LAS VEGAS — Damian Mills said he was turned down four times before he landed a salesman position in June 1992 at a Crown Automotive Dodge dealership as he looked for a summer job during college.
And it wasn’t until Mills met a mentor — his sales manager — that he began to see he could do much more in life, he told the Automotive News Retail Forum: NADA in Las Vegas on Thursday.
Mills said that mentorship immediately began. His mentor helped him with “everything from taking me to a men’s store to buy a suit to walking me into Wachovia when I got my first real check and helping me to establish a bank account to showing me the potential of what I could do and giving me permission to want to be more than what I was and what I saw that I was when I walked in that door.”
Today, Mills is CEO of Mills Automotive Group in Charlotte, N.C., and is a mentor to many.
Mills bought his first dealership in 2004, a Ford store, and now has 19 dealerships in four states, including three stores purchased in 2021.
Mills, 48, said mentorship “takes time and intentionality.” He said he looks at a person’s character, their intentions and what the greater good is.
“It starts with recognizing talent,” he said. “But it can’t just be talent because sometimes talent will take you to a place that character won’t keep you.”
Mills said he has developed a mentorship program and meets one-on-one with mentees, often around 7 a.m. or after work, sometimes as late as 9 p.m.
“I have a gentleman right now that we’re developing to be, he’s going to be one of our first Hispanic American general managers,” Mills said, adding his group also has Asian American, African American and female dealership leaders. “In fact, over 70 percent of all the stores that we have are all led by first-generation diversity candidates that were developed.”
Mills, a 2021 Automotive News All-Star, Automotive News Notable Champions of Diversity honoree in 2021, and 2013 Automotive News 40 Under 40 honoree, is slated to take over as chairman of the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers this year.
Mills emphasized the importance of diversity in making a better company and said leaders are cultivated by making “people in our organizations comfortable being uncomfortable.”
He said he is proud of his dealerships’ diversification efforts across sales floors, service drives and finance and insurance offices and those seated in the general manager’s chair.
“You see a representation of the demographic of the people we serve every single day,” Mills said. “And that is by design.”