ATLANTA -

AR: Tell us a little about where you grew up.

Schwartz: Home was in Columbus, Ohio, the son of two immigrant parents. My mother and father were both born in Poland. An interesting story is that they both were Holocaust survivors and  met in Germany after the war (World War II).

AR: Let’s pause there for a minute.  That is something certainly unique among the people we profile in this series. Can you tell us more?

Schwartz: Well, they both were in the camps, but separate camps. Mom was in Bergen-Belsen and my dad was in Auschwitz. They had been taken away from home at a very young age along with the rest of their family. Dad had one brother who survived (the concentration camps), and mom also had one brother who survived. It is a very difficult, touching and heartwarming story all wrapped up into one.

They did not know each other prior to surviving in the camps but met right after they were liberated in Germany after the war. Once they were liberated, they just stayed in Germany. My mom’s brother who survived used to play cards with my father, and he introduced him to my mother, his sister. They fell in love and got married, and my older sister was born in Germany.

AR: How did your parents wind up in the United States?

Schwartz: That involved my other uncle, my father’s brother. In 1949, my dad and his brother talked about how it was time to go somewhere else (other than Germany). So my uncle decided to go to Israel, but my dad said he wanted to go to the United States. He wanted to have the American Dream.

So, the two brothers parted and went separate ways, even though my uncle eventually changed his mind and came to the United States, as well. Mom, dad and my sister came to the United States and settled in Columbus, where I was born and where I lived until I was 32 years old.

So, I grew up in middle America. I grew up in what was called a blue-collar household. Dad was a glazer for window panes, working with the union for many years and later opening his own business. He later even went into real estate and was successful there as well. He truly was the American Dream. He was my mentor, my inspiration and my best friend. Watching him overcome so many obstacles — the Holocaust, limited education, didn’t know the language when he got here — and watching how he navigated those obstacles has always been an inspiration to me.

AR: He definitely was a survivor.

Schwartz: Not only was he a survivor, but he just never gave up. For example, he died from cancer when he was 76, but the doctors had told him two years earlier that he only had a few months to live! And he was proud of what he had accomplished in life. He would often go to local schools to talk about the Holocaust and his personal story.

I was very fortunate to grow up in a household of very hard-working people, who set a great example and believed in education.

AR: How much of that determination characteristic from your parents do you see in yourself?

Schwartz: Probably only 150 percent! (laughter)

My mom is still alive, 85 years old, and you don’t want to mess with her because she will kick your butt! She’s feisty.

I’m a real lucky guy in that I believe I learned a lot from both parents. For one parent the glass was half-full and for the other it was half-empty, but together they were a perfect match. It is amazing that together they just endured through everything. They just believed that you had to win, go forward and do what you had to do. Dad would often say that if he survived the (concentration) camps — he could survive anything.

You asked what did I draw from them? I am not a quarter as courageous as my parents have been in their lifetime, but I hope that some of their courage has rubbed off on me.

AR: You mentioned a sister. Is she your only sibling?

Schwartz: Yes. She actually works for the New York Times and lives in New York.

AR: What did you like to do growing up?

Schwartz: I was into sports big time, and that actually distinguished my sister and me a lot. She was born in Germany and grew up with parents who were just beginning to become Americanized. I, on the other hand, grew up in the more American environment … I was a baseball player and was named to the All-City team in high school. I lived for sports. I was very American because my whole life was built around school and sports. I was fortunate because that (sports) and my love of writing kept me out of trouble! (laughter) If I look back, I think writing and sports defined what I did, both of which I started very young. I was on the school newspaper in junior high school.

AR: Baseball was your sport?

Schwartz: Yeah, I loved baseball. I played second base primarily all through high school and tried to play a year in college at Ohio State until I found out I wasn’t good enough. (chuckle) But in high school I was pretty good.

Of course, when we were growing up, we did not have these restrictions that kids today had. We could go out and stay for four hours, playing pick-up baseball or just having fun. All we needed was a ball and bat, and we were ready to go.

AR: Did you also play organized baseball?

Schwartz: (laughter) I played wherever I could: neighborhood baseball, Little League baseball, Pony League baseball, junior high baseball, high school baseball, American Legion baseball … anything organized that I could play, I was a part of that. I think those experiences build you a lot in terms of teamwork.

AR: How did you get interested in writing?

Schwartz: Funny you should ask that. My junior high school baseball coach, a guy by the name of Sam Hopkins, was also our English teacher. He used to have a vocabulary/spelling test every Friday. He had one guy, who was a friend of mine but a little older and who also played second base, who had gone the entire year without missing a spelling word. He gave me that challenge, and I went through my entire ninth-grade year without missing a spelling word! But that also got me interested in English and writing. He saw that I had an interest, and he was able to get me on the school newspaper.
When I saw my name on that byline, I was hooked! (laughter) I always worked on the newspaper, and I have always loved writing.

AR: Newspapers became a part of your life then.

Schwartz: Absolutely. I got at job at the Columbus Citizen-Journal during football season and while I was going to Ohio State.

AR: You were a newspaper stringer?

Schwartz: Not at first. My first job was as a score taker, where people would call in the scores and you would write up something simple. Then the next year, when they were convinced I could write, they assigned me to covering games. I eventually got hired down there full time. I started as a sports writer. I went from there to assistant desk editor and then sports editor. I worked there 11 years before we moved to Arizona, where I started my career with Cox.

AR: So what motivated you to go to Arizona? Weren’t both you and your wife from Columbus?

Schwartz: Yes we were. Not only did we have the security of Columbus being home, but we also had two small children. However, the television station Sue was working for, as well as the newspaper, was going through changing business situations in 1985. We decided that we should look for new jobs, but we should only go somewhere we could both find good jobs. That turned out to be Phoenix, where she went to work for a company there and my job was with the Cox newspaper. It was a tough decision because Columbus had always been home.

However, it was one of the best and luckiest decisions of my life. I went to work with the best company in the world, Cox, even though I didn’t know it then. It was also a great place to raise children. The area was just beginning to boom, and it was exciting. I was there from ’85 to ’96.

AR: Tell us about your job.

Schwartz: Actually, for the 11 years I was in Phoenix, I had six different jobs with Cox. So I did a lot of different things at the newspaper. I have now been with Cox for almost 26 years, and this is my 14th different job. I like to think I am moving up, but my wife thinks I cannot hold down a job! (laughter)

One of the most beneficial things about Cox is that you have an opportunity to do so many things. For example, I was on the newspaper side in Phoenix. I was managing editor of the five community newspapers we had in the greater Phoenix area. These were all dailies and together had a circulation of over 100,000.
One day, they came to me and said they wanted me to move to the circulation department. I looked at them like they were nuts and asked why I would want to do that. The answer was that if I wanted to be a publisher at Cox, I needed to have business experience. I asked my publisher what I should do and I clearly remember his answer: “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but if you want to advance your career, you need business experience.” I’ve done everything they (Cox) asked me to do, and it always turned out all right. So I took the new assignment.

AR: How did it turn out?

Schwartz: I went there as the number two guy, and I learned more in seven months about what makes a newspaper run than I had in all of my previous experience on the editorial side. It was a total wake-up call.

Then, seven months later they came to me again and said the long-time editor was leaving and they wanted me to become editor. So I came back and became editor. It’s real interesting because I had a different perspective when I came back (to editorial). It’s one thing to write a great newspaper story, but it is something else to sell it and get it delivered. I had a new focus.

I was offered the job as general manager two year later, and I jumped at it because I thought it would be fun. I had no idea how much fun it would be. Usually people on the editorial side of a newspaper don’t want anything to do with a general manager, but I had been one of them. We had a good relationship, and I think it helped all of us.

I then later became publisher of the newspaper group. It was a great 11 years.

AR: By the mid-’90s, there were the beginning signs of changes in the print world with the beginning of the Internet. How did this affect you?

Schwartz: Back then, we were pretty isolated from the coming changes. When I went to Austin in ’96 to be executive vice president and general manager of that paper, that city was growing and the paper was growing. In the rest of the country, you could see where classifieds were being chipped away some, but in Austin we were just growing. I was beginning to wonder how technology was going to have an impact on the business, but I didn’t have to worry so much about it. Back then we still had great margins.

When I came to Atlanta in 2001 to become general manager of the Journal-Constitution, that was our high-water mark in revenue. After that, revenue began to really flatten. After that is when I was brought up to corporate to start the Internet operations for our newspapers, along with some other things. That is about the time that the rumblings on how the Internet would devastate our business really began to hit home.

My job was to get the Cox newspapers online and connected. Every day I would see more and more how the Internet was having an impact not only on us, but the entire newspaper industry. Later, Cox asked me to run our business development department. That is when I went on the Auto Trader publishing board, began to work with AutoTrader.com a lot more, worked with Manheim some and really got into the business development area. That is when I saw the world changing. Technology was really moving. It was moving at a tenth of the speed it does today, but to us back then it was really moving fast.

AR: Was the revelation of the fast-changing aspect of the Internet part of the reason for terminating the Auto Trader print books? After all, your entire career was in print.

Schwartz: I find that decision process interesting. When we did the deal (to purchase Auto Trader book publishing), I was convinced that we had about five years left where the books would be really valuable. I knew that they were trending down.

AR: But they were still making money?

Schwartz: Oh, yes. We were bigger than AutoTrader.com when we took those books. We were making money with good margins. But you could just feel the momentum starting to slide. I told the Cox folks that we had about five years left, and Cox had decided to do the deal because it was the right thing to do.
Then, about a year-and-a-half into it, I was sitting at my desk one day, and I just knew we were on a downward slide. And, it was going much faster than I originally thought. Instead of five years, we had about two-and-a-half. I think the sign of good businesspeople is when they can look at something and say there is no future in it. This was not that we were not good salespeople but more about how the world was changing, how it was going digital. Why would someone go get a printed book each week if they could check a car out immediately online?

Once we made the decision that it had to close, we made the move quickly. We did not let the business die a slow death. I think it takes courage to make a move like that. I think all businesses have life cycles, and that business was at the end of its life cycle.

AR: Cox, both as a newspaper company and an automobile company, has been right in the middle of how the dealer classified advertising has changed.

Schwartz: So right. Ten, 12, 14 years ago — before I got here — Cox’s management recognized that someone was going to take dealer classified advertising away from newspapers. I give Jim Kennedy (Cox chairman) the credit because he said that if someone was going to do it, it might as well be Cox. That is when we started AutoConnect (later renamed AutoTrader.com).

It is really interesting when you look at it in a historical perspective. Here we are as Cox, with newspapers one of our critical components, and we funded this online classified company with the directive to go steal our business! It was the philosophy that if we are going to have a competitor, why not let the competitor be ourselves.

That is still a philosophy I have today when I think about the auction business. We know it is changing, that we have new competitors. What is the market demanding new in way of products or services? Why can’t we develop a new company that provides that instead of letting our competition fill that void? So what if it competes against our own current businesses?

We at Manheim constantly must be saying to ourselves: We know the industry is changing, is moving in ways we have not even seen yet. We have to project into the future to try and determine where the industry will be in say five or 10 years and make sure we are there with the products the industry needs then. I am confident enough — or dumb enough — to know that if we work hard we will be the best ones in the marketplace at one determined time. I’m that competitive.

AR: That’s an aggressive goal, which means that not only will Manheim constantly be changing, but so will the industry.
Schwartz: That’s right, the industry is already changing and will have to continue changing. We cannot do this alone. I have tremendous respect for all of our competitors, and I know they are undergoing some of the same changes, the same challenges. But I have to always be asking myself if we can do this or that better; can we make it better for our customers.

We are going to get really active to help to determine where the industry will be five years from now. I am real bullish on the future and am confident there are things we have not even thought of yet, much less put into practice. I hope that is what I am bringing to Manheim: the ability to step back from the rush of today to think about things for the future. Thinking is hard.

AR: You’ve talked about your newspaper experience and how it led you to online and Auto Trader. When did you first become aware of the automotive side and Manheim?

Schwartz: Great question. When I first came to work at Cox, we used to have things called the senior management meetings, and that is where I had my first experience with the auction people. I have to admit — now this was many years ago — that coming from a media background they were a little different. They didn’t have on the three-piece suits.

I got to know the auction people a lot better when I was with the business development area. Dean (Eisner, past Manheim president) would be looking for better ways to do things, and we would work with them to develop solutions. As I spent more time with Dean and others, I was amazed at how smart they were. I was amazed at the diversity of what they did. I got really intrigued by the auction process, not so much because they were cars — now I have always been a car guy — but by the process. It is totally intriguing as to how they could run a business like this.

I think it is very important to get out of this office, to visit and meet people in the field. I spend as much time as possible meeting customers, learning about their business and how we can help them. I also spend time with our auctions and learn from those employees who touch our customers face-to-face. It has been eye-opening as to how intense it is, but I love it.

AR: What has been one of your biggest surprises?

Schwartz: Wow, another great question. I think I didn’t realize before becoming more associated with the auction side the effect the automobile industry has on the rest of the nation’s economy. It’s tremendous. I sometimes think about what has happened in Detroit. My God. Here is a city that once was the Mecca of the United States, everything was going on there. The auto industry has really shaped Detroit — along with surrounding cities.
It is amazing to think about how important our industry is to the national economy. Knowing that keeps me jazzed to come to work every day. That, and of course, our great employees. Our employees give me energy!

AR: Project out for a minute and tell us what you might envision in Manheim’s future. Say, five years from now.

Schwartz: I am convinced that 50 percent of the cars in the future will be remarketed digitally. I think there is a great use and need for the physical auction, but the auctions of the future I believe will be smaller, and there will be fewer of them. Grounded cars bring a different challenge. When cars come back in 18 months to two years, we will play a critical role, but it will be different. You have to be versatile; you have to be fast-paced; you have to be able to take care of your customer the way they want to be taken care of. You have to help them achieve what they want to achieve.

In some cases, we have to lead the industry. We cannot just sit back and do whatever is asked. We have to be strong in different ways for our clients. I don’t know if the technology is that difficult, but we have to lead the way and have the resolve to do it.

I view some people like that image of the cat on the chalkboard … hanging on by their claws as they slowly slide down. We can either hold on or we can decide to take the next step. I don’t know exactly what it looks like in five years, but I am confident that it is different than what we have today. If we can maintain our core values, I think there is a great place for Manheim. If we don’t stick to our core values, then we will lose. But I am convinced that the core values that brought Manheim to where they are today are the ones that will carry us to the next generation.

AR: You are nowhere close to retirement …

Schwartz: (laughter) Closer to retirement than to the beginning of my career! I love what I do way too much.

AR: True. But if after you retired someone spoke about your contributions to Manheim, what would you want them to say?

Schwartz: What I would want someone to say that this guy (Schwartz) came in here and made us move fast; was open and honest and direct with us; he listened to us really well, listened to ideas.

My father had an expression that I think shaped my life. He told me, “People don’t like an instant expert.” So, I hope people will say that I didn’t act like I knew it all. I hope I will be able to set things in motion so we can really move fast, be at the front of the industry … but more importantly that we treated our customers openly and right. And also that we did something for the entire auction industry. Most importantly, I hope our employees will say — that guy cared about us.

AR: What do you like to do when you are not working? What about your down time?

Schwartz: (laughter) I love my children; I love to play golf; I love to run. I have run eight half-marathons in the last couple of years. We have a daughter in Phoenix and a son in Los Angeles, and my wife and I love to go out and visit them.

One of the buzzwords people always talk about is wanting work-life balance. I think it is really important. I think if you work hard you need time to play. That is one of the things I see as my responsibility. I want to get people to work hard, but you have to shape downtime around that or you are not a balanced individual.
AR: Finally, is it still fun to come to work?

Schwartz: (laughter) I have so much fun it should be illegal — but don’t tell my boss!

I’m a lucky guy that has had a chance to do a lot of things in my career. We had a group together a few weeks ago, and they asked me what was my best job here? I told them I have had 14 jobs with Cox — and I know this comes across as politically correct, but it is true — every one of them has been better than the last one. And this one is just great. I’m real excited because this business is changing. You can go somewhere that is not changing as quickly, but it would be boring.

I am so excited about where we are and where we are going.

Sandy Schwartz is the president of Manheim Auto Auctions.