It wasn’t a long-term thing.
It was a quick-fix business.”
That was the only thing we had going for us.