A Road to Success

In years past, automobiles were distinctive. Each model made a statement about itself and its owner. Today, many cars tend to look similar. The handful of exceptions include the Mini Cooper, PT Cruiser, VW Beetle, Bentley, Porsche and, of course, the Corvette.

Since first introduced in 1953 by legendary designer Harley J. Earl (1893-1969), about 1.25 million Corvettes have been built, and more than 1 million are still on the road.

Every year in late August more than 5,000 of these sleek muscle cars converge on the Carlisle, Pa., fairgrounds to be bought, sold, swapped and ogled by 60,000 enthusiasts, while more than 1,500 vendors from all over the country set up shop to peddle their Vette-related wares.

Smack in the middle of this happy mayhem, in the large white Mid America Motorworks tent, presides a former tool and die maker named Mike Yager. During the show, he gives away 2,500 T-shirts and hats to attendees and exchanges good humored barbs and rapid-fire repartee with any and all who happen by. And he seems to know just about everybody who happens by.

At age 20, Yager bought a 1967 Corvette and was hooked for life. In 1974, with no experience and no business plan, he sweet-talked a banker out of $500 to buy a few owner’s manuals, 500 patches and some Corvette T-shirts that he intended to sell at local club events and swap meets. “I had no idea what 500 patches looked like,” he says, “and I vowed to myself that if I ever sell all of these, I will never buy this many again.”

Today, as owner of the premier catalog of Corvette parts and lifestyle enhancements, he ships more than 1 million automotive parts and accessories a year. At his Effingham, Ill., corporate headquarters (about 100 miles from St. Louis) he has 47,000 SKUs, a six-figure customer base, 175 employees, 50 classic Corvettes and a peripatetic travel schedule that is greatly eased by his private BeechJet 400A and three full-time pilots in his employ.

Out of the Office

For Mike Yager, the Carlisle Corvette bash is his annual coming-out party — a chance to connect with hundreds of customers and myriad friends from all over the world whom he has helped pursue their passion for 30 years. They range from CEOs of major corporations, show biz car collectors and federal officials, to folks struggling to pay their bills and put their kids through college.

“Get that piece of junk outta here!” he bellows like a foghorn at a middle-aged man who has parked an SUV and is ambling over. Yager leaps to his feet and rushes over to give the guy a bear hug. Behind the SUV is a covered trailer containing a $500,000 racing Corvette to be gently unloaded and pushed into the display tent across the road alongside two dozen authentic works of automotive art, many with dizzying paint jobs and chrome that gleams like polished sterling silver.

The gregarious Yager returns from his encounter and plops down on a folding chair where he takes a swig of water. “I hug everybody,” he says. “What’s more, I sign all my communications with ‘Hugs.’ And you know what? I get ‘hugs’ back all the time.”

Suddenly the air is shattered by the deep, guttural roar of an engine so loud it makes a Harley-Davidson with straight pipes sound like the electric clock of a Rolls-Royce. Mike and Laurie Yager’s 1968 C3 (third generation) L-88 Corvette that once competed at Le Mans has been fired up for a short drive to the display of historic racing models. All conversation stops until the mind-numbing thunder recedes into the distance. “I turned down an offer of $2 million for that car,” Yager says with obvious relish. “It’s part of the collection in my museum.”

The Early Years

From patches, manuals and T-shirts, Yager expanded his inventory to include Corvette jackets, jewelry and drinking glasses. Calling his fledgling company Mid America Enterprises, he created his first sales flier by cutting and pasting images himself, and using primitive equipment for the copying.

In 1976, he printed 2,000 eight-page catalogs. In 1978 he moved to a tabloid format, and finally went from a black-and-white catalog to color in 1980.

This was seat-of-the-pants marketing by a high school graduate from the boonies who opted not to go to college, but rather spend six years as an apprentice tool and die maker and three more years as a journeyman. He assembled a prospect list by attending Corvette shows and mooching names from local clubs. For the first six years he never tracked responses.

Finally in 1982, Yager got serious and engaged an Evanston, Ill., catalog consultant who got him to use the same tracking and coding software employed by other catalogers. For the first time he could go back into his database and analyze recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) value. He could send more catalogs to his best customers and generate more orders. As a result, many original customers from the early 1980s happily are buying merchandise from Mid America Motorworks a quarter century later.

The Curious Universe

In many cases, Corvette aficionados are sporadic owners. They’ll buy their first Vettes while in their 20s, only to get married and be faced with expenses such as mortgages and children needing cars with back seats. So the beloved Corvette will go into storage for a decade or two — or perhaps be sold to help pay bills. After the kids are out of school, the long-quashed passion for Vettes resurfaces.

From 1953 to early 2004, General Motors produced five Corvette models, C1 through C5. The C6 model, with a top speed of 186 mph, arrived in late 2004 as a 2005 model. It would be marketing madness to send a catalog offering parts for the engine, exhaust, brakes and interior decor of a 2004 Corvette to the owner of the 1958 C1 model, especially when Yager knows precisely which car each of his customers drives.

Instead, the company offers the market three separate catalogs:
1953-82 — classics;
1984-96 — C4; and
1997-2004 — C5.

Many of the pages are the same, especially those offering Vette-related lifestyle items such as clothing, jewelry, wallets, patches, golf balls, limited-edition art, luggage, bath towels and Corvette-shaped cookies that can be described as animal crackers for grown-ups.

The catalogs are printed by Quad/Graphics; each edition is about 250 pages and mailed six to 12 times a year, depending on the purchasing habits of the customer. Because the books are so comprehensive, customers hang onto them for reference. “After 52 weeks, our catalogs still have a significant tail,” says Yager. “We get a lot of orders a year later.”

What do Corvette owners buy from Yager? Mid America Motorworks customers put 78 percent of their purchases on the car and the remaining 22 percent on themselves, Yager says. While a tiny percentage of Mid America Motorworks’ orders are from repair shops, the lion’s share of customers are serious, do-it-yourselfers who love working on their cars.

“I don’t pretend to know whether a customer is a Sunday driver or a race driver,” Yager says. “My job is to help each owner enjoy his or her car in their own way. As I tell people, I’m not in the catalog business, and I’m not in the automotive aftermarket business. I’m in the entertainment business.” In fact, each catalog is titled, “Corvette Entertainment,” and his corporate slogan fits all comers: “Pursue your passion for Corvette here.”

Getting the Word Out

Since the beginning, Yager has placed small corporate ads in magazines to generate interest and prospects. When using print media, catalogers can run ads that offer to send a catalog or ads that sell an individual item, which then is shipped with a catalog. The 1974 ad (above) by the fledgling direct marketer in his first year of business ran in a new magazine out of Atlanta called Vette Vues. It created awareness but offered no products.

Because of the massive number of SKUs, to this day no Mid America Motorworks ads are merchandise specific. “Out of 47,000 SKUs, how do you know which item to choose?” Yager asks rhetorically.

The Fulfillment Challenge

Mid America Motorworks is a licensee of Chevrolet, manufacturer of the Corvette, and so it resells General Motors parts. Along with GM as a supplier, the cataloger relies on an eight-person merchandising department and four more people in purchasing to deal with more than 1,000 vendors to keep the warehouses stocked with just the right amount of merchandise, much of it parts no longer manufactured by GM.

Roughly 18 percent of Mid America Motorworks’ orders are drop shipped. “In order to do business with us, both parties have to win,” Yager says. “We expect to make our vendors successful and vice versa.”

In addition to being a reseller, the company also manufactures a complete line of soft trim interiors — seat covers, door panels and floor carpets.

Management Style

“I empower my people to make mistakes,” Yager says. “I want people to make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions. We don’t have a hierarchy at Mid America Motorworks. Every job is important, and nobody is more important than anyone else.

“I may have more responsibility,” he continues, “but I’m not more important. In fact, I don’t call myself ‘president.’ I sign all my correspondence ‘chief cheerleader.’ But let’s say a company has six levels of employees from the president down. I’d expect the top five levels to be in decision-making jobs.”

In Yager’s view, a business is never a static institution, but one that keeps changing and morphing — up, down and sideways. People have to keep changing with it. “If employees don’t change when the business changes, you have a problem,” he relates. “Quite simply, you cannot do the same thing tomorrow that you did today.”

One problem that gnaws at Mid America Motorworks is the customer who complains that a certain part doesn’t fit his Corvette. “We know what questions to ask,” Yager says. “Some of the older models have had as many as six owners over 20 years, which means they may have been customized and modified. We figure it out and make it right.”

It was the great L.L. Bean who once said that he considered a sale complete only when the merchandise had worn out and the customer was still satisfied. At Mid America Motorworks, everything is unconditionally guaranteed. “If a seat cover wears out in five years, we ship another and ask for the old ones back, no charge. No questions asked.

“Yes, we have competitors,” Yager acknowledges. “But if you’re an owner and the company you do business with treats you very, very well, why switch? That’s why some customers have been with us for 30 years.”

Beyond Corvettes

In the 1990s, Yager engaged a catalog consulting firm, which promptly advised him to get additional product lines. At his 137-acre corporate campus in Effingham, all the pieces were in place for expansion: warehouse space, merchandising team, catalog production and database management capabilities. What was needed was another brand of automobile about which the owners were passionate.

At that time, the Polk automobile registration lists were available, so it was possible to see actual numbers (e.g., makes, models and years). After looking over Jeep, Harley-Davidson, MG and Mustang, among others, they settled on the VW Beetle. Designed by the legendary Ferdinand Porsche and born in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Beetle arrived in the United States in 1950 and took the country by storm. It was inexpensive and went forever on a gallon of gasoline. And most owners were (and still are) nuts about them.

Yager hired a VW expert and invested in an inventory of SKUs, launching his first VW catalog in 1999. In 2004, Mid America Motorworks bought its competitor Rocky Mountain Motorworks for its VW customers.

“Startups are tough,” Yager notes, “but an acquisition is also very tough.” Inventory had to be moved from Denver to Effingham, and all SKUs renumbered. Furthermore, the Rocky Mountain folks were dealing with water-cooled VW models (e.g., Jetta, Golf, GTI) about which the owners generally aren’t as passionate. Mid America Motorworks’ audience owns air-cooled models (e.g., Beetle, Bus, Thing and Karmann Ghia).

In 1999, the company expanded into the Porsche business by acquiring the P.B. Tweeks catalog with its 20,000 customers and like number of SKUs.

The Business of Branding

In 2003, Yager realized that his company’s multiple names — Mid America Direct, Tweeks and The Real Source — were confusing to his customers. Indeed, customers were refusing to pay or questioning their invoices, especially Porsche and Volkswagen customers who were getting invoices from Mid America Direct. In the post-9/11 era, some customers even refused to accept delivery of a Mid America package if they had ordered from Tweeks or The Real Source.

After a series of customer surveys, they discovered that few people knew the brands were connected. Yager ordered promotional pieces from his various businesses — every touchpoint and every message — to be tacked up on a wall for comparison purposes.

“Each piece was well executed, but the collection had no continuity,” he recalls. “They were all different. It was like a collage.”

He began interviewing branding companies and settled on the Columbus, Ohio, firm Integrate that had worked with The Limited and Victoria’s Secret.

“Branding is not a logo,” Yager believes. “It’s a culture.” And Mid America Motorworks has a customer-centered culture that exudes passion and care. For example, any Corvette owner who is featured in a magazine gets a personal letter of congratulations from Yager. Integrate took three separate brands and made them one, Mid America Motorworks. It’s hoped that the new logo will be to Mid America Motorworks what the swoosh is to Nike.

The Future: MY Garage

Today on the Mid America Motorworks drawing board is a catalog with the working title of MY Garage (MY = Mike Yager). It’s devoted to the creation of super-deluxe garages complete with elegant wooden cabinetry, Mediterranean tile floors, book shelves, wet bars, a home entertainment center and fine art.

“The garage is the last room in the house that’s ripe for architects and interior designers,” Yager says. “Look at it this way: A Corvette or a classic car is that family’s Picasso.”

Giving Back

After 20 years in the business and a seemingly endless series of car shows, Yager decided to throw a thank-you party and invited all his customers to Effingham. He offered free food and T-shirts. About 1,200 people showed up, bringing with them 300 Corvettes. For Yager, it was like having a bunch of friends to a cookout in his own backyard.

Delirious attendees wrote to thank him for all the fun at the private festival. As a result Mid America Motorworks now holds a Funfest every year with 10,000 Corvettes and 40,000 enthusiasts expected in this, his company’s 30th anniversary.

Funfest costs a ton of money, but the company sells merchandise at the event. The real payback is in customer good will.

Yager believes in being a “net giver” in life — that is, doing more favors for others than they do for him. He’ll fly to any local club that asks him to speak. All the parking fees for this year’s Funfest will be donated to the search for a cure for primary amyloidosis, a rare and incurable plasma and cell disorder that claimed the young life of a beloved colleague in the Corvette world, Chip Miller, founder of the Carlisle Corvette show.

As we parted company, Yager said, “Most people have to go to work. But if you’re in a business that is your hobby, you never go to work!”

Amen.

The Mid America Motorworks List

Primary customer age range: 35 - 54 (69 percent)

Annual income: $50,000+ (62 percent)

Base list rental: Lake Group Media

Contact: (914) 925-2400

Mid America Motorworks at a Glance

Headquarters: Effingham, Ill.

Former name: Mid America Direct; rebranded this year to Mid America Motorworks

Merchandise: automotive parts and accessories for Corvettes, Volkswagens, and Porsches

Year founded: 1974

Average unit of sale: $178

# of SKUs: 47,000

# of employees: 175

Primary customer demographic: serious, do-it-yourselfers who love working on their cars