Grappone Automotive recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, which is now under its fourth-generation ownership by chief vision officer Amanda Grappone Osmer.
To commemorate the milestone, Osmer co-authored a book, “Grappone Automotive: The Founding,” which chronicles the company’s origins from Italy to New Hampshire.
‘One thing I’ve stuck to is the core belief that fear is the absolute enemy of love. And if you’re going to try to bring your best to anything you do, including retail, automotive sales, you have to do it out of love. You have to love your team,’ says Amanda Grappone Osmer, fourth-generation steward of Grappone Automotive.
The book is available for purchase at local bookstores throughout New Hampshire including Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord and The Bookery in Manchester.
Osmer visited the NH Business Review office to chat with us on the latest episode of our Down to Business podcast. This story was adapted from that interview.
Q. Grappone is celebrating 100 years. What are your thoughts on being the fourth generation in family ownership?
A. It always just was sort of a habit for me to be part of the family and to work where I did. I’ve been there about 27 years now. But a couple of years ago, in anticipation of the 100th anniversary, which took place last November in 2024, I thought of all these wonderful stories and little snippets of things I’ve heard over the years. I’d love to try to pull that together into a book of some sort.
In the course of the research, I now fully understand there’s still a lot I don’t know, but I feel like I have a fuller understanding of exactly how much hard work it took and how improbable the odds are that we ever got as far as we did. So, just knowing that I’m the last one there in terms of family members after 100 years, that’s pretty unusual as well.
We’ve been pretty specific about just making sure anybody who works there, who’s in the family, serves the purpose, that they’re there for the right reasons. And I have kids that hopefully will come to the business someday. But in case this is the end of the line, I wrote a book so that we all know how we got to where we got.
Q. Talk about the success of last year’s Bring Back the Trades and Tradeapalooza event that you helped spearhead.
A. It was really amazing. Sometimes you have an idea, and it actually comes all the way through and turns into what you thought it might be. One of the concepts came to me was, what if we could get somebody like Mike Rowe, who is such a well-known name and has such recognition worldwide. If we could get him to come to New Hampshire and just have something to coalesce around to talk about the importance of the trades.
There were four main people who organized the event: it was Tracy Pelton at PROCON, Steve Turner, who runs Bring Back the Trades, and then Chuck Lloyd, the vice chancellor from the community college system. I think we ended up with about 4,000 people (at the event) that morning. And we also had people participating online who couldn’t make it.
It was a huge success because we were targeting middle- and high-school age students with the idea that we wanted them early enough on before they graduate and go out into the real world to look at all of the options. There were 84 vendors there, so you can see the different things that are on display and get some hands-on experience. It’s a testament to the state of New Hampshire for, if you want to come together and do something big, all you have to do is ask a couple of people.
Q. How does the workforce fair throughout your dealerships?
A. We have a lot of success in apprentices who come in through our Manchester Community College program. Lakes Region Community College has the Toyota T-Ten. Honda and Mazda both have programs down in Nashua. We work closely with those schools to make sure that, if they have students they want to place, that (Grappone) can be a place that that young people want to come and at least get their feet wet and see, is this actually what I want to do? It’s the slower way of growing a technician to becoming master certified, but it also gives us and them a chance to try each other out and say, you know what, this is not what I thought it was going to be, so maybe I’ll go do something different. Or most times it does work out really well where they say, this is great, I can go to school part-time, and then when I’m here, I’m getting paid to be an intern, helping to pay my bills, and also getting really good hands-on experience with master’s certified techs around them in the shops.
Our stated mission is painted on the walls — it’s painted on my heart: We build lifelong relationships with people. We have three groups of people we want to build lifelong relationships with: It’s our team members, our guests, and our community. And that’s the order in which we want to do those things. Because the simple philosophy is, if you take really good care of your team, they will in turn take care of the guests. And if we are doing those two things really well, it allows us to make enough profit that we can share with the community. And we do. We give 5% of our net profit every year back to the community in terms of all kinds of different support for nonprofits and things.
We can do our best to try to keep it really good and make it a little bit better for the next generation.
