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Nelson Goes on Auto Pilot
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Barbara Nelson
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For those who are curious how the word “retirement” fits into the work-ethic world of Barbara Nelson, whose Bellevue Acura has been one of the great automobile business success stories in the Pacific Northwest, just ask her husband Bruce, who recently celebrated three years of marriage with Nelson (General Social Science ’64).
“I asked her what she wanted to do for our anniversary, and she wanted to do the same thing as she did on our honeymoon,” he says. “She wanted to go fishing.”
Then again, Barbara Nelson has always pushed life’s gigantic envelope a little farther than the next person. She went to college in Eugene when everyone thought she’d stay close to her Sedro-Woolley, Wash., home. She headed for San Francisco with her degree, working as a ramp and photography model, when everyone assumed she would put her four years of schooling to use in Washington State.
And when her first husband left her in 1980 with, as she puts it, “two kids and nothing to do,” Nelson used her accounting skills as a breadwinner at the Honda store her family had just purchased in suburban Seattle.
“Soon I found that I didn’t like accounting, so I worked my way up to general manager,” Nelson says by telephone from her part-time home in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley region. “It was 1981 and the world was realizing women bought cars, too. I decided it would be fun to have a store of my own.”
The Japanese-made Acura had just been introduced and Nelson applied for a franchise. “I was eager, and I was the only woman qualified at that time,” she says. “I guess they liked that, and in (November) 1986 I opened Bellevue Acura.”
With a dealership fifteen miles east of Seattle, Nelson started from scratch and built a loyal foundation of customers by relying on quality service to bring every person back a second time.
“The first thing I did was to tell all my sales guys to treat every woman as they did the men,” she remembers. “My philosophy was ‘customer for life,’ and that was before it was the thing to do. I put everything into this business. I was knee-deep from the very first day.”
Nelson grew the company, opening a second Acura store in Spokane, Wash., and a separate BMW/Subaru/ Volkswagen dealership near her flagship location. In 1994, she won the Nellie Cashman Woman Business Owner of the Year Award, which recognizes Puget Sound-area women entrepreneurs who have made outstanding contributions to the status of women business owners through their leadership in business and the community.
“I guess I never spent time thinking of myself as a woman in business,” says Nelson, who was named Washington State Dealer of the Year in 2000. “When I started, some people weren’t comfortable with a woman in an automobile business or as the head of a company.”
But as Bruce, when pressed, is quick to point out: “She has a determination to be competitive. And she’s always been smarter than the rest of them.”
Four years ago Nelson kept a promise that she would take six months off when she turned sixty. She’s never gone back to work. She remains a 100-percent owner of the dealerships now being run by her son—and still keeps close tabs on the numbers.
But retirement brings with it no schedule, projections or flow charts, and Nelson always finds time to stay at her Seattle condominium or to visit her two children who live in Washington’s Skagit County region, about an hour north of Seattle, where Bruce’s children also live.
One day she’ll turn over all the keys at Bellevue Acura, and when she does finally give it up completely, Nelson says there will be no looking back.
“I want to play,” she says enthusiastically. “I’ve got a Harley-Davidson, a guitar, a sewing machine, a garden. I like to paint. I like to write. These are all the things in my life that I have never had the time to do. And now I do.”
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2003 University of Oregon
Updated October 3, 2003
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