Paul Levengood Jr. is always up for a good challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic was one of them. He used the crisis as an occasion to prepare CJ’s Tire & Auto for bigger and better things.  

“When COVID-19 hit, it was a wake-up call,” he says. “We said, ‘OK, we need to make some tough decisions.' We made the decision to furlough some employees. I said, ‘We know they can get unemployment. We know they have guaranteed income. The best thing we can do is temporarily lay them off and bring them back.’  

“The next thing we said is, ‘Health care workers, if you need your car inspected, we’ll take care of you.’ We didn’t charge for it. It wasn’t about making money. It was about helping people. 

“When you’re on a race track and you’re going into a corner, it’s not how fast you go into that corner,” says Paul. “It’s how fast you come out of the corner. I said, ‘We’re going to focus on doing things now to make this business healthy because the pandemic is going to pass and there’s going to be demand. We want to have that exit speed so we can capitalize on that turn.’ It made a huge difference in our business.” 

A more recent challenge that Paul overcame is when he realized that CJ’s Tire & Auto had “an over-ordering problem. Tier-three and tier-four tires — the imports — are gaining market share. People have been trading down a lot. Because of our membership in the Tire Alliance Groupe (TAG), we’ve forged some really good relationships with some of these importers. We kept ordering more and more.” 

Paul soon noticed that the dealership was “over-ordering for what our system could handle. What we needed, the cycle times — my calculations were wrong. We were building inventory, but it was beating the heck out of our people. Our warehouses were full. We bought all kinds of containers for overflow. It was all hands on deck. I challenged our people in a way that wasn’t required. We made those corrections and now we’re healthier and better for it.”