FORT WAYNE, Ind. — McMahon's Best-One Tire & Auto Care is proud of the family environment at its four stores in the Fort Wayne market. So when an employee leaves the company, President Kim McMahon said, tongue-in-cheek, she takes it personally.
Fortunately, that doesn't happen too often. It's that family environment that propelled McMahon's Best-One Tire to be a finalist in the Tire Business Best Places to Work competition.
The 52-year-old tire dealership, with four retail/commercial locations and a fifth under construction, has nearly 100 employees.
- This article appears in the Nov. 23 print edition of Tire Business.
"Family is really what we're all about," said Ms. McMahon, who owns the dealership with her husband, Patrick "Bubba" McMahon III, and Randy Geyer.
"We take care of each other. We worry about each other, and I don't mean just me and my husband, I mean at every level.
"If someone is having a baby, or someone's parent dies, we're very involved with each other. That's an important part of any company. We encourage that feeling to our customers as well. … I think it's an important part of what has kept us around this long.
"I just can't say enough about our employees. They're my favorite people,"she said, "which makes it really difficult to hire people because you do look at how are they going to fit in. And it also makes it difficult when people leave you. You kind of take it personally," she laughed.
The company offers employees health care benefits, flex time, a 401k retirement plan, mentoring and training, along with awards and recognitions.
Ms. McMahon said the most popular benefit is the new 401K match. The dealership has offered a 401K retirement plan for years, but this year it started offering a 3% match to employee contributions, boosting participation to 90% from about 65%.
Her biggest challenge is finding new employees, especially since the dealership will be opening a new store soon.
"Finding good people is really difficult. We've actually taken the stance of, depending on the position, we don't go for experience; we really go for somebody who is interested in our company and our culture and being a part of our family. That way we're all about training. … They'll learn our way of doing things. We find greater success that way than trying to take someone from a competitor," Ms. McMahon said.
The dealership offers new employees training through its vendors and the Best-One Tire & Service network, while all employees participate in Tire Industry Association (TIA) training.
Oftentimes job candidates are referred by the dealership's employees. Sometimes the candidates are relatives of employees.
"We've had three generations working here at the same time," she said.