New form of social work Frankel uses past career to help customers find the right vehicle
BY RICHARD GREENE
Helping people is second nature for Rachel Frankel, a former social worker turned auto dealer.
When an elderly customer calls about being unable to tell if their new hybrid vehicle is running or the timing belt snapped on a recently sold vehicle, she and her husband, Curtis, drop everything to help their customers.
“We are there for our customers. We do way more post-sale for our customers than expected,” Frankel said.
The owner of Top Auto Brokers in Clark County, Washington, began her dealership in 2015. It has been named a Top 5 Best Used Car Dealer in Clark County for the past seven years by the Columbian, the newspaper in Vancouver, Washington. The dealership has also built a loyal customer base with multiple generations of families purchasing vehicles from them.
“That’s our bread and butter, repeat referrals,” Frankel said. “One family has probably purchased five or six cars from us. They know they could call us no matter the situation and we’d help them.”
For Frankel it’s a continuation of her first career as a social worker, a field she said she entered “to save the world.” She studied to be an art therapist using art as a way to communicate with people.
“I worked with a lot of people throughout the years, young children, people on the spectrum. I worked in the adult foster care space,” Frankel said. “I utilized a lot of artistic approaches to people to gain their trust, confidence and give them a voice where otherwise they may have difficulty communicating their needs or their emotions.”
She takes the same artistic approach to selling a car from previewing vehicles on the auction block and envisioning the customer for that vehicle. She uses those visions in her marketing.
“I create a scenario and vision for my buyers,” Frankel said.
“I actually enjoy the marketing aspect, writing my short story about this car and pandering to my audience. I put a lot of creative energy into writing ads. I’m not about cookie-cutter. I want it to resonate with someone who reads it.”
She and Curtis also drive every vehicle extensively to make sure it’s a quality product for their customers.
“We have to do our due diligence. We can’t sell bad cars,” Frankel said. “I can’t have a single mom with her three kids on the side of the road calling me crying. Things do happen, but I have to try to mitigate that before I put the keys in someone’s hand.”
After initially working as a social worker, Frankel took a break in her career to raise her children. When her then-husband was laid off, she answered an ad from a car dealership looking for a customer development person. Quickly she transitioned from that role to sales. She said she was able to put the experience she also had of running a dating service to work moving cars.
“They put me on the sales floor the first Saturday and I sold a truck. I then sold 32 cars my second month,” Frankel recalled.
The role led her to make a fateful acquaintance. She began working with a client whose parents had been in the car industry for decades. The family suggested she pursue getting her dealer’s license, which she did. Almost 10 years later, she is at home in the car business, running her own dealership her way.
She moved to a few dealerships in the area but encountered what she described as some inequities that drove her from the industry briefly.
“Women are not treated as equals in the car business even if we’re better than the men,” Frankel said. “So, I got out of the car business and took a job in my field of study. I worked for the State of Washington with people with developmental disabilities.”
The Frankels sell an average of 15 cars per month with a few buy-here pay-here accounts on the books.
Her social work is now finding the right car to match the consumer’s needs or going to battle to help them get affordable financing. And work that is truly rewarding and thrilling for Frankel.
“There’s an adrenaline rush about the car business that a lot of other professions don’t provide,” Frankel said. “There’s something really exciting about finding a vehicle and knowing a little about it like if it has a cult following or is really hard to find.
“But the thing I really like is that when I became a dealer, I advertised in the moms groups on Facebook that I’m a part of. I became the mom dealership of the area, and everybody knew that I was a safe place to come buy a car.”