![]() And I knew this management job that they promoted me to, the next move would be to Detroit.” “I was smart enough to know that there was going to be a cap on my career growth. “I realized, in short order, that I was never going to be able to rise up to the highest levels of management in the company,” Fink says. The company promoted Fink to his first management position, where he ran the regional marketing department for the Lincoln Mercury division, for the east coast. I was thinking, at this rate, I’d be making $1 million a year,” he says with a laugh. He did well in this new role and was promoted multiple times, going from making $25,000 a year to $52,000 a year, over the duration of three years. ![]() He got that job, and it changed the trajectory of his career forever. “But they filled the job internally.”ĭown the hall, he heard, Lincoln Mercury was hiring. It was for the sales and marketing division,” he says. He had to travel to Teterboro, New Jersey, for the interview, which he later found out was for Ford Motor Co. All it said was a ‘large automobile manufacturer,’ ” he says. For a year, he sent handwritten cover letters and résumés to would-be employers. ![]() “I made the decision then that I was going to try to leave and get a different job.”įink would scour the New York Times, every Sunday, looking for potential new career paths. “I was like, I don’t want to do this,” Fink says. During that time, you had to pass multiple parts to earn the designation. He studied and took the certified public accountant’s exam. They said, ‘If we put him in staff accounting, he will likely kill himself, and if we put him on financial accounting, he will kill everybody else.’ So I went into auditing, which got me in front of people, which is kind of my thing-more than anything else.” “You go through these series of interviews,” Fink recalls. His job paid $19,200-“big money,” he says of the time. “I was like, well, that’s not happening.”įink ended up with a job at Brooklyn Union Gas, which at the time was the largest independent utility serving all of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. “I was caught between a rock and a hard place because my mother said, ‘If you don’t get a job, you’ll just have to move to Florida, to Delray Beach,” Fink says, adding it was a retirement community. His parents moved to Florida when Fink was a sophomore in college. He studied accounting, which made sense to him, as he was pretty good at math, he says. His father bought the family’s first home, in Rockland County, New York, when he was 52 years old.įink attended Wagner College, in Staten Island, New York, on a track scholarship and thousands in student loans. “And the topic of conversation was how we didn’t have any.” It’s not like we were hungry, but money was always a topic of conversation,” Fink says. They raised their family in Brooklyn, in the projects outside of Sheepshead Bay. They married when they came of age, his father 20 and his mother 18. His parents grew up as orphans and met as children. He is still the same guy, just with much cooler wheels and toys.įink is the third-born, of three boys. With a total of $430 million in revenue in 2020, Fink admits he’s come a long way from his humble beginnings. In March, Fink Auto Group was acquired by Lithia Motors, but Fink retained ownership of Volkswagen of Wesley Chapel and the soon-to-open Subaru of Wesley Chapel. The crown jewel is Hyundai of New Port Richey, which has been the highest-volume Hyundai dealership in the United States for eight consecutive years. He was raised in the projects of Brooklyn, New York, and through what he calls “being opportunistic,” has amassed an auto empire here in the Tampa Bay area-the Fink Auto Group.įink Auto Group includes Genesis of New Port Richey, Volkswagen of New Port Richey, Hyundai of Wesley Chapel, Genesis of Wesley Chapel, Mazda of Wesley Chapel and Chevrolet of Wesley Chapel.
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