EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Trumps and Fords and I loved it,” he
says. “That’s when I got my passion for
cars.” After working there for several
years, John felt a very strong calling to
start his own automotive dealership
operation. “At that time I would wake
up in the morning with a knot in my gut
at three o’clock in the morning,” he says.
“I had all the tests and there was
nothing wrong.”That was when he saw the upcoming
auction of a service station site. It
sparked an idea in his mind but, due tohis recent wedding and being low on
savings, he didn’t attend the sale. The
next day, after another night of feeling
that familiar knot in his stomach, he
called the selling agent hoping the site
hadn’t gone at auction. It hadn’t.“I rang them up the next day and I
made an offer that I thought they
couldn’t possibly accept,” he says. “I
slept well that night. The next morning
they rang and told me it was mine. I
had to walk up and down the main
financial street in Perth and borrowed125 per cent of the capital I needed, but
the minute I made that decision, that
knot in my gut went away. I wasn’t
destined to work for other people, and
that purchase was the start of it.”These days the John Hughes Group has
550 staff and an annual turnover of
$600 million, selling over 10,000 used
cars every year. In a remarkable
achievement, John Hughes Hyundai was
the biggest-selling Hyundai dealer in
the world for nine consecutive years.“I have raised the image generally of the
whole car industry in Western Australia
by my example,” says John. “It sounds as
though I’m sounding off, but it is the
truth. I put customer service above all
else and I have been here in the
business for sixty years — forty-seven
years in the same location. What gives
me the greatest source of satisfaction is
people buying cars from me and
walking away, driving away with a smile
on their face. That’s important.”The relationship between the John
Hughes Group and Hyundai is an
important one to both John and the car
manufacturer. His award shows his
value to Hyundai, on top of the fact that
John has not only been the biggest-
selling Hyundai dealer in Australia —
along with business partner Alan Bond,
he helped to bring the first Hyundai
cars to Australia in 1986. John Hughes
Hyundai in Perth sold the very first
Hyundai in Australia in 1986, as well as
the millionth Hyundai from the same
dealership in July of 2012.The dealer–supplier relationship is a
particularly important one — one can’t
exist without the other in the
automotive sales business.“It is important that we work together
to try to get the maximum result in
terms of customer satisfaction,” says
John. “It all comes back to teamwork