POCATELLO — Ryan Cole remembers the summer of 1999, when the Cole Chevrolet at 1325 Yellowstone Ave. was nothing but a lot freshly paved with asphalt.

Before any cars were brought in, he and his sister rode around the empty lot on bikes, and he distinctly remembers the asphalt being so hot that their wheels would pop.

Cole has since remained around automobiles — even attending a car dealership academy to hone his leadership skills — and now is the operations manager of the Cole Chevrolet dealership on Yellowstone where some of his early childhood memories of automobiles first began.

“To go back to those memories of sitting there watching the empty lot…before anything else was here, before the building ever opened, coming here and working in this place and running it is fun. It comes full circle,” said Cole, who moved back to Pocatello in September of 2020 to become operations manager of the dealership his father purchased in 1995.

Cole’s family lived in Pocatello up until 2003, when his father, Greg, purchased another Chevrolet dealership — 2,000 miles away in Georgia. While the family packed their bags and moved across the country, Greg continued to own the Yellowstone dealership, working with local managers in Pocatello, and eventually hired Arturo Beery as general manager.

“Beery got here six years ago and has completely transformed the way this dealership interacts with the community and does business,” explained Cole. “It’s been really fascinating to watch and get to learn more from him.”

Beery and Greg purchased the Cole Nissan Kia dealership at 1900 Flandro Drive, and while Beery has become executive manager over that location, Cole came in during this transition to take over Beery’s position at the Chevrolet dealership.

It’s something he’s put in many hours and effort towards, whether that be by attending the only university in the country that allowed him to major in automobile marketing and management, or taking an eleven-month-long program through the National Automobile Dealers Association, where he went to a “car dealership school.”

Every few months, Cole would fly out to Tysons, Virginia for a week where he’d take a class and learn about each department in a dealership, and upon returning home would spend months working in that specific department to learn how it functions.

“So their goal is to train future and current leaders in dealership operations how each department works, how to make them more efficient, and how to innovate in those departments for their own stores,” he said. “The cool thing for me is I enjoy this business because every department inside of the dealership kind of operates on its own. So it is its own little business, all under the same roof, that all kind of comes together for one larger business … It’s kind of fun.”

Cole also logged five years working for GM corporate as a district manager, where he lived in four separate states and acted as a liaison between GM and dealerships.

“During my tenure there, I think I covered or had contact with 134 dealerships,” he said.

Over this time he met many dealers and individuals and learned about different leadership styles and how each one worked within their communities.

“The fun part is you get to go into each of these dealerships to talk to the dealers, and you learn what they do well, what they do poorly, and try to bring the best of everything back with you,” he said.

One major lesson he’s learned is that when a dealership’s employees are given the opportunity to become positively involved with the community around them, that dealership flourishes.

“It’s all about the people,” he said. “In more than one sense, it’s all about the employees, the people that make the dealership go round. But it’s also about the community. The most successful dealers, the happiest employees, I saw are the ones that were empowered and given the ability to actually go in the community and try to help out and engage. So obviously there’s the little operational things like how to work cars and structure like that, but the most important thing I saw during my tenure is that it’s all about the people.”

Cole says he has brought this community-oriented mindset to his own dealership, and is in Leadership Pocatello-Chubbuck, donates to the Portneuf Boys and Girls Club, works with Idaho State University’s College of Technology, and much more.

With ISU’s College of Technology, he said they have two partnerships where they help teach students how to work on cars. His service manager and body shop manager are both on the advisory panel, and help develop curriculum to ensure that students are educated and using the right equipment.

“So we’re helping them right now create curriculum for electric vehicles, so when the wave comes up, the current students don’t get blindsided by the technology,” he said.

Currently, Cole is keeping an eye on the horizon, where the future seems more centered on electric vehicles, especially in the midst of record-high gasoline and diesel prices.

“We’re keeping an eye on how the future of the automobile industry is going to change,” he said. “Electrification, everyone says it’s coming. So GM is making a really strong push to electric, and with the current administration in office they’re pushing electric, and with rising gas prices, everything’s kind of moving that way. So we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to adapt from internal combustion engines and gas and diesel to adopting a little more electric vehicles and electric infrastructure for those, especially out here in Idaho.”

While the demand for electric-powered vehicles is rising more rapidly, Cole says they still have plenty of people popping in to purchase trucks, and that they have only a few electric cars on hand that they are still waiting to have work done on before they can hit the streets.

“We’re waiting on government entities and private entities to get more charging stations along the roads,” he said.

Although certain aspects of the industry are changing, Cole said he’s prepared to take it on directly and that no other career path interested him as much as one in the automobile field.

“I grew up in the car business during the 2008 era, so during the bankruptcy, the recession…and I looked at a lot of different career paths,” he said. “Nothing spoke to me. It was interesting because I didn’t get the same fun atmosphere from anywhere else, than I did from the car business. So my future goals here are to continue to grow the culture and expand the dealership.”